I could spit on a stranger.

(This is my return to reviewing films for teh lulz. Hooray? Hooray!)

During my last trip to Quiapo, I sniffed around the 10-peso DBD bins along the street and discovered lots and lots of wonderful “small” independent films. One of them was Funny, Haha a celebrated small independent film by Andrew Bujalski. Shot on 16mm and released in 2002, this movie started the whole Mumblecore hullabaloo. (You gotta love Quiapo for these rare finds.)

Mumble-what?! Well, let me first explain this to you through the wonders of Wikipedia.

Mumblecore is an American independent film movement that arose in the mid-2000’s. It is primarily characterized by ultra-low budget production (often employing digital video cameras), focus on personal relationships between twenty-somethings, improvised scripts, and non-professional actors.

Okay, do more research if you want. But, with that in mind, let’s delve deeper into Funny, Ha ha.

It starts off with Marnie (Kate Dollenmayer), a twentysomething college graduate who enters a tattoo parlor because she wants to get a tattoo (duh). In the process of choosing a design, she blatantly admits that she’s drunk. She’s obviously confused, she’s fucking drunk, and she doesn’t even know if she truly wants a tattoo. This is actually pretty good set-up to describe the characters involved in the story: They’re a bunch of confused, drunk twentysomethings (staple for Mumblecore flicks; twentysomethings, not drunkards) with no idea how to go on with their lives after college.

Anyway, what follows then is how Marnie deals with her own problems like her love life, her friends, and finding a decent job. That’s pretty much the premise, you follow Marnie as she lives her life day to day.

The interesting thing about Funny, Ha ha is that it’s so raw and it really is an honest view at life of twentysomethings (Okay, I don’t belong to that twentysomething category yet; but trust me, sometimes I feel like I do). There’s no score or soundtrack (the characters listen to some music which I guess also serves as the soundtrack) and it was badly shot that sometimes you’d wish that the dudes knew how to use a tripod. The characters in the movie just never stop talking and mumbling their “like, I don’t know” “uhhmmm..” “yeah… like…” (which makes a really good drinking game; more details below) –but you know what? I liked it.

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