Baghead - Review from an Extra

"Baghead - Review from an Extra" was written by Annie in Austin for her Transplantable Rose blog.



You can't do this until next month, but last weekend we went to see Baghead, the latest indie film from Mark and Jay, the Duplass brothers, who work on a shoestring budget to turn their stories into films. This movie is premiering in Austin - even New York and Los Angeles have to wait!
Philo and I loved the 2005 Duplass feature, The Puffy Chair, so we'd have wanted to see the latest Duplass movie in any event, but we had a special reason to see Baghead on opening weekend - to find out if either Philo or I could be glimpsed in the final film.

Most of Baghead was filmed at a cabin in the woods near Bastrop, Texas, a town Southeast of Austin. Hilarious, scary and surprising things happen to the two men and two women who are attempting to finish a screenplay for a movie - while also making sure the movie will provide roles for themselves.
Before they leave for the cabin, the story starts at a film festival, and back in October of 2006, Philo and I were both extras for a scene of an audience watching one of the film festival entries in a theater. I was directed to a seat right behind the four main characters and Philo was on the aisle, so we're both visible on screen for a couple of seconds - the sleeve of my light green blouse gets a few more seconds as background!

Baghead is said to use a comedy form to combine a scary movie with a relationship movie. That's not a bad description, and I'll add that we both liked the characters and story. It's an 'R' movie, which means casual profanity, nudity, and some violence. (These things don't bother me but I'm not sure who's reading this blog and thought you should be warned.)

And it's an indie movie which means some jiggly hand-held camera moments - and also some wonderful closeups. That visual intimacy with the actors' faces is something that's always been essential to the film experience, but recent movies are so stuffed with special effects, explosions, iconic landscapes, distant vehicles and petty details of historical recreation that there seems to be little time for dwelling on the individual landscape of the human face, keeping the audience at a distance from the people in the movie, sometimes leaving an unsatisfied feeling at film's end.

In contrast, the Duplass brothers let the camera linger on the faces of their four main characters, played by Greta Gerwig, Elise Muller, Steve Zissis and Ross Partridge and all of them were very watchable. We'd already seen Greta Gerwig when she starred with Mark Duplass in another indie movie called Hannah Takes the Stairs. Although I wasn't crazy about that movie it was interesting and I wanted to see the quirkily charming Greta Gerwig again - she's a naturally charismatic actor. Seeing Baghead let us know how amazing Steve Zissis can be - we hope to see him in more movies!

When the post about our experience as extras who'd been directed by the Duplass brothers went up in autumn of 2006, we didn't know whether we'd be in the movie - now I harbor delusions of grandeur and wonder whether a couple of seconds of screen time would qualify me for an entry on the IMDb. Could there be really be some filmmaker looking for a sixtyish, well-upholstered, grandmotherly type who sings songs to the trees?

"Baghead - Review from an Extra" was written by Annie in Austin for her Transplantable Rose blog.