
Today Motion Theory: Target “A Better Bullseye”-
Target has good taste. By enlisting Motion Theory, the studio has left its mark on the rich history of Target advertising and embarked on a project that sets itself apart from the usual Motion Theory repertoire--creating a different approach for the themselves and a fresh perspective for the client.
In A Better Bullseye, the studio has delivered a piece that fits easily into the Target aesthetic, but remains unique. Gone are the typical Warholian graphics and pop-art visuals of previous Target ... (more)

Today NYC Tonight & Tomorrow: Rooftop Films-
NYC: Tonight, Rooftop Films presents “Capucine: Filmmaking Monkeys and other Renegades” and tomorrow their “Animation Block Party”
Posted on Motionographer... (more)

Today Hermanos Inglesos feat. MeMe – Wanderland-
Crazy fun music video of goodness from Kristof Luyckx for Hermanos Inglesos feat. MeMe – Wanderland
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Today Type That Moves (You): AIGA/LA event on August 18th-
That Moves (You): AIGA/LA event on August 18th
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Yesterday Little Dragon – Twice-
A couple of years old? Yes. Beautiful and poignant? Certainly. Great piece for Little Dragon by Johannes Nyholm.
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Yesterday EA Alice: Madness Returns Game Teaser by Shy the Sun-
EA Alice: Madness Returns Game Teaser by Shy the Sun
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Yesterday Punga – Gluko & Lennon-
You *need* to check out this 11 min pilot of awesomeness from Buenos Aires based Punga, and production company L'Orange Gutan!
So full of great ideas and hilarity it’ll make you weep / give up (whichever comes first)!
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Yesterday AENY Meeting: July 29th – 6:45 PM-
AENY Meeting: July 29th – 6:45 PM
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Oscar, Oscar, Oscar...- Between the newly inflated Best Picture category, the battle-of-the-sexes banter, the joy from fanboydom, the shenanigans of an over-zealous producer, and the feigned ex-spousal rivalry drummed up by the media, the Interweb has been all ablaze with Oscar-related stories at a rate that far exceeds previous years, or so it seems. (I guess it's a distraction from discussing economic genocide.)
Few of the films I cared about in 2009 are represented among the nominees, and those that are stand l... (more)

I, For Film- Well, it's not quite the long-promised return to blogging (which, as Buddha is my witness, will happen in the near future) but I did want to mention that besides my occasional stint at Time Out New York, or getting beat-up over at Salon.com, the fine folks at across the pond at Eye For Film have asked me to contribute to their fine site, and my first review for them, The Ghost Writer (directed by some Polish guy) has just been posted.
... (more)

Other Posters, Other Films 2000-2009- Inspired by my good friend Adrian Curry, whose Movie Posters of the Decade post over at The Auteurs led critic (and Twitter fiend) Roger Ebert to issue forth a "bleh" (and then respond with his own choices), I thought I'd join in on the fun and put together a post on posters as well.
Yet rather than "best" or "favorite" I decided to focus on films and/or posters that aren't as well known here in the States -- things I saw at film festivals, or in a P... (more)

Chaos Reigns! - The Unofficial Soundtrack to the 2009 New York Film Festival- After a two month unplanned hiatus, Like Anna Karina's Sweater is back, and with a new look to boot. It was never my intention to stay away for so long, but matters both personal and professional consumed nearly all of my waking hours. Running a small business in this economic climate, and specifically a DVD business -- well, let's just say that the money isn't pouring in. Still, there are some very exciting developments with Benten/Watchmaker that will be announced in the coming wee... (more)

Filmbrain's Screen Capture Quiz: Round 19 - We Have a Winner!- The extra-long all-opening-credits round of the Filmbrain Screen Capture Quiz is finally over!
Regular contestant Max G. was the lone voice in the wind this week as he (somehow!) recognized the blue curtain and moon behind it from the opening of Francis Ford Coppola's One From the Heart, a desert-island movie if ever there was one.
This is the film that drove Coppola into bankruptcy, and forced him to take on studio fare such as the truly awful Jack. But you know what? It was... (more)

