Authors — Scott Macaulay
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Watch: Jim Cummings’s Springsteen-Fueled Sundance Grand Prize-Winning Short, Thunder Road
Following a heartfelt public campaign to convince Bruce Springsteen — or, perhaps, his battery of lawyers, publishers and master owners — to let him affordably release his short film, Thunder Road, director Jim Cummings prevailed. The result is that this excellent short, fully deserving of Sundance’s Best Short prize, is now screening online, for free. Cummings himself stars as a young man who decides to evoke The Boss while eulogizing his mom at her funeral, and the short is an example of a game-changing work that can make a career. (Cummings is on every agent’s radar now as an actor […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 19, 2016 -
Watch: Adam Savage Goes on a Walking Tour of the Stanley Kubrick Exhibition
For those of us who can’t make it out to the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, Adam Savage of Mythbusters gives us a brief tour of their Stanley Kubrick exhibition and reveals himself to be quite the Kubrick fan. Listen and watch as he views cameras from Barry Lyndon, costumes from 2001 and more.
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 19, 2016 -
Alan Vega, 1938 – 2016
Alan Vega, half of the epochal punk electronic music duo Suicide, died yesterday. He was one of the greats. With Suicide partner Martin Rev, Vega laid the groundwork for industrial electronic music, and much more, as he mixed noise with melody, free-form floating song structures with the terse songwriting economies of doo-wop. The band — starting with its title — was a provocation, but also a salve (or, as Bryan McPeck and Matt McAuley from ARE Weapons wrote in their interview with Vega, “optimistic, life-affirming shit”). Songs dealt with psychotic killers and social unrest and love and optimism. “Dream, baby, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 17, 2016 -
Jessica Oreck Explains the Uplifting Origins of the Bra
Filmmaker Jessica Oreck (Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga) has created a new series for TED-Ed, “In a Moment of Vision,” dubbed “an all-new, all-fun animated micro-series about the history of common objects.” The first episode tells the story of the invention of the bra, which you may be surprised wasn’t invented until the early 1900s.
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 13, 2016 -
Les Cowboys Writer/Director Thomas Bidegain on Contemporary Westerns, His Journey to Directing, and the Importance of the “B-Book”
In theaters now from Cohen Media, Les Cowboys is the directorial debut of acclaimed French screenwriter Thomas Bidegain, best known in recent years for his collaborations with French director Jacques Audiard. (He has co-scripted all of Audiard’s films following The Beat My Heart Skipped.) In an age when the value of the cinematic medium is being challenged, Bidegain has made a haunting and bold first feature that is both intimate as well as epic in scope. It’s a film steeped in the history of cinema, drawing both visual and narrative inspiration from classic American westerns. At the same time, Les […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 5, 2016 -
Cinema Great Abbas Kiarostami Dies at 76
One of cinema’s great masters, Abbas Kiarostami, whose pictures could be intimate and human-scaled while also self-reflexive and bracingly political, died today in Paris. The Palme D’Or winner — for Taste of Cherry in 1997 — passed away following treatment for gasto-intestinal cancer. Speaking to The Guardian, director Asghar Farhadi said, “He wasn’t just a film-maker, he was a modern mystic, both in his cinema and his private life. He definitely paved ways for others and influenced a great deal of people. It’s not just the world of cinema that has lost a great man; the whole world has lost […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 4, 2016 -
Watch: Aphex Twin’s New Music Video Directed by 12-Year-Old Ryan Wyer
It’s been over a decade since Richard James released a storied string of Aphex Twin music videos, including the fiendish hip-hop musical extravaganza Windowlicker (directed by Chris Cunningham and embedded below). But, today, a surprise new video dropped from James’ upcoming EP, Cheetah, and it revisits several classic Aphex Twin tropes — namely, kids and disconcerting James’ masks. In fact, the director is a kid — 12-year-old Ryan Wyer of Rush County, Dublin. Check out “CIRKLON3 [Колхозная mix]” above.
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 21, 2016 -
Trailer Watch: Andrea Arnold’s American Honey
A24 has just released this trailer for Andrea Arnold’s Cannes prize-winning American Honey, starring Shia LaBeouf and riveting newcomer Sasha Lane. She’s the new recruit, he’s the troubled showboater and Riley Keough is the bikini-clad capitalist who has cultishly transformed a motley collection of street youth into a band of traveling grifters. Arnold, along with her regular DP, Robbie Ryan, creates an exuberant and kaleidoscopic vision of contemporary America in a film that creates its own entirely compelling rhythm.
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 21, 2016 -
Watch: The Lion City, 2, a Mind-Blowing, Multi-Year Time-Lapse Video
Australian filmmaker Keith Loutit, a pioneer in tilt-shift photography, has just raised the bar in time-lapse photography with his latest video, The Lion City, 2. A portrait of a changing Singapore, the video features time-lapse shooting that took place in multiple locations over years. Writes Loutit: When we pass by landscapes they appear fixed in time, but they change around us constantly. The idea behind this film is to reveal this change by returning to the same camera positions over the years. In the comments, Loutit reveals that he shot the video over three years, and while his ability to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 11, 2016 -
Pressing Pause: Elaine Sheldon and Sarah Ginsburg Take a She Does Podcast Break
One of the best podcasts to launch last year was She Does, a series of audio portraits of women creators across film, music, new media, journalism and more. It was created by two filmmakers, Elaine McMillion Sheldon and Sarah Ginsburg, who previously collaborated on Sheldon’s award-winning interactive documentary Hollow. Using data visualization and web storytelling techniques to examine the economic and social history of one rural West Virginia town, Hollow landed Sheldon on Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list and announced her as a documentarian committed to exploring all the new forms non-fiction storytelling can take in a digital world. Hence, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 10, 2016
