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Tiny Furniture



Lena Dunham got her start making YouTube videos, but she emerged as a major talent thanks to the breakthrough success of this exceptionally sharp comedy, which garnered the twenty-four-year-old writer-director-actor comparisons to the likes of Woody Allen. The filmmaker herself plays Aura, a recent college graduate who returns to New York and moves back in with her mother and sister (played by their real-life counterparts). Though Aura is gripped by stasis and confusion about her future, Dunham locates endless sources of refreshing humor in her plight. As painfully confessional as it is endlessly amusing, Tiny Furniture is an authentic, incisive portrait of a young woman at a crossroads.

Disc Features

- New digital transfer, with DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
- Director Lena Dunham talks about filmmaking and autobiography in a new interview with writer and filmmaker Nora Ephron
- New interview with writer-director Paul Schrader
- Creative Nonfiction, Dunham’s first feature film
- Four short films by Dunham
- Trailer
- PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Phillip Lopate

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Due to the amount of intermingled discussion about Tiny Furniture, Lena Dunham, and "Girls," all previous posts in this thread have been moved to the Lena Dunham thread in the Filmmakers subforum. All future posts in this thread should pertain specifically to the Criterion release of Tiny Furniture.

For anyone who's actually SEEN the contents of the Tiny Furniture Criterion, how are the bonus features? I'm interested in her early shorts/Creative Nonfiction mostly, but the interview with Nora Ephron should hopefully be a delight, too.

The extras on this edition are pretty strong. They give a good insight into Dunham's point of view and filmmaking process, plus they look at the film's (and Dunham's) reception. The shorts and first feature are more representative of where she was coming from (YouTube, mumblecore) than Tiny Furniture, which seemed more like a generic indie to me.

And, at the risk of starting another shit storm, may I just say that, while this film was certainly not my cup of tea and not great by any measure, it's a perfectly competent piece of filmmaking and, in conjunction with the extras package, does a decent job of representing a particular strand of (arguably significant, but time will tell) contemporary filmmaking. (That's not something that can be said for Solo con tu pareja!) Also, you have to concede that Criterion bet on the right mumblecore horse in this instance, since Dunham has gone on to be far more culturally prominent (for better or worse) than her contemporaries.

Agree with Zedz pretty much. I didn't care for the film but I've seen far worse, yet I really enjoyed going through the films and the Ephron interview on here. I actually found the shorts fairly funny.

zedz wrote:The extras on this edition are pretty strong. They give a good insight into Dunham's point of view and filmmaking process, plus they look at the film's (and Dunham's) reception. The shorts and first feature are more representative of where she was coming from (YouTube, mumblecore) than Tiny Furniture, which seemed more like a generic indie to me.

And, at the risk of starting another shit storm, may I just say that, while this film was certainly not my cup of tea and not great by any measure, it's a perfectly competent piece of filmmaking and, in conjunction with the extras package, does a decent job of representing a particular strand of (arguably significant, but time will tell) contemporary filmmaking. (That's not something that can be said for Solo con tu pareja!) Also, you have to concede that Criterion bet on the right mumblecore horse in this instance, since Dunham has gone on to be far more culturally prominent (for better or worse) than her contemporaries.

The sad part is that you have to worry about "starting another shit storm" just because you're calling something "a perfectly competent piece of filmmaking."

Tragic.

I don't think Tiny Furniture is anything more than a adequate-to-mediocre film by a director that I'm interested in, but come on. The hate for Dunham on this site is a little out of hand.

Oh neat, this discussion again

To try again to get at the film itself...
I happened upon this interesting critical reading of the film. I agree with much of what he says. It's not that there's social criticism here; it's not a film of questions (let alone answers) but an "exploration" or "exposition." The film uses an "indie comedy" format to look at "social" conditions in a way that Antonioni or Martel (La Ciénaga came to mind for me) have examined very differently (I'm not suggesting anything about the stature of these filmmakers relative to one another with this analogy).

rwiggum wrote:And to everyone complaining that she "made a movie off her mom's dime," no shit. Most indie films get made with money begged and borrowed from family members and friends. That's a non-argument in my book.

To demonstrate just how much of a non-argument it is, Jean Renoir financed his early career off his dad's dime.