Filmbrain's Screen Capture Quiz: Round 19 - Tiebreaker 1- A quick correction to last week's post. There are in fact four people with perfect scores, not three as I had reported.
Here's the first of the tiebreaker quizzes. Submit your answers to this address. Good luck!
... (more)

Filmbrain's Screen Capture Quiz: Round 19 - We (Don't) Have a Winner!- A day (or two) late and a dollar short. Wednesday came and went, as did Thursday. It was only late last night that I found the time to tally up the entries for the round. It appears there are three people who managed to get all sixteen correct, and as a result a tie-breaker round (or rounds) will be needed. I'll have to spend some time this weekend thinking and searching for additional interesting title sequences. Check back on Wednesday for the first tie-breaker.[Update: Forgot to inclu... (more)

Filmbrain's Screen Capture Quiz: Round 19, Week 16- A variation of the 20th Century Fox logo on a Los Angeles billboard appears at the beginning of Mel Brooks' triumphant experiment, Silent Movie, from 1976. There were some pretty far-out guesses (Aliens?) but most managed to work it out.I wrote a primer of sorts this week on the films of Sion Sono (Love Exposure, Suicide Club) over at Greencine Daily. It was meant to be peppered with quotes, but my allotted interview time with him was cut severely short. Very frustrating. I also participated... (more)

3 days The Antonionian Ennui of Mad Men- by Vadim Rizov
In 1962, Don Draper went to see La Notte and loved it. He's up on his cinema, and that's no surprise. When someone asked if he'd seen The Bridge on the River Kwai, he responded, "I've seen everything, and I have the ticket stubs to prove it." Not that Don could assimilate Antonioni into advertising that quickly. He's much more likely to use Bye Bye Birdie as a starting point for his work; foreign innovations are, for now (the show's up to 1964), just that. As Kieron Clark p... (more)

PODCAST: Todd Solondz-
Think of this as an addendum to our podcast recorded during last year's New York Film Festival, in which Armond White, Andrew Grant and myself (along with party crasher Sylvia Miles) debated Welcome to the Dollhouse and Palindromes auteur Todd Solondz's newly released Life During Wartime:
Part sequel, part variation on his acclaimed and controversial Happiness, the newest film from celebrated director Todd Solondz assembles an amazing ensemble cast including Allison Janney, Shirley Hende... (more)

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival and The Castro Commons: The filmgoing experience.- by Adam Hartzell
Many film festivals seek to start a conversation amongst cinephiles and the wider community in which the films are screened, and to do that they need space. And the lobbies of many film festival venues are often antithetical to discussion. They become cramped spaces of rugby-like scrums of people trying to queue for a seat, the bathroom, a snack, a friend they see in the distance, and, when the film ends, a convenient exit. Once outdoors, the scrum continues, pushed out into ... (more)

PODCAST: Nicolas Winding Refn-
The latest from Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn (Bronson, The Pusher Trilogy) is the austere and brutal 12th-century epic Valhalla Rising, what I elsewhere called "a trippy nightmare of savage poetry burning slow across bleak and otherworldly landscapes." These ain't your daddy's Vikings:
For years, the fearsome figure known only as One Eye (Mads Mikkelsen of Pusher, Flame & Citron and Casino Royale) has defeated everyone he's encountered, but he's treated more like an animal than a ... (more)

PODCAST: Winnebago Man (Ben Steinbauer and Jack Rebney)-
It might seem counterintuitive to craft a feature-length documentary around a viral clip concerning one man's explicit outtakes during a 1989 industrial video production, but Winnebago Man director, producer and cowriter Ben Steinbauer has truly made an entertaining portrait with a complicated range of emotions:
Jack Rebney is the most famous man you've never heard ofâan RV salesman whose hilarious, foul-mouthed outbursts circulated underground on VHS tapes in the '90s before turning ... (more)

The Boy With the Dragon Tattoo Crush- by Vadim Rizov
I'm in love with Lisbeth Salander. I'm unrepentantly coming out with this information, despite at least three reasons this is a stupid way to feel:
1.) Lisbeth Salander is a fictional character from the late Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogyâa series of books I haven't read (I struggled through 10 pages of an Amazon.com preview before giving up on them)âand two movies I've seen for work that I'd call absolute shit. Salander is a better character than either franc... (more)

