In an effort to assure traditionalists that anything television can do the Internet can do better, YouTube got their first slice of the awards show pie last night with their inaugural YouTube Music Awards. In Saturday’s Times, Chris Milk — under the watchful eye of creative director Spike Jonze — revealed that each performance would be structured around a live music video, utilizing the platform to generate viral content in house. For the opener, Jonze enlisted one Greta Gerwig, replete with twinkle toes and jazz hands, to accompany Arcade Fire’s “Afterlife,” through forests, apartments, and a bearded man’s embrace. It […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Nov 4, 2013Frances Ha world premiered at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival. It is being distributed by IFC Films and opens theatrically on Friday, May 17, 2013. Visit the film’s official website to learn more. Just when it seems oh so skull-poundingly clear that the world really, really, really does not need yet another portrait of confused Caucasian 20-somethings who are fumbling and bumbling their way through the posh shopping mall that is 21st century New York City, along comes a cinematic delight like Frances Ha to soothe ones agitated nerves like a tingly pill of Vicodin. And though the fact […]
by Michael Tully on May 16, 2013In 2008, Noah Baumbach surprised many people by teaming up with Joe Swanberg, first on a couple of Saturday Night Live Digital Shorts (which Baumbach directed and Swanberg shot), and then on Alexander the Last, Swanberg’s fourth feature, which Baumbach produced. The director of The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding seemed to have little in common with the most prolific of the mumblecore directors, but the association was indicative of a desire on Baumbach’s part to reinvent himself and find new ways of working. For his 2010 comedy drama Greenberg, Baumbach recruited Swanberg’s former muse (and […]
by Nick Dawson on Apr 23, 2013The North American premiere of Woody Allen’s To Rome with Love was the big to-do Thursday night in downtown Los Angeles, and not just because it opened the L.A. Film Festival: Allen doesn’t often visit the city (not even when nominated for an Oscar), making his personal introduction of this latest work something of a coup for the fest. And while it would be wrong to call a new film by the endlessly prolific director a cinematic “event” in the same vein as, say, the arrival a new Terence Davies project, so too would it be wrong to think it […]
by Michael Nordine on Jun 19, 2012(The Dish & The Spoon world premiered at the 2011 SXSW Film Festival. It opens theatrically at the reRun Gastropub in NYC on Friday, February 10, 2012. Visit the film’s official Facebook page to learn more.) Alison Bagnall’s The Dish & The Spoon opens with a distraught young woman named Rose (played by Greta Gerwig) hastily driving an old, large Mercedes station wagon into the rainy sprawl of an off-season Delaware beach town. When her cell phone rings, she only hesitates for a moment before throwing it out the window onto the highway. This act — equal parts defiant, hostile, […]
by Vinay Singh on Feb 9, 2012Since becoming the poster girl for indie film’s most scrutinized subgenre – mumblecore – Greta Gerwig has transformed herself from a twentysomething aspiring playwright to a diverse character actress who can hold her own with the likes of Ben Stiller, Russell Brand and even the particular direction of Woody Allen. Her latest role once more shows her expanding range as she delves into the obscure and mannerist comedic world of indie vet Whit Stillman with his first film in 14 years, Damsels in Distress. In the film, which Sony Pictures Classics opens in March, Gerwig plays Violet, the angst-driven leader […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 10, 2012Via The Guardian, here’s a talk with Whit Stillman and clips from his new film, Damsels in Distress.
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 19, 2011At Hollywood Elsewhere, Jeff Wells picks up on the character mystery suggested by Arthur‘s trailer, i.e., has Liza Minelli’s role of “Linda Marolla,” played in the remake by Greta Gerwig, really been demoted to not much more than a cameo? Or are Russell Brand, conspicuous consumption, and arch repartee with Helen Mirren (in the John Gielgud) role that much easier to market than Gerwig’s rising star? And, oh yeah, the original had something to do with drinking…. (By the way, can we put a moratorium on the use of “Under Pressure” in movies and movie trailers?)
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 12, 2011MARK DUPLASS AND GRETA GERWIG IN JOE SWANBERG’S HANNAH TAKES THE STAIRS. COURTESY IFC FIRST TAKE. Whatever the merits or otherwise of the “mumblecore” tag, one positive thing it has certainly done is help bring deserved attention to filmmakers like Joe Swanberg. The precocious 25-year-old was born in Detroit, but moved around as a kid before attending Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where he studied film. After graduation, he used money he had made from web design work to fund his first feature, Kissing on the Mouth (2005), which played at the SXSW Film Festival at the time the concept of […]
by Nick Dawson on Aug 22, 2007