Something cool to look at. Music video for Rymdreglage’s song 8-Bit Trip with incredible lego stop-motion. Visit their YouTube page for more information about the band and the video.

Opening at IFC Center in New York This Week:

From Filmmaker Magazine:

A connoisseur of longing and remembrance who brings great sensitivity to each of his reflective fables, Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda should be better known in the States, as his films extend the tradition of world-class artists like Naruse and Ozu. Enthralled with the operation of memory and the impact of grief on the lives of everyday people, Kore-eda has created a body of work that’s as rich with feeling as it is modest in tone. In Maborosi (1995), Kore-eda told the story of a quietly devastated young widow struggling to move on after her husband commits suicide. He then departed from this film’s elegant compositions and moody, color-saturated production design to draw on the observational techniques he’d developed earlier in his career as a documentary filmmaker. After Life (1998), built around interviews he conducted with hundreds of participants, visits an institutional purgatory where the recently deceased are asked to choose a single recollection to relive for eternity as a film. Distance (2001) and Nobody Knows (2004) are both loosely based on high-profile news items: the emotional aftermath of the Aum Shinrikyo sarin-poisoning tragedy and the heartrending story of three school-age children who survived for 200 days in an apartment after being abandoned by their mother. Even Hana (2006), an Edo period piece, has none of the usual trappings of the jidai geki genre, instead emphasizing the gentle, domestic rituals of a reluctant samurai-turned-village teacher who elects not to avenge the murder of his father. Throughout these films, Kore-eda studiously avoids the pitfalls of cynicism and sentimentality, exploring the private worlds of vulnerable, emotionally complex people with extraordinary grace and subtlety.

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Tisch Asia’s own Shijie Tan’s film Er Ren (For Two) has been accepted to the 66th Venice Film Festival. Inspired by true events, Er Ren is a story about relationships and their illusions. A lonely widower lives in his sparse apartment, still longing for his deceased wife. Living secretly in his house, however, there is a woman, who takes part to this life “together” with him, taking care of the home when he’s not there. When the fragile reality of this life “together” threatens to become too real for either to take, both Man and Woman must react.

The film will screen on September 8th. Visit the Venice Film Festival website for more information about the screening and for tickets.

We caught up with Shijie recently and got his thoughts on Er Ren and his experience at Tisch Asia.

Describe your film Er Ren (For Two)?
The story is about a curious relationship between a man and a woman who lives, in secret, inside his cupboard. They share a life “together”; a fragile relationship held up by the implicit denial of each other, in different ways. One of the key aims of this film was to depict this fragility aesthetically.

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Mary Schmidt Campbell, dean of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, has announced that the Tisch School will hold its annual gala, This is Tisch!, on Monday, November 2 at the renowned Frederick P. Rose Hall, home of Jazz at Lincoln Center. This is Tisch! will honor Academy Award® winning producer Brian Grazer, two-time Academy Award® winning director Ron Howard, Academy Award® and Tony Award® winning actress and Tisch alumna Marcia Gay Harden, arts philanthropist Diana King, and Academy Award®, Emmy Award® and Peabody Award® winning Sheila Nevins, president of HBO Documentary Films.

In addition to a fundraising event and gala dinner, This is Tisch! is a celebration of some of the nation’s most distinguished artists and philanthropists with students and alumni performing live at the Frederick P. Rose Hall. The star-studded performance will be produced by Ken Davenport and directed by Stafford Arima. Past Tisch galas have included performances from Tony Award® winning Broadway shows such as Spring Awakening and from some of the entertainment industry’s most celebrated talent such as Billy Crystal, Jerry Seinfeld, Wyclef Jean, Bill Cosby, Elaine Stritch, Raúl Esparza and Jesse L. Martin.

Scheduled award presenters will include the Chairman, CEO & President of Sony Corporation, Sir Howard Stringer, and award-winning director, Spike Lee, both members of the Tisch Dean’s Council, and Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Tony Kushner.

