Mumblecore Beatdown

You may have heard that Badass Digest helmer Devin Faraci and "mumblecore" darling Joe Swanberg participated in one of Fantastic Fest's infamous "debates" over the weekend. If you're not familiar with the format, FF lets participants lay into eachother verbally in a conventional debate... then the opponents put on boxing gloves and settle up for real.

Swanberg won the physical matchup rather definitively (you can see the footage after the jump) - he's a big guy with almost a foot on his opponent, and in Devin's own words he got "the piss beaten out of him." The whole thing is more-or-less for show; but these two guys don't like eachother and for my money Faraci won the war of words with this brutal slapdown of the "mumblecore" movement:

"Mumblecore is the opposite of everything that's great about indie film. It's the laziest form of filmmaking. It's a bunch of middle class and upper class white kids whining about their ennui and their middle class white lives in front of a camera, without a script, without good actors. Here's what you need to make a mumblecore movie: a sense of entitlement, white skin, and Greta Gerwig, and that's it."

"To me, the word "core" at the end of mumblecore, sounds like it should be something punk rock, something amazing, something edgy. Instead it's the blandest, most self-indulgent bullshit, aimed only at the narcissists who make it. Your only audience, pretty much, is you."

I'm not always Devin's biggest fan or even "defender," but I can't help but give a colossal FUCK. YES. to that.