Let Them Chirp Awhile

Posted: November 30th, 2008 | Author: miconian | Filed under: Movies | Tags: , | Comments

Here’s the Quicktime trailer.

The title basically means “It’s okay to have a little bit of unproductive fun in your youth, even though you will eventually give in to the inevitable sorrow and entropy that is endemic to all life, and die.”

Trailers for this sort of movie aren’t about describing the plot, or even particular characters. The only goal here is to express just the right balance of sincerity and cynicism, so that the target demographic will feel touched and understood.

Some obvious predecessors:

Kicking and Screaming (the Noah Baumbach film, not to be confused with that soccer movie) is about a group of college seniors who have insulted themselves from adult life in a bubble of intellectual self-referentialism.

These attractive wet people in Garden State are contemplating death and stuff like that.

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Comments on “Let Them Chirp Awhile”

  1. 1 Nick S. Miller said at 11:58 am on November 30th, 2008:

    You’re all mixed up about this movie. I saw it at Santa Fe Film Festival last year. In the first 5 minutes it actually openly rips on Garden State which is really hilarious. And the title comes from some Emerson Essay called “Self Reliance”. it’s on the official website here :

    http://www.letthemchirpawhile.com

    the movie is building on stuff from woody allen and the classic italian filmmakers (fellini, de sica) but it’s pretty original actually in a lot of ways. don’t write it off based on the trailer. it’s actually a fun film

  2. 2 Michael Bennett Cohn said at 4:03 pm on November 30th, 2008:

    Hey Nick, thanks for reading my blog, and thanks even more for commenting.

    It’s true that I haven’t seen the movie… the basic model of the blog is that I go ahead and review films before actually seeing them. Although I’m surely often wrong, I do feel that I’m accurately representing the text of the trailer as I perceive it. If the movie itself turns out to be a lot different than my interpretation, then perhaps that trailer wasn’t the best possible representation of that particular film.

    What do you think?

  3. 3 Dave Bernhardt said at 1:27 am on December 15th, 2008:

    hey…i think Nick is right about that, and in response to MBC – dude – most indie movies are marketed with trailers that do not reflect the actual content in an effort to bring in a broad audience. i havent seen let them chirp a while yet, but if what nick is saying is right, then, the producers of let them chirp a while are just trying to make the film seem more mainstream.

    take for example that film ELEGY which was marketed as a comedy. it’s actually a really dark film, and i saw it with a friend. the trailer made it look like a movie for baby-boomers, but it’s really all about death and sex. anyway, rarely are trailers good representations of films if the films are by a) unknown filmmakers b) first-time filmmakers or c) if the films are about something that is sort of out of the ordinary…

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