INTERVIEW: Lisa Cholodenko- by Jeffrey M. Anderson
Lisa Cholodenko's well-received 1998 debut High Art was a major landmark for lesbian filmmaking in the '90s, even if the writer-director makes films more to please herself than to fill any LGBT niches. After moving from New York to Los Angeles (where she shot 2002's titularly set ensemble drama Laurel Canyonâwhich, coincidentally, was centered around straight people), dealing with distribution troubles and working in television (directing episodes of The L Word ... (more)

FILM OF THE WEEK: Willie Nelson's 4th of July Celebration-
Willie Nelson's 4th of July Celebration
Directed by Yabo Yablonski
1979, 100 minutes, USA
(screening July 3, 4 at Anthology Film Archives)
To a central Texan, celebrating Independence Day means more than fireworks, BBQ, baseball games and parades, as this weekend marks the 37th year of aging outlaw-country legend Willie Nelson's "4th of July Picnic," a laid back and Southern-fried Lollapalooza that this former Austin-based writer once attended in the late '90s.
Over three days in 1974, ... (more)

Today Daguerréotypes- Varda has made the 14th arrondissement her home since the 1950s, and shortly after the birth of her son she was seeking a subject she could shoot “less than 50 yards from my door.” The result is both a living photo album and a commentary on what has become a vanishing world.... (more)

Yesterday One Sings, the Other Doesn’t- Agnès Varda – One Sings, the Other Doesn’t was conceived as a film aimed at the widest audience possible, one that would celebrate the gains that the feminist movement brought to women in the seventies. The downside to this is that the film, while not without its charm, is probably the least rewarding of her features. Varda’s formalism, her taste for experimentation and structural complexities, have been smoothed out in favour of a straightforward narrative (ca... (more)

3 days Inception- While I realize that seeing Lost Highway and Inception in one weekend paves the way for an unfair comparison, it’s still amusing to me that Nolan’s film, so ostensibly concerned with the depths and wonders of the human subconsicous, is yet so bereft of imagination.
At its best, Nolan’s film comes off as little more than a fascinating remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors upgraded to Business Class. Instead of Freddy Krueger, there’s Leonardo DiCa... (more)

3 days Lions Love- Agnès Varda – Using the contemporaneous events of the Warhol and Kennedy shootings and the duality of Los Angeles as both a factory pumping out nostalgic fantasy and a site of great social and political upheaval, Varda’s film is able to suggest the centrality of this conflict at a number of levels simultaneously: in Warhol’s pop-artworld, Viva’s hippie Shangri-la, and in Varda’s own engagé filmmaking practice.... (more)

Black Panthers- Agnès Varda – Agnès Varda may not have been around for May ‘68 in Paris, but she made a point of being present for August ‘68 in Oakland. Her short film Black Panthers is a fairly straightforward record of that equally contentious moment, and it offers documentation and a little insight into the collective movement surrounding the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, focusing especially on the “Free Huey” campaign in the lead-up to the murde... (more)

Do It Again- When did the edict go forth that four out of every five American documentaries should chronicle “one man’s quest” to do or learn something? As with so many mixed blessings for non-fiction film culture, we can probably thank Michael Moore, who perfected the formula with Roger & Me and has consistently milked it in every movie since. (OK, Ross McElwee might deserve a slap on the wrist as well.) At any rate, after American Movie, Super Size Me, No Impact Man, The Cove, and doz... (more)

Uncle Yanco- Uncle Yanco is the first of the films Varda would make in California, and it’s also the most obviously personal, in that it records her first encounter with her uncle Jean, a painter living on a houseboat in the “aquatic suburbia” of Sausalito, just across the bay from San Francisco.... (more)

Les Créatures- Agnès Varda – Les Créatures is a work of misdirection—and this is the saving grace of the film, which otherwise threatens to topple over into pretension. It’s a mistake to view this science-fiction plot as the centre of the film; it’s only one element in a diverse mix that veers back and forth between documentary record, offbeat slapstick, and psychological drama.... (more)
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