“The 2009 gala will raise critical scholarship dollars which will be used to support those students who would not otherwise be able to afford an NYU Tisch education,” said Campbell. “In an ambitious effort to scout new talent as proactively as elite schools scout for members of their athletic teams, the Tisch School is committed to finding, enrolling and retaining the country’s most talented young people, regardless of their ability to pay.”
Honoree Marcia Gay Harden added, “I am very proud to be honored by Tisch on November 2. The education and training that I received there enabled me to find my voice as a young artist and gave me the skill and confidence that I needed to succeed in a very competitive field. What I am most proud of, though, is what Tisch is doing today to reach and enroll those students in this country, and even around the world, who have a great gift, but who are not able to afford or access the fantastic training that I received.”

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Two Weeks – Grizzly Bear from Gabe Askew on Vimeo.

From The Hollywood Reporter:

Finally, a Twitter effect that benefits a movie instead of hurts it.

After lukewarm tweets from Friday screenings caused weekend drops for pics like “Bruno” and “Funny People” earlier this summer, “Inglourious Basterds” came along this weekend and rode a crest of tweeting goodwill.

The movie held fast after its $14 million Friday to finish at $37.6 million for Quentin Tarantino (it was his biggest opening ever, though “Pulp Fiction,” came out in an earlier, slower-rollout time) and, to the delight of media everywhere, provide plenty of fodder for a Harvey victory lap.

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From The Guardian:

Here it is then, our first glimpse of James Cameron’s Avatar, his first fiction film since 1997′s Titanic, and the film that is supposedly going to mark the true dawn of the 3D revolution. Shot using a revolutionary new motion capture “fusion camera” system which Cameron helped develop himself, and set in a future where humanity has found its way to the stars, the film centres on Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a wheelchair-bound marine who is given the chance to walk again via a new, alien body which he can control remotely on the distant planet of Pandora, a lush, rainforest-covered extraterrestrial moon populated by the three-metre-tall, blue-skinned Na’vi.

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From the Daily News:

Oliver Stone has a secret . . . or ten.

The Academy Award-winning director is shooting a ten part nonfiction series for Showtime about “secret” events in U.S. history.

“Oliver Stone’s Secret History of America,” debuting in 2010, covers topics from the reasons behind the Cold War with the U.S.S.R. and changes in America’s global role since the fall of Communism to President Harry Truman’s difficult decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan in 1945.

Showtime says the project examines events that were “at the time under-reported, but crucially shaped America’s unique and complex history.”

Stone believes the series will become “the deepest contribution I could ever make in film to my children and the next generation,” he said in a statement to Reuters. “I can only hope a change in our thinking will result.”

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From Artforum.com:

CINEMA AS POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER, Lucrecia Martel’s astounding The Headless Woman willfully disorients the viewer while forcefully indicting its subject. Great films have the power to unspool as dreams or nightmares; only the most exceptional, like Martel’s third feature, can make a spectator feel as if she is in a slightly concussed state.

The Headless Woman—shot, like Martel’s previous works, La Ciénaga (2001) and The Holy Girl (2004), in Salta, a city in northwestern Argentina (the director’s hometown)—begins with three boys and a dog playing, darting across a nearly abandoned highway to a canal. Their laughing and yelling transition, confusingly at first, to the sounds of other children, this group far more privileged, being shuttled back from some kind of family outing by various relatives. Among the adults is tall, bottle-blond, middle-aged Vero (a superb María Onetto). Alone in her Mercedes, listening to “Soley Soley,” a 1971 pop nugget, on the radio, she takes her eyes off the road to answer her cell phone, hitting something: a dog, or maybe one of the kids first seen playing by the road. Vero stops, tries to regain her composure, but drives off, never once looking back.

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From The Guardian:

Works about the Sichuan earthquake and other sensitive issues have been banned from a Beijing art show that was to involve controversial figures, its artistic director said today.

The group exhibition at the 798 space, a former electronics factory in the Dashanzi art district, north-east of central Beijing, covered themes including the death of children in schools that collapsed in the quake. The show, the centrepiece of the Beijing 798 Biennale, reopened today but without some of the contentious works.

Zhu Qi, the artistic director of the Biennale, said he told the exhibition’s deputy director not to include performance art involving people likely to stir up controversy. They included “Runner Fan”, a teacher who became notorious after posting an article on the web saying he fled his school ahead of his pupils during the earthquake; Liu Xiaoyuan, a prominent blogger and lawyer; and the owners of the Chongqing nailhouse who became famous for refusing to leave their home even when developers demolished all the buildings around it.

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