Jake Scott, filmmaker and son of a man named Ridley, directed this 30th Anniversary spot for Apple, showcasing the cinematographic capabilities of an iPhone 5S. Shot on 100 smartphones around the world, “1.24.14” depicts a day in the life of Mac products and their users, that is equal parts horrifying and awe-inspiring given the Macintosh’s ubiquity. Culled from more than 70 hours of footage, the ad was cut by 21 editors under the guide of regular David Fincher collaborator, Angus Wall.
Fever is a recently formed group of photographers and video artists hailing from Berlin and Madrid. As their blog, We Are the Fever, exhibits, their work consists of photo essays and videos, often dealing with youth culture amidst Europe’s economic crisis — two themes present in the group’s new short film, a startling, poetic and beautifully shot evocation of personal and social change titled Nothing Stays. It is produced by the group’s three members — Borja Larrondo, Daniel Eceolaza and Luis Guijarro — and written and directed by Eceolaza. Guijarro shot the short and did color correction. Check it out […]
Screenwriter and producer James Schamus was honored with the WGA East‘s Evelyn F. Burkey Award, which celebrates those “bringing honor and dignity to writers.” Gratefully accepting the award, Schamus ponders the meaning of “honor” and “dignity” with regards to screenwriters in today’s working environment and delivers a rousing call to arms. Watch above.
I spent most of yesterday caught in a self-centered malaise upon hearing that one of my favorite actors had passed away. An outpouring of eulogies — each distinct and personal, though unanimously carrying that sorrowful, grateful conclusion — drifted onto the internet, while I reflected in the only way I knew how: by watching his work. It takes more than a few hours or a days to wind your way through Philip Seymour Hoffman’s filmography, as he was not just blessed with great talent, but also, great taste. Nelson Carvajal of Press Play and Fandor has put together a nice […]
The cover story of our current issue, Enemy is Denis Villeneuve’s brooding adaptation of José Saramago’s The Double, his second collaboration with Jake Gyllenhaal following last year’s Prisoners. Today, the busy bees over at A24 debuted a trailer in advance of the film’s March 14th release that also showcases an impressive supporting cast in Isabella Rosselini, Melanie Laurent and recent Cronenberg favorite, Sarah Gadon. The film, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, is another entry in cinema’s long-running fascination with doppelgängers, and apparently, a rather successful one at that. Prior to interviewing Villeneuve for the Winter issue, Brandon Harris raved the film in his […]
If you’ve been wondering where on God’s green earth Jonathan Glazer has been for the last decade, then April should be a very fine month for you. Come the 4th, A24 will release Under The Skin, the Englishman’s long-awaited follow-up to 2004’s Birth. As transparently plotted as that Nicole Kidman-starrer was, Glazer (with significant assistance from Harris Savides) demonstrated a clean handle on its foreboding mood, a trait that has apparently carried over to his latest. In this teaser, cut by Glazer himself, we can barely glimpse Scarlett Johansson’s extraterrestrial stalker for more than a second a piece, but the atmosphere pulses […]
The awesome upstarts at A24 Films made three smart pickups at Sundance (Obvious Child, Laggies and Life After Beth), and have a pretty formidable slate of films upcoming include Denis Villenueve’s Enemy, Steven Knight’s Locke, Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin and, maybe most excitingly, David Michôd’s The Rover. The follow-up to the superlative Animal Kingdom, this outback thriller looks to be a departure from the urban crime drama of the Australian director’s feature debut. (According to A24, the plot is as follows: “10 years following the collapse of society, a man will go to any lengths to take back the one thing that still matters to him.”) In […]
Swapping Rammstein for The Talking Heads, the trailer for Volume II of Lars von Trier’s nymphomaniacal, five-hour affair is considerably more dialed down than its predecessor. Favoring mood and quiet exchanges to the sexed-up, melodramatic hysteria that’s categorized the majority of Nymphomaniac‘s elongated marketing scheme, this new trailer puts its best ensemble forward with glimpses of Christian Slater, Willem Dafoe, Shia Labeouf, Stellan Skarsgard, Mia Goth, Stacy Martin, and of course, the titular Charlotte Gainsbourg. The U.S. had its first glimpse of Nymphomaniac: Volume I at Sundance’s secret screening last week, and Magnolia Pictures will release Volumes I and II to the rest of […]
For nearly as long as there have been moving pictures, there have been drugs moving through their frames. The Conquest of Happiness, a 2005 pastiche by the German artist Oliver Pietsch, examines the patterns of drug use and representation on film. Compiling hundreds of clips over the course of two years, Pietsch “[aimed] to mirror the subject drug by aiming for a similar absorbing and lulling effect.” In an interview with Carroll/Fletcher earlier this month, Pietsch remarked of his piece that “the structure of repetition goes well with the principle of drugs.” While the obvious titles like Requiem for a Dream and Scarface make their […]
Joe, David Gordon Green’s adaptation of the Larry Brown novel, sees the peripatetic filmmaker returning to the Southern-fried family drama of his Undertow days, if not with considerably more grit. Premiering at the Venice Film Festival, where Tye Sheridan — riffing off the remnants of his Mud daddy issues — scooped up the Marcello Mastroianni prize for Best Young Actor, Joe follows the eponymous cypher, played by Nicolas Cage, who takes Sheridan under his wing and away from his troubled home life at the local lumber company. As you may glean from the trailer, Sheridan’s father doesn’t take too kindly to the boy’s new […]