Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007)

I think I'm gonna join the mumblecore hating club. It really is only good for those who make it, watching it is too often a vain effort. This one is the worst I've suffered, not much more than an uninspired home video without a script: the ultimate waste of time. Random events and improvised dialogues, redundant and irrelevant, a bunch of friends playing to be actors. If a line or two might be interesting, it's by pure chance. Character decisions are pointless, now I like you now I don't, they could be doing just about anything else and it wouldn't matter. I can't believe I watched the whole thing. I remember a time when low budget films weren't necessarily an endless self-absorbed rambling and characters would actually do things, go places.

Joe Swanberg's "Hannah Takes the Stairs" is a low-budget art-film done in a quasi-improvisational style. It centers around a group of self-absorbed twenty-somethings who spend most of their time sitting around discussing life and relationships as if such subjects had never been talked about before. The result is a sometimes insightful but more often tedious look into the mindset of today's younger generation.Hannah (Greta Gerwig) is a neo-Bohemian playwright with poor instincts when it comes to men, who, upon dumping her ne'er-do-well musician boyfriend, immediately strikes up romances with two fellows at the obviously loosey-goosey TV production company where she works. The movie strives hard to be as extemporaneous as possible both in its performances and its direction, and while that does yield a few moments of truth and honesty along the way (the break-up scene is almost painfully convincing), too much of the movie is simply vapid and self-indulgent, with a trio of perfectly able-bodied young folk puling and mewling and whining about life to the point where we just don't care to listen to them anymore.With no real plot or storyline to speak of, watching "Hannah Takes the Stairs" is a bit like staring at someone else's random doodlings for an hour-and-a-half and finding no real reason why we should care about them. And, oh yes, unless I missed it, no actual staircase appears in the movie, with or without Hannah going up or down it. I guess it must be metaphorical.

I am from Europe and have been living in US for 2 years. I mostly watch films like this one: low budget, simple camera etc. especially I love films where 'nothing is going on' with one room and 2 people talking about nothing. But still could not connect with this one. I find it shallow, empty. Maybe I am wrong but can not get rid of the feeling that is all Matt Duplass' fault. I have seen also My puffy chair and felt the same (both films on Sundance Channel which is by the way the best thing I get through whatever is provided from my cable company). Also contrary from most other comments I found the main girl interesting… soft and tender

Hannah takes the stairs... what does that mean exactly? Taking the stairs would constitute doing things "the hard way", and that is exactly what she Hannah does whilst trying to "find herself"/and "relate".From the beginning we can see that there is no budget here, they don't even try to hide it... not necessarily a bad thing, if it hadn't been so much like a movie I recently saw on youtube called "four eyed monsters", which belonged on youtube. I believe this belongs on youtube as well, for its amateurish almost-there-but-not-quite quality.The zoom-ins to try to capture Hannah's emotion where all else fails are absolutely played-out and do nothing for the scene...While it is nice to see "real people" sometimes instead of actors, in this case, it's not. It's nice that the guys in the movie are "cute in their own way", giving them a chance to pull the promiscuous blond-chick, based on their personalities for once. (Matt's hairiness and ass made me almost want to leave right then) Hannah's "I don't knows..." get old really quickly. Also, trying to end a movie on a happy note doesn't always work, in this case there was already a bad pattern established.The only interesting character was Hannah's roommate, Rachel, and right when she started to develop we got cut off by another one of Hannah's escapades. Rachel seemed to be too mature or too aesexual to get involved with anyone at that point in her life, let alone the three men Hannah paraded around, and smartly so- the best thing Rachel does is just sit back and enjoy the show (or should I say train wreck). And for that, three stars.