To launch the new Jim Jarmusch film, Only Lovers Left Alive, which hits cinemas on 11th April and stars Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston, Cinema Paradiso Events are holding an exclusive preview experience on Tuesday April 1st in New York. The evening will start off at 7pm sharp with a screening of Jim Jarmusch’s crypto-vampire love story at the Sunshine Cinema, followed by live performances at Santos Party House where musicians from the film’s soundtrack – White Hills, Jozef Van Wissem, Yasmine Hamdan, Zola Jesus and Jim Jarmusch’s band SQÜRL – will all play live. Guests are encouraged to wear […]
THE LIFE ACOUSTIC: Meet Randall Poster, The Man Who Makes Wes Anderson Soundtracks Sing
EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first published in issue #104 of MAGNET MAGAZINE. BY JONATHAN VALANIA How’s this sound for a dream job description: Sit around all day rolling doobies with Wes Anderson, reading script pages as he pecks them out on a vintage Smith-Corona and then firing up your iPod for the perfect vintage Kinks b-side/deep-cut mid-60’s Stones track/David Bowie song sung in Portuguese to go with each scene. Must have and impeccable ear, a kaleidoscopic mind and an encyclopedic record collection epic in its scope and unknowable vastness. Some time travel required. The bit about smoking doobies and […]
INCOMING: Something Wicked This Way Comes
Say what you want about her authenticity (whatever that means), her name, her lips, or how, by her own admission, her “pussy tastes like Pepsi,” love her or hater, she is coming to the Skyline Stage @ The Mann Center on May 11th. Resistance is futile. Tickets go on-sale Friday, March 14 at 10am via Ticketmaster.com, 800.745.3000, AEGLive.com, MannCenter.org, or the Mann box office. PHAWKER: Tell me something nobody knows about Lana Del Rey. Why do you think she is such a polarizing figure? WOODKID: You’re definitely fishing for the bold headline of this interview!?Lana has an incredible knowledge […]
CONTEST: Win Tix To See A Special VIP Advance Screening Of Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel
To mark the highly anticipated release of The Grand Budapest Hotel in select theaters on March 14th, this is officially WES ANDERSON WEEK on Phawker. We’ll have soundtrack and film score Sound Clouds to share, an in-depth interview about all things Wes Anderson from award-winning New York Magazine critic Matt Zoller Seitz, author of The Wes Anderson Collection AND we’re giving away 40 tickets to a special VIP advance screening tomorrow night, Tuesday March 11th, 7:30 pm at the Ritz 5! Because what’s the point of seeing a Wes Anderson movie if you can’t see it before everyone else […]
CINEMA: There Will Be Blood
300: RISE OF AN EMPIRE (2014, directed by Noam Murro, 102 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC It is surprising that it has taken seven years to mount a sequel to Zach Snyder’s left field hit 300, but who would have predicted a sequel at all when all 300 title characters died in the first film? Gerald Butler, the original film’s star may only be seen fleetingly amongst the corpses at the opening of 300: Rise of an Empire but the ancient battlescapes return as more impossibly musclebound soldiers — wearing little more than Speedos, beards and sandals […]
CINEMA: Gone With Wind
THE WIND RISES (2013, directed by Hayao Miyazaki, 126 minutes, Japan) TIM’S VERMEER (2014, directed by Teller, 80 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Hayao Miyazaki, the wildly imaginative Japanese animator, who has been compared to Walt Disney and Steven Spielberg, has announced with great fanfare that his latest film, a biography of Japanese airplane designer Jiro Horikoshi will be his swan song. Miyazaki has since back-pedaled a bit about retirement (“I might make something short, so nothing has changed really,” he told Variety) but The Wind Rises does have the scent of an autumnal valedictory of a […]
EARLY WORD: The Geodesic Dome Of The Rock
Bringing indie rock to its waterfront stage for the very first time, FringeArts announces an exciting addition to its spring 2014 calendar: the documentary film The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, directed and live-narrated by Academy Award-nominated director Sam Green; and accompanied by a score performed live on stage by legendary Hoboken band Yo La Tengo. FringeArts will host two showings of the The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller on First Friday, April 4, at 7 and 9 p.m. A special member pre-sale will begin on Feb. 27, and general tickets will be on sale March 1 at fringearts.com or […]
CINEMA: The Past Isn’t Dead, It’s Not Even Past
THE PAST (2013, directed by Asghar Farhadi, 130 minutes, Iran/France) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Making a mystery out of everyday life, Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s French-shot The Past quickly pulls us into a web of domestic intrigue. The family we meet is in severe dysfunction and at the root is an ever-looming past, an unspoken trauma whose role in which none of the characters truly understand. We arrive like Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) understanding very little. He has returned to Paris from Tehran after a four year absence to sign divorce papers and end his marriage with Marie (Argentine […]
CINEMA: The Catcher And The Why
SALINGER (2013, directed by Shane Salerno, 129 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC It’s a little hard to fathom the critical animosity this absorbing documentary on legendary writer J.D. Salinger has received, except to conclude that writers still feel the need to protect lonely old Holden Caufield. The notoriously reclusive author of Catcher in the Rye and Franny & Zooey didn’t leave behind a whole lot of evidence of his private life, but Salerno puts together the pieces to present the trajectory of a great fiction writer but he also paints an unflattering picture of a man whose […]
CINEMA: To Siri With Love
HER (2013, directed by Spike Jonze, 125 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC The movies have asked us to honor many unconventional romances — men and mermaids, men and androids, young men and senior citizens, and women with monsters. Movies demand we suspend our disbelief and it is almost magical how we can project our emotions into such scenarios but Spike Jonze’s Her, which chronicles an affair between Joaquin Phoenix’s lonely Theodore and the voice on his phone, asks us to suspend our belief over what may be a romantic bridge too far. In a future that appears […]
CINEMA: The Day The Clown Cried
Illustration by DREW FRIEDMAN SPY MAGAZINE: To artists and intellectuals, the twentieth century has posed no questions more vexing than these: First, can art make sense of the Holocaust? And second, why do the French love Jerry Lewis? The first question can’t really be answered, at least not in the space allotted here. As for the second, it’s my own opinion that the French have confused sloppy, uneven filmmaking with Godardian anti-formalism. Regardless, raising these two issues on the same page is not just a pointless exercise in non-sequitur. Because Jerry Lewis, like Elli Wiesel and Primo Levi before him […]
CINEMA: You Say You Want A Revolution
More than 60 commercial and underground films dedicated to the sexual revolution will be presented in Free to Love: The Cinema of the Sexual Revolution, running Jan. 10 – Feb. 15, 2014, at International House Philadelphia’s Ibrahim Theater (3701 Chestnut St., Philadelphia; 215-387-5125), a resource for world-class avant-garde and repertory cinema since 1976. This expansive film series, which includes appearances and talks by several of the original filmmakers and influential film historians, explores the political and artistic tumult of the 1960s and ’70s and its effect on contemporary culture. The series is supported by a grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. Free to Love: […]
CINEMA: The Trouble With Llewyn Davis
NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS: There’s the subliminal hint given by Llewyn’s Welsh name, in addition to his blank-slate personality. Maybe the Coens really wanted to make an early-Dylan biopic but couldn’t—it would probably be impossible, at least right now, for a variety of reasons—and front-loaded the picture with Van Ronkiana to blur the traces. And perhaps it is this matter of cross purposes that leaves the movie feeling aimless. The story is no more than a rambling anecdote, Llewyn’s character undergoes no change for all that he experiences and endures, and to the extent that the picture has […]