New Brooklyn-based production company Modern Mythology has scored a viral hit with their inventive video for “Everything Changes,” from Eytan and the Embassy. As the Wall St. Journal reports, the video has nabbed the title of “most costume changes in an unedited music video” by Recordsetter.com, a site promising that everyone can be the best at something. What’s great about the video is that, unlike many clips, the costume changes aren’t just for visual variety; instead, they narrate the history of rock and pop music. From the Wall St. Journal: Filmed in Williamsburg in video director Joe Pickard’s apartment in […]
Martin Donovan’s directorial debut, Collaborator, returns to the IFC Center tomorrow for a week-long run before opening Los Angeles on the 20th. It’s also available now on VOD. Here, from the June 18 IFC Center screening is the Q&A with director Hal Hartley interviewing Donovan along with executive producer Ted Hope and actors David Morse and Melissa Auf der Meur. (Hat tip: Truly Free Film.)
“Fuck you.” With those opening words of Savages, author Don Winslow delivered a kick to the teeth of the literary world. The jarring and unorthodox novel — about a trio of beach bum lovers-turned-drug kingpins and with a writing style that ranges from poetry to screenplay — became a New York Times Bestseller and a shot in the arm to Winslow’s already successful career. The author had penned more than ten novels prior to Savages, including the Neal Carey series, while moonlighting as a private investigator during grad school and the meticulous DEA/drug cartel fueled intrigue of The Power of the Dog, […]
Second #6298, 104:58 Another dissolve. 1. This one from a montage that’s as expressionistic and compressed as anything in any of Lynch’s films. Having been strapped into the gurney and loaded into the circa 1960s ambulance in all its hallucinatory, candy apple red, hearse-like terror, Dorothy struggles against her bindings, screaming, “Hold me! I’m falling! I’m falling.” The frame captures Dorothy’s dream-terror as it slowly dissolves into a shot of the ambulance siren, a moment that is both horrifying and deadpan, as the dull wail of the siren lends a sort of flat, matter-of-factness to sequence. 2. From Charles Musser, […]
Scotland looks magnificent in EIFF closing night film Brave — lots of mountains, mystical spaces and torrential waterfalls. Strangely though, it doesn’t rain in the movie. Not once. This decision must have been overseen by the Scottish tourist board, for there are few places as rainy as Scotland. When it rained in Cannes this year, it was all the trades could talk about — but it’s just not news when it happens in Edinburgh. The last two weeks in Edinburgh we have all been dashing from cinema to cinema in raincoats, umbrellas up, wavy hair getting frizzier by the minute. […]
Second #6251, 104:11 Sounds 1. “He put his disease in me.” (Dorothy to Sandy, around three seconds before this frame.) 2. Blue Velvet’s sound designer was the late Alan Splet, who had worked with Lynch beginning with his short film The Grandmother, in 1970. 3. In the distance, growing louder, the wail of an ambulance siren, which will arrive immediately after this shot for Dorothy. 4. The sound of Sandy crying, gradually drowned out by the wail of the siren. 5. What if the siren is, secretly, Sandy’s red thoughts at this moment, an outward auditory expression of her inner […]
The word on the film is that this is David O. Russell going back to his roots somewhat, returning to the territory of films like Flirting with Disaster, which is something I can definitely get on board with. It seems like this might be the film that will let us know if Bradley Cooper is (or at least wants to be) an actor rather than a movie star — what he shows here is certainly promisingly different from what we’ve seen before from him. And it’s also nice to see Jennifer Lawrence coming back to a role with a little […]
Second #6204, 103:24 Fragments. Frames. Pieces of a puzzle: 1. “Sandy please. Sandy.” 2. Dorothy naked, but still wearing her wig. A performer. 3. Her performance before Sandy and Mrs. Williams. 4. The lamp in the corner. The trapped bird. 5. The flesh of Dorothy’s arm. 6. “Nothing can be achieved in the art of film until its form is understood to be the product of a completely unique complex: the exercise of an instrument which can function, simultaneously, both in terms of discovery and invention. . . . The camera provides the elements of the form, and, although it […]
For The New Yorker, Lena Dunham has penned a wonderful remembrance of writer/director Nora Ephron, who passed away this week of leukemia. Not surprisingly, they knew each other and, last year, had become friends. Here’s Dunham on that friendship: …I devoured her prose, her other film offerings, and became a fangirl right along with my mother, aunt, grandmother and every other intelligent woman in the tristate area. Which is why it was so momentous when, in March of 2011, I received a short, perfect e-mail from Ephron, saying she had seen and enjoyed my film and would like to take […]
We’re over half way through now and I’m starting to panic. I keep hearing about great films that I’ve missed (The Mirror Never Lies is spoken of only in superlatives, and The Unspeakable Act is another one I’m late to the table for, Tabu, Kid-Thing and more) and rocking events that slipped by while I was elsewhere. Chris Fujiwara told me about an event where he and some of the Filipino filmmakers who are in town did a live musical accompaniment to a film, and I don’t know where I was for Thelma Schoonmaker‘s Q&A after a screening of a […]