Boys, Why the hate?

call this film what u want, but IMO it was really one of the worst films i have seen in a while and yes im a guy. i mean wheres the plot??? its just a bunch of jarble and *beep* i thought it tried way too hard to try and be "hip" or "cool" ppl comparing this to woody allen are pathetic. woody can write better one liners than any piece of dialog from this entire film. sorry but this movie was beyond terrible and it being in the criterion collection pisses me off even more lol.
and there might b all the hate because there was not one single likable character in the film and it went absolutely nowhere.

Maybe you're right.

I'm a guy. I liked the film, but it wasn't as good as I expected based on what I'd heard in the rave reviews. Aura just wasn't relatable at all to me. She came across as hugely self-absorbed and self-centered, and very immature for her age. She was a very unattractive person (I don't mean physically - Lena Dunham is not bad looking). I enjoyed the humor of the film and the relationship between Aura and her mother and sister. I loved Jemima Kirke's character.

____
This signature is copyrighted and can be yours today for just $14.95! Order today!

There are plenty of women directors who are a hell of a lot better than the overhyped Ms. Dunham (Katherine Bigelow for instance). Stop playing the gender card.

Other than mulholland_empire (first post only) and kaelcarp, everyone else seems to be talking around your point. They're talking about female directors, whereas you're talking about identification with the female experience.

I am male, and way out of the age group being depicted. I liked the movie, but I really disliked Aura. She seemed somewhat lost in life (which is OK for everyone at that age), and I was waiting for her to branch out on her own with Frankie, but instead she withdrew into her mother's apartment. That last act cemented her as being a spoiled entitled loser in my mind.

I don't think this is because I can't identify with the female experience, because I think a lot of females of Aura's age would not have done what she did in the end. If anything, I think you are selling females short if you think most of them would behave that way. (I actually think her final act is more typical of males her age than females.)

Aura reminded me a lot of Jaye in Wonderfalls, the difference being that Jaye was generally more expressive, and ultimately grew as a person, which Aura isn't and didn't. (The other difference is that I saw Wonderfalls 7 years ago, when as a younger man, I probably had more sympathy for these types of young lost characters.)

Yeah, I'm a guy but frankly I'm not only kinda tired of this kind of film but I'm also kind of the tired of this kind of defense of self indulgent films.

In my admittedly old-fashioned and limited view, I think good story telling finds something universal in the situations it presents. I think a real story teller is able to get an audience invested even if they don't share the same background as the characters in the film. I think art is about communication and if you're only appealing to an audience who is already in the know, you're preaching to the choir and not really communicating.

I've never been a fan of this kind of indie film. The kind where we follow a character who is just a stand-in for the writer/director and we see them drift from one relatively unfocused scene to the next. I find it lazy and self indulgent. The director doesn't seem interested in putting forth the effort to bring out what's profound or interesting about this story but would rather just say, "hey, here's some stuff that happened to me. Aren't I so likable and interesting?"

It doesn't matter whether or not I share the experiences of the writer/director. I find Tiny Furniture as tedious and self-indulgent as I do Stranger than Paradise or films where I do happen to indentify with the situation.

I don't think we should make excuses for bad movies simply because they happen to represent a place we are or once were in our lives. I think when a work of fiction is so self focused, it ultimately becomes a very extravegant form of masturbation and masturbating is something I think is best done in the comfort of one's own home and not on the screen.

I'd take a movie like Winter's Bone over a film like Tiny Furniture any day. I'm not a teenage girl living in hill country with a meth-dealer dad and a catatonic Mom but that film was amazing in it's ability to allow me, someone not familiar with this society, to become invested in the struggles of this young girl. It even managed to frame its story in an almost mythical way, further pushing the audience to take more away from it than just this very specific situation.

It's fine that the OT found something in the film that I didn't but I think it's more than a little condescending to dismiss other people's opinions because they happen to have a Y chromosome.

I'm a guy, and I loved this film, but I'm asexual and much more emotional than most of the other males I know. I can instantly understand why so many dislike the film--there is nothing redeeming about Lena's character. No action performed by her in the second half of the film says anything positive about her character. She is inconsiderate. She doesn't know what she wants. Up until about a year ago I would have considered this movie worthless and the character worthless. However, I have recently come to accept some imperfections about myself, and after doing so I have realized that there is no such thing as a worthless human being. Aura is a troubled soul lost within a deep sense of impotence and a fear of the future. I think that people's dislike of the film is rooted not in its poor filmmaking/storytelling techniques, but because they don't like the result of the techniques. They don't like Lena. They don't feel sympathy for her and ultimately do not believe that she can come out of this a good, loving, effective human being. The final scene of the film asks the viewer to believe something that many are not. The level of hatred I've seen displayed, in my opinion, is actually a testament to the effectiveness of the filmmaking, because the viewers are so insistent against the story's sentiment, rather than indifferent.
Of course, many of the things Aura does in the film are unacceptable--namely, the disrespect she displays for her mother by drinking her wine and the way she treats her friend. But really, she is SUPPOSED to be a mess. Many of the harsher critics seem to believe that the writer created this character as a means of glorifying bad personality traits. That is not what is happening. By mirroring Aura's path against that of her mother when she was her age, Dunham wants to convey that *despite* Aura's despicable situation and personality traits, she can come out of it a well-formed and gracious human being. And that, I think, is a very admirable message. It calls us to look past what we've been taught heroic traits are and have trust that the universe can take care of us even when we're bad.

if this is a girl power film then you must have a (bleep) opinion of yourself and other girls like lena (bleep)ham and probaly aspire to be a (bleep) just like that (bleep) piece of (bleep) show girls

For me, it was how incredibly self-indulgent it was. I couldn't even begin to care about these mumbly, selfish narcissists.