Greta Gerwig: ditz of steel or inspired genius? Discuss. In Mark and Jay Duplass’ follow-up to “The Puffy Chair,” a quartet of friends, all failing actors, retreat to the backwoods after a film-festival exposure to an absolute piece of shit that impresses them, and amid double-talk, flirtations, misbegotten making-out, umming, hemming, hawing, and with camerawork as uncertain as the badinage, decide to make a horror movie. A man with a paper bag over his head ensues. Call it “The Blair Bitch-Session Project.” There’s something just out of grasp that the Duplasses are after here, despite the genial and ultimately sentimental form of their small comedy. Again, the question remains of just how a larger-budget project might waste co-star Gerwig’s twerpitude of magnitude. In the earlier “Hannah Takes the Stairs,” she managed to demonstrate an intelligence that is mere flightiness here; in the forthcoming “Nights and Weekends,” which she co-directed and co-stars in with Joe Swanberg, it all comes together: simply by moments passing, without that much situation, behavior or even drama, that film captures something all these twentysomething filmmakers seem after: drama as quicksilver as breath, as sudden as adrenaline, as memorable as life. In the meantime, a man in the woods with a bag on his head is reasonably goddam scary in carefully calibrated increments. With Steve Zissis, Ross Partridge, Elise Muller. 84m. (Ray Pride)
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