E-Mail This Article to a Friend Mumble’s the word Twentysomethings triumph at the Newport Film Festival BY GERALD PEARY
	Related Links Newport Film Festival's official Web site Mutual Appreciation's official Web site >Four-Eyed Monsters' official Web site The Real Dirt on Farmer John's official Web site Beauty Academy of Kabul's official Web site Gerarld Perry goes to the >2005 South by Southwest Film Festiva

According to Boston’s Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha), a recent blog labeled him and his fellow twentyish cinéastes "the mumble corps." Why? I presume because their vague post-collegiate characters stumble and trip over language, approaching and then backing off from coherent thoughts. No matter how self-absorbed they are, they never quite manage to explain themselves to themselves.

But "mumble movies" rocked and reigned at this month’s Sixth Newport Film Festival. Bujalski took a Best Screenwriting Award for the concerto of half-sentences, hesitations, falterings, questionings, and confusions that marked the dialogue of his sterling new Mutual Appreciation. The Teen Jury Award for Best Picture went to Susan Buice (from Framingham) and Arin Crumley for their genial Four-Eyed Monsters, an autobiographical fictional piece about the awkward, tenuous, monumentally inarticulate courtship of the mid-20s filmmakers, who live and work together in Brooklyn.

At a Newport party, a bemused Bujalski envisioned the subtitling problems presented by Mutual Appreciation’s wall-to-wall muddled talk that . . . you know, uh, starts one way and . . . whatever . . . There are 50 lines of Bujalski dialogue for every one in the obstinately laconic Four-Eyed Monsters. "That movie just spoke to me," a 14-year-old girl on the Teen Jury explained. She was heartened by the way, for much of the movie, the filmmakers spoke through pictures, notes, and doodles. Those sequences replicated several mute months in the actual dating of Buice and Crumley. Even mumbling was verboten.

The Teen Jury? It’s a Newport special, an outreach program that I’m proud to report I’ve been involved with for four festivals. I’m the critic-in-residence who supervises a shifting group of students, ages 14 to 17, plucked out of Middletown High School in the nearby Rhode Island town. They watch a group of feature-length films and, in an always heated and passionate meeting at the end, choose a winner.

This year’s smart, clever, inspired debate lasted two and a half hours. The kids watch the same pool of pictures the adult juries did; there’s no censorship, no shielding of sensitive minds. But everything becomes okay for them to see, I believe, within the context of discussions and grown-up mentoring. The kids came through! I’ll be back in 2006.

Newport is not a particularly artsy or intellectual town; its interests are yachting and genealogy and gardening, not Godard. Past festivals have found the locals forgoing the challenging fare and sticking to the feel-rosy English-language narratives. This year, however, Rhode Islanders finally arrived in numbers. Laurie Kirby, a well-regarded sports and entertainment lawyer with Newport roots, has become the fest’s savvy executive director. Program director Sky Sitney (okay, she’s from the Big Apple) designed an excellent line-up, including in the mix a handful of documentaries — Murderball, for one — with obvious audience appeal. Crowds packed screenings of such engaging non-fictions as Stolen, a documentary about the Isabella Gardner Museum robbery, The Real Dirt on Farmer John, a winning tale of a non-conformist eco-farmer, and The Beauty Academy of Kabul, a sweet saga of American women going to post-Taliban Afghanistan to start a hair salon to train and employ Muslim women. Post-feminism? Pre-feminism? Harvard grad Liz Mermin’s film makes the challenging case that in the context of Afghan sexist oppression a lady can become empowered by giving perms.

This year’s Claiborne Pell Award for Lifetime Achievement went to comic actor Michael McKean, who was Lenny on Laverne and Shirley and became somewhat immortal as Nigel, This Is Spinal Tap’s befuddled lead singer. "We’ve spent great time laughing together," said fellow Tap member Harry Shearer in tribute, "which makes the sexual demands almost bearable."