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The Burning

It speaks to the strength of The Burning’s reputation among cult-film fans that what’s most memorable about the 1981 slasher is not that it was written by the Weinstein brothers, nor that it represents early appearances of the likes of Jason Alexander, Holly Hunter and Fisher Stevens. It’s that its Cropsy is just a damned good villain.
05/24/2013 | Comments 0

Dexter: The Seventh Season

There's no way to discuss the seventh and penultimate season of Showtime's hit Dexter without acknowledging how the previous year ended. Therefore, if you haven't finished the sixth season, stop reading now. You've got work to do.
05/21/2013 | Comments 0

Nightfall

As Simon Lam gets older, he gets better. The veteran actor has appeared in such in seminal HK action films of the 1990s as Once Upon a Time in China (opposite Jet Li) and Bullet in the Head (directed by John Woo); in the aughts, he graced audience and critical favorites Election and Ip Man.
05/20/2013 | Comments 0

Grand Duel

Lee Van Cleef enjoyed a secondary career in Italy cranking out spaghetti Westerns, with little regard to quality. However, 1972’s Grand Duel — aka The Big Showdown — is deserving of its Grand label. No wonder Quentin Tarantino borrowed its sweeping theme song by Luis Bacalov for Kill Bill; you'll recognize it in two notes.
05/20/2013 | Comments 0

The Last Stand

Early in The Last Stand, the small-town sheriff played by Arnold Schwarzenegger says, "It's my day off. Should be a quiet weekend." That's the new way of saying, "I've got one week to retirement," because it signals — with flashing neon and everything — that life is going to royally upend those plans.
05/17/2013 | Comments 0
Home · Articles · Movies · Drama · Tiny Furniture
Drama

Tiny Furniture


You’ll have a good time watching Lena Dunham have a hard time in her brainy, but buoyant film

Rod Lott January 26th, 2011  

Warning: Those allergic to quirkiness may be sent into fits of anaphylactic shock by the DIY indie “Tiny Furniture,” but the immune among us will find something of a rough gem. The microbudget dramedy plays Friday through Sunday at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.

Warning: Those allergic to quirkiness may be sent into fits of anaphylactic shock by the DIY indie “Tiny Furniture,” but the immune among us will find something of a rough gem.

The microbudget dramedy plays Friday through Sunday at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.

New Yorker Lena Dunham is the film’s writer, director and star. (You’ve never seen her before, but if you’ve seen 2009’s “The House of the Devil,” you at least heard her voice as the 911 operator.) Acting opposite her real-life mother and sister as her fictional mother and sister, Dunham plays the mousy, dumpy Aura, who returns home to recalibrate following both a split from her longtime boyfriend and her graduation from college.

To say that her family life is unconventional is a given, based solely on the name Aura. Mom (Laurie Simmons) is a successful artist/ photographer, while Nadine (Grace Dunham) is an overachieving high school genius. As for Aura … well, she likes to sleep late and walk around their apartment sans pants.

In her post-grad delirium, she neglects her own artistic ambitions in favor of hanging out with friends, finding a no-brainer job as a hostess, and romancing a self-absorbed, would-be filmmaker (Alex Karpovsky) known for such pretentious YouTube performance-art vids as “Skeptical Gynecologist” and “Nietschian Cowboy” (his spelling, not ours).

But this picture isn’t about whether Aura will find true love or regain her creative mojo; it’s just about Aura from one point in time to another, ending abruptly yet somehow appropriately. It’s a study in characters, and there are plenty for Dunham to examine.

Aura and her pals remind one of the lyrics to The Dandy Warhols song “Bohemian Like You”: “So what do you do / Oh, yeah, I wait tables, too … ’Cause’ I like you, yeah, I like you / And I’m feeling so Bohemian like you.” They’re the kids who cry “woe is me” despite living a life of uninterrupted privilege and comfort. The daughter of two far-from-starving artists herself, Dunham seems to poke fun at her own environs, giving her rich-but-shallow characters lines like “I leave my lights on when I’m gone. For fun,” and let them go unexplained and unrecognized.

In that aspect, “Tiny Furniture” carries its own figurative vocabulary. Like the films of Miranda July (“You and Me and Everyone We Know”) and Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan,” “Barcelona”), Dunham’s feature very much exists in its own elite, insulated world — foreign to most viewers, but easy to acclimate to, given a script that’s intelligent, accessible and delightful.

While it’s too early to tell, it may have the year’s funniest line, in which Aura’s perpetually drug-addled BFF (Jemima Kirke) discusses difficulties in finding gainful employment: “On my résumé under ‘Skills,’ I put ‘has a landline.’”

 
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