Mutual Appreciation, by Andrew Bujalski, is the type of film which really causes me to have to step back and question my love of cinema. Its story (that might not be the appropriate word, let's say premise) is of a young "musician" who comes to New York. He talks to his friends a lot about his boring life and search for "love". He also tries to find other band members, and plans for his big show. That's it.<br /><br />Bujalski makes what I suppose could be labeled a "sincere effort" with this film, but all through it's incredible almost 2 hour running time I felt that I was watching a wanna-be French New Wave film by someone who had never actually seen a New Wave film.<br /><br />The film is full of awkward, possibly improvised dialogue segments which don't really flow. This could have worked to the film's advantage, adding to its attempt at cinema varite, but it makes the audience more uncomfortable than the characters.<br /><br />The painfully simple camera work and the far overused, and rather barren, apartment set make the film less than visually stunning. At points during the long, uninterrupted, dialogue pieces, I felt like the cinematographer just dumped the camera on a tripod and took a cigarette break.<br /><br />More so, the dialogue rants are not interesting and end up saying essentially the same thing over and over again; perhaps this was the filmmaker's intent, but if so it wasn't well thought out. The characters are also dull and very one-dimensional. They sit around, smoke and complain, none of which is at all interesting.<br /><br />Mutual Appreciation is part of an ever increasing breed of film which attempts to emulate the style of "art films" from the 1960s and 1970s while simultaneously trying to be modern and cutting edge. Andrew Bujalski is not a talented enough filmmaker to pull off an effort like this and the haphazard approach here becomes infuriating by the one hour mark.<br /><br />Despite its near epic length, it still feels like at least a good 20 minutes of the running time were added simply to make the film longer. For example, I really don't care about seeing a five minute sequence in which the lead character performs a couple awful songs on stage for around 20 swaying hipsters in the audience.<br /><br />If Bujalski had made this film 30 minutes shorter, or better yet, a 45 minute short feature, I might hold a very different opinion of it. But given how little actually occurs in it and how long it takes for it to occur, I was quite put off.<br /><br />Here here to the future of art.