David Fincher directed this beautiful Calvin Klein commercial starring his Girl with a Dragon Tattoo muse, Rooney Mara. Karen O. provides Mara’s interior soundtrack as the actress moves from subway to concert hall. At Movie City News, Ray Pride gives the spot a loving meditation: The glimmering of inconsequence… Angles on cafe to compare with Girl With The Dragon Tattoo; Rooney Mara walking same cadence as cyclist in zebra crossing; sugar crystals in coffee instead of Godardian cream; cuttingly crisp and creased white blouse under fitted form of lightest black leather blouson of highest odor; taffeta dress knee-length as girl-kick […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 8, 2013Apparently frustrated by Interscope’s tardiness in continuing the production of a documentary on M.I.A. he was directing, Steve Loveridge staged a guerrilla action this weekend by uploading a five-minute teaser to YouTube, embedding it on his Tumblr. “Reblog the shit out of this and maybe they’ll wake up,” he wrote. The action did not go over well. Interscope pulled down the clip, and a Roc Nation exec sent Loveridge one of those entertainment industry “I’m really pissed off but, hey, bro, s’all cool” emails, noting that the upload “screws with” the label’s marketing and PR efforts while assuring Loveridge that […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 8, 2013Published in 2008, Alix Lambert’s Crime is one of the most fascinating books on the subject, bringing together in one gorgeously-produced volume interviews with various artists and dramatists who have chronicled crime as well as actual criminals themselves. But the book is just one element of Lambert’s practice surrounding this topic. Her Crime has taken the form of gallery shows, theater pieces and now, animated films. This week Lambert and animator Sam Chou will launch Crime: The Animated Series at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. From MoCA: MOCATV presents a screening of short animated episodes from our […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 8, 2013Still the only lab focusing entirely on what happens after rough cut —- from locking picture to devising a distribution strategy — the IFP Narrative Lab concluded its ninth edition last month. When I created the Lab with the IFP almost a decade ago, the idea was simple. A successful career in film is partly based around making mistakes — and then not making those same mistakes again. But first-time filmmakers don’t have prior experience to draw upon, and in today’s hyper-competitive, content-swamped environment, failure is a luxury many of them can’t afford —— especially when that failure is made […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 8, 2013The folks at Craft Truck sat down with legendary cinematographer Ed Lachman, whose credits include Far from Heaven, Virgin Suicides, Life during Wartime, and Ulrich Seidl’s recent Paradise trilogy. Watch part one above and part two at the link.
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 6, 2013David Lynch may be mostly retired from filmmaking these days, but here he is in Paul Sharits/Tony Conrad mode with a music video that comes with an epilepsy warning. If you are non-epileptic, turn the speakers up, the lights down and enjoy David Lynch’s video for Nine Inch Nails’ “Come Back Haunted.”
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 28, 2013Jem Cohen’s highly recommended Museum Hours — the winner of the Filmmaker-sponsored 2013 Cinema Eye Heterodox Award — opens in theaters today from Cinema Guild. Below is an excerpt (about half) of my interview with Cohen in the current print issue of Filmmaker. You can read the whole interview in the issue, and in the iPad version there’s also a 12-minute video with Cohen explicating various scenes in the film. What does it mean, in 2013, to photograph — to reproduce — a painting? Does it, as Walter Benjamin wrote in his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 28, 2013Dean Fleischer Camp and Jenny Slate — the 2011 25 New Faces who created the delightful Marcel the Shell with Shoes On — have a new web series, a 12-part “comedy of sincerity” called Catherine. Camp wrote in an email: It’s a comedy, but it’s also sincere and menacing and hopefully kind of evocative. In some ways it’s a response to the “awkward” comedy that dominates TV & movies right now. My secret hope is that it kicks off a new movement away from that kind of boring cynicism toward something with a live, beating heart. A single-entendre sense of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 25, 2013A yearly subscription to the print edition of Filmmaker magazine now includes our iPad edition as well as full access to our digital archives — all for $18. That’s the short version of the recent changes we’ve made for subscribers. The slightly longer version, for those interested in how we’re conceiving of Filmmaker across our various platforms, follows. If you’re a regular reader of this site, you’ll have recognized that we’ve effectively created multiple editions of Filmmaker. Our website contains new, original content every day, and this content is mostly not contained in the print magazine. In fact, if you […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 21, 2013The body and mind — filmmaker Mitch McCabe tackled the former in her excellent HBO documentary, Youth Knows No Pain, which looked at the plastic surgery industry and America’s fixation on staying young. Now, she says, she’s “pointing the camera in the opposite direction, at our internal selves.” Make Me Normal is her film about the mental health industry. From her website: MAKE ME NORMAL is a feature-length documentary film exploring recent controversies in the psychiatry field, the rise of diagnosed mental illness, psychopharmacology and our new definition of “normal”— all set against the backdrop of the filmmaker’s own roll-coaster […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 21, 2013