FUNNY HA HA
Funny Ha Ha
Andrew Bujalski, 2005
Catalog No.: FTF-100
Length: 89 minutes
Marnie is 23, and drifts through "Funny Ha Ha," Andrew Bujalski's critically acclaimed debut feature, in search of romance and employment. The film's conversations sound improvised and the narrative rhythms appear loose and ambling as it paints a deft group portrait of recent college graduates-Marnie’s friends, co-workers and would-be lovers. But this scruffiness is a bit deceptive, as the film has both a subtle, delicate shape and a point. By the end of the film, Bujalski proves to be one of America’s most acute and intelligent young dramatists, utilizing 16mm film to probe and reveal the curious facts and stubborn puzzles of contemporary life.
Starring: Kate Dollenmayer, Christian Rudder, Jennifer L. Schaper, Myles Paige, Marshall Lewy, Lissa Patton Rudder, Andrew Bujalski, Justin Rice, Victoria Häggblom, Vanessa Bertozzi
Written, Directed and Edited by Andrew Bujalski
Produced by Ethan Vogt
Cinematography by Matthias Grunsky
Festivals: SXSW, Los Angeles Film Festival, Sidewalk Film Festival
Winner: Spirit Award
PURCHASE
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WATCH THE FILM
PRESS
"Funny Ha Ha rocked me. I didn't know that you were allowed to do things like that. It was amazing to me."
– Lena Dunham, Director
"One of the most influential movies of the ‘00s”
- A.O. Scott, The New York Times
“A tender, funny and stealthily affecting portrait of youthful powerlessness and frustration”
– Carina Chocano, The Los Angeles Times
“Invigoratingly Original”
– Scott Tobias, The Onion
"A master of the mixed message and a veritable sculptor of dead air, he's deft at showing how inarticulateness can serve as a defense tactic and passive-aggressive weapon."
-Dennis Lim, The New York Times
"Beautifully observant and wholly unpretentious with roots more in Cassavetes than Sundance style showbiz."
-Robert Koehler, Variety
"With her hunched adolescent posture, her eager smile, and her halo of niceness, Dollenmayer is lovely, vulnerable, genuine...Women in the audience will slip easily into Marnie’s sneakers...Bujalski and Dollenmayer have a bright future.
-Kyle Smith, New York Post
"Bujalski takes a sledgehammer to the carefully ordered surfaces and dramatic conventions of narrative cinema, favoring instead an unpredictability in which the crosscurrents of quotidian life collide on the screen in a series of brilliantly alive patterns. This isn’t improvisation, but rather an adroitly achieved randomness—the perfect syntax for a generation- defining work about a generation marked by its very lack of definition.”
-Scott Foundas, LA Weekly