Over her two-decade-long career, music supervisor and self-confessed music nerd Susan Jacobs has worked with directors such as Robert Altman, Jean-Marc Vallée and Spike Lee. She has worked on notable TV series and films such as I, Tonya, American Hustle, and Little Miss Sunshine. She won the first ever Emmy award for music supervision for her work on Vallée’s Big Little Lies, where she worked without a composer, handpicking specific sounds and musical artists for each character in an attempt to mirror the intricacies of their personal lives. On another Vallée project, Sharp Objects, Jacobs exhibited this aptitude again, building […]
by Arrow Peretz on Dec 19, 2023Two movies at the Toronto International Film Festival, which kicked off Thursday, made me think back to Ben Lerner’s year-old novel 10:04. In it, there’s a conversation about a specific male performance that supposedly begins around middle school and high school-age: “You take your dick out of your pants to piss in a urinal, you start bending at the knees just a little, or otherwise making a show as if you were lifting some kind of weight.” Men performing their maleness through a leaky member shows up in Wim Wenders’s Everything Will be Fine and Kazik Radwanski’s How Heavy This […]
by Whitney Mallett on Sep 13, 2015It is Day 80 of a tremendously difficult, three-month, 1100-mile trek up the Pacific Crest Trail, from the Mojave Desert to the Bridge of the Gods that spans the Columbia River at the Oregon-Washington border. On a narrow path in a lush Oregonian rain forest, Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) runs into an elderly woman and her grandson — an angel-faced child of no more than five — accompanied, perhaps not so strangely, by a pet llama. The precocious boy politely offers her a tune. His rendition of “Red River Valley” is as innocent as the nostalgic lyrics, so pure it […]
by Howard Feinstein on Dec 3, 2014The 41st annual Telluride Film Festival kicked off with a packed screening of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now featuring Coppola, screenwriter John Milius (still recovering from his debilitating stroke but in great spirits), cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, producer Fred Roos, and editor and sound designer Walter Murch in attendance for a post-film Q&A. It was the kind of event that represents what Telluride does best as a kind of summer camp for movie lovers: presenting a great film impeccably projected before an appreciative crowd in a casual, conversational atmosphere. There’s something about the environment of Telluride — both the gorgeous Colorado […]
by Jim Hemphill on Sep 5, 2014