Radiohead’s The King of Limbs, announced for pre-order this week, is available one day early. If you bought it already, you can log in to the pre-order page with your password and download it. I’ve only given it one listen so far, but it’s more intimate, softer, prettier album than In Rainbows, sonically closer to Kid A but more open emotionally. I like it. Arriving with the album today is this amazing video for “Lotus Flower” featuring Thom Yorke, a bare stage, and a light. The video is directed by Garth Jennings and choreographed by Wayne McGregor. (Click on the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 18, 2011Brent Green is one of Filmmaker‘s favorite young artists, a wholly original animator and performer who has become something of an art world star on the basis of his idiosyncratic, low-fi short films and live events. Tonight and tomorrow he brings the full evening live version of Gravity is Everywhere Back Then to New York’s The Kitchen. From The Kitchen’s website: Inspired by the real actions of the eccentric Leonard Wood, filmmaker Brent Green brings to life this love story like no other in his first feature-length film. Shot entirely on the full-scale town he built in his backyard, Green […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 17, 2011Via Nowness comes Film 1, a short by Martin de Thurah for designer Johan Lindeberg. De Thurah is best known for his Fever Ray and James Blake music videos, and his latest stars Iva Gocheva, Bogdan Kwiatkowski and Kate Lyn Sheil. It’s shot by Kaspar Tuxen, one of Filmmaker‘s 2010 “25 New Faces.” From the site: Today’s digital premiere of Martin de Thurah’s Film I spotlights Johan Lindeberg’s new BLK DNM line and takes cues from the designer’s personal life. “I went through a recent break-up and wanted to use my own dynamic to inspire the film,” Lindeberg says. “I […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 16, 2011
AICN thinks this trailer for the zombie game Dead Island might be better than most movie trailers, and I tend to agree. More Dead Island Videos
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 16, 2011Today we, along with seemingly everyone else in the film blogosphere, announced Criterion’s exclusive deal with Hulu, which will see some 800 Criterion titles stream to viewers on the Hulu Plus service. And, like everyone else, we had to add a small update when we realized that Hulu’s gain is Netflix’s loss. The Criterion titles we Netflix subscribers are used to watching (just last week, for example, I saw Agnes Varda’s Cleo from Five to Seven) will soon be leaving the service. Over at Hulu, Criterion President Peter Becker launches a blog with this declaration of love for the label’s […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 15, 2011Back in the day, Richard Kern did many of our covers — Robert Duvall, Kim Pierce/Chloe Sevigny/Hilary Swank, and Michelle Rodriguez, for example. Recently he gave us a shot of Sasha Grey for The Girlfriend Experience that is only in our print edition. But the truly well-viewed will remember Kern’s string of New York underground and transgressive films from the 1980s, movies like The Right Side of My Brain, Submit to Me, and Goodbye 42nd St. This new Kern music video of the band Dentata is more straight-up performance, but it still boasts his great eye and specific vibe. Dentata […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 15, 2011A couple of years ago at a film panel discussion I had to smile at the irony of a $600/hour entertainment attorney solemnly intoning to an audience questioner that his indie-film revenue issues would be solved if he embraced “the Radiohead model.” That is, if the filmmaker decided, like the English superstar band did with their album In Rainbows, to allow fans to pay what they want, even if that was only a penny. But that was back when free was the thing. Indeed, while others had previously experimented with such pricing models, that Radiohead did so with one of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 15, 2011The IFP Narrative Lab launches its online application today. From the website: IFP’s Independent Filmmaker Labs is the only program in the world currently supporting first-time feature directors in post-production to complete, market and distribute their films. Focusing exclusively on low-budget features ( Through the Labs, IFP works to ensure that talented emerging voices receive the support, resources, and industry exposure necessary to reach audiences. The Lab is really an excellent program that provides a wealth of intensive mentorship having to do with all the aspects of filmmaker that follow production. Recent Lab films include such Sundance selections as Pariah, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 15, 2011
This piece was originally printed in the Spring 2010 issue. Winter’s Bone is nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress (Jennifer Lawrence), Best Supporting Actor (John Hawkes) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Debra Granik & Anne Rosellini). The Ozark mountain holler that is the setting for Debra Granik’s fierce and extraordinary Winter’s Bone seems carved away from much of what signifies as “contemporary America” in cinema today. The movie, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year, dwells in a landscape that imbues it with the starkness of classic Western frontier drama. Seventeen-year-old Ree Dolly is the single-minded heroine who […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 14, 2011Here are a few of the articles in my Instapaper this week. At Bad Lit, Mike Everleth has his usual excellent selection of Underground Film Links, including this link to “Foreign Cinema: Whither San Francisco’s Experimental Film Legacy,” by Kimberly Chun at the Bold Italic. She visits Canyon Cinema and and various local filmmakers, looking for scene described in the Pacific Film Archive’s first book, Radical Light. Chuck Tryon watches (and likes) The Fighter with his Massachusetts-born fiance and notes the reference to the documentary High on Crack Street: Lost Lives in Lowell: A look back at the documentary shows […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 13, 2011