Aaron Katz has experienced festival and critical success for his first two feature films, Dance Party USA and Quiet City, primarily coming out of the South by Southwest Film Festival’s affinity for so-called mumblecore filmmakers. (The New York Times wrote an excellent piece a few years ago about this film movement. Generally speaking, mumblecore is--in addition to being an obsession of mine--a contemporary approach to indie filmmaking with a focus on character development and spending as little money during production as possible.) Like Andrew Bujalski or Joe Swanberg, mumblecore’s other major players, Katz creates features that are grouped in this movement. His newest film Cold Weather, which premiered at SXSW this year to positive reviews, both draws and deviates from mumblecore traditions while maintaining a playful relationship with genre and style.
Cold Weather is about a young man who moves in with his older sister in Portland, Oregon, and gets caught up in a good old-fashioned mystery: missing person, stolen capital, tire slashing, the whole nine yards. The protagonist, Doug, is a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes and the film is inspired considerably by the detective genre. Against this backdrop, though, the movie maintains many mumblecore characteristics. Small moments of connection between characters, mundane conversations, and an obvious low-budget stylistic approach connect Cold Weather to Katz’s other films.
