Art

Boundary-pushing avant-indie crew Animal Collective and video artist Danny Perez took over the iconic rotunda of New York’s Guggenheim Museum last night, bringing their signature weirdness to a capacity audience of 1,500 people. Billed as an “immersive environment for visitors to come and go through,” the unique performance titled Transverse Temporal Gyrus was part rock concert, part art installation, part hang-out session, and part Night at the Museum , where wild things come to life after the sun goes down. The piece was a mix of Matthew Barney and Wicker Man , as three of the four members of Animal Collective — Avey Tare, Deakin and Geologist — stood nearly motionless for three hours in the center of the room, guarding glowing video orbs and donning black robes, white gloves and creep-tastic white bunny masks. A pool of glass stalagmites jetted upwards, a puffy 8-foot-tall mountain stood menacingly in the background and Perez’s epileptic video art flickered up the rotunda, … [Read more...] about Animal Collective’s Offbeat Art Project Comes to the Guggenheim

Spike Lee will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Achievement in Motion Picture Direction at this year’s DGA Awards, Directors Guild of America President Lesli Linka Glatter announced today. The DGA’s highest honor will be presented to Lee at the 74th annual DGA Awards on Saturday, March 12. Lee is the first Black director to get the award, which recognizes extraordinary efforts in the art of cinema, He joins a roster of just 35 helmers so honored, including Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Miloš Forman and, most recently, Ridley Scott. In a statement, Glatter said, “Icon. Trailblazer. Visionary. Spike Lee has changed the face of cinema, and there is no single word that encapsulates his significance to the craft of directing. From his groundbreaking Do the Right Thing, BlacKkKlansman , and everything in-between – to his signature ‘double dolly’ shot, Spike is an innovator on so … [Read more...] about Spike Lee To Receive DGA Lifetime Achievement Award

Jon Stewart will receive the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ 23rd Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, the organization announced today. The award will be presented at a gala performance on Sunday, April 24, in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. “I am truly honored to receive this award,” Stewart said in a statement. “I have long admired and been influenced by the work of Mark Twain, or, as he was known by his given name, Samuel Leibowitz.” The Mark Twain Prize for American Humor recognizes individuals who have had an impact on American society in ways similar to the distinguished 19th-century novelist and essayist Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain. This year’s ceremony, the first since 2019 due to the pandemic, marks the 23rd year that the Mark Twain Award will be presented and broadcast nationally. “For more than three decades, Jon Stewart has brightened our lives and challenged our minds as he delivers current events and social satire with his trademark wit … [Read more...] about Jon Stewart To Receive Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Prize For American Humor

Yellowjackets continues to deliver more than just sinister suspense for Showtime as the survival drama brings in more than one million viewers with its cliffhanger-filled season finale . Showtime revealed that the Yellowjackets Season 1 finale, which aired on Sunday, brought in 1.3 million viewers across its platforms on premiere night, just shy of the season high 1.4 million posted by the penultimate Episode 9. The finale’s viewership is all the more impressive because it was the first Yellowjackets episode not to have a Dexter lead-in. Per Showtime, the Yellowjackets f inale more than doubled its premiere viewership. The network says streaming viewership for Yellowjackets has quadrupled over the course of the season. Across its various platforms, the Yellowjakcets averaged more than 5 million weekly viewers, the highest for a freshman series on the network in almost six years, since Billions in early 2016. As previously reported , Yellowjackets … [Read more...] about ‘Yellowjackets’ Finale Tallies 1.3M Multi-Platform Viewers To Wrap Most Watched Freshman Season On Showtime In 6 Years

EXCLUSIVE : In competition, Garrett Basch ’s new company Dive has won the television rights to Afterparties , the collection of stories by Anthony Veasna So that became an instant bestseller when it was published last year by HarperCollins. The intention is to turn it into a half hour series, “a naturalistic comedy with heart,” based on the characters and anecdotes written by So about the lives of Cambodian-Americans. Lauren Yee will produce. The author, the son of former Cambodian-American refugees, died before the book was published. Dive’s Rachel Foley brought in the project and will oversee on behalf of the company. Dive will be executive producer along with Yee. The book is described by its publisher as seamlessly transitioning between the absurd and the tenderhearted, balancing acerbic humor with sharp emotional depth, an expansive portrait of a new generation of Cambodian-Americans as they shoulder the inherited weight of the Khmer Rouge genocide and grapple with the … [Read more...] about Garrett Basch’s Dive Wins Rights To Develop Anthony Veasna So’s ‘Afterparties’ For TV; Lauren Yee To Produce

EXCLUSIVE: Nana Mensah , the writer, director, producer and actress who made her feature debut with Queen of Glory , has signed with WME for representation. In the comedy, which premiered in U.S. Narrative Competition at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival, the Ghanaian-American multihyphenate stars as Sarah, who looks to abandon her Ivy League doctoral program to follow her married lover across the country. The film netted Mensah the festival’s award for Best New Narrative Director and its Special Jury Prize for Artistic Expression, as well as the Mill Valley Film Festival’s inaugural Mind the Gap Creation Prize. Mensah was a staff writer on Season 2 of HBO’s late-night sketch series Random Acts of Flyness and is currently writing on Amazon’s The Power . She co-wrote and co-starred in Season 2 of Netflix’s Bonding , and appeared last fall in a series regular role opposite Sandra Oh and Bob Balaban in Netflix’s half-hour comedy, The Chair. Mensah also appeared … [Read more...] about ‘Queen Of Glory’ Filmmaker Nana Mensah Inks With WME

EXCLUSIVE : Oscar and Emmy winner Kathy Bates ( Richard Jewell , American Horror Story ), two-time Oscar nominee and Emmy winner John Malkovich ( Space Force , The New Pope ) and Lewis Pullman ( Top Gun: Maverick , Pink Skies Ahead ) have signed on to star in Thelma , an indie directed by two-time Emmy nom Ken Kwapis ( #BlackAF , The Office ). Thelma recounts the true story of the mother of John Kennedy Toole (Pullman), the Pulitzer Prize winning author of A Confederacy of Dunces . Toole died by suicide before finding a home for his masterpiece, and his mother Thelma (Bates) made it her life’s mission, through outrageous gamesmanship, to see the book published. She eventually succeeded in getting the manuscript into the hands of writer Walker Percy (Malkovich), who became the novel’s champion. It would be published in 1980, eleven years after Ken’s death, thereafter becoming a widely celebrated cult classic. Black List screenwriter Andrew … [Read more...] about ‘Thelma’: Kathy Bates, John Malkovich & Lewis Pullman To Star In Indie From Director Ken Kwapis

Animal Collective are here to freak you out. Again. The long-running psych-pop crew have teamed with Miami videographers Coral Morphologic for an album and film called Tangerine Reef – a weird, hypnotic, sensual, occasionally Cronenberg-ian look under the waves that gets up close and personal with spawning sealife. A strong departure from the giddy hooks of 2016’s Painting With , the new project submerges Animal Collective in patient, murky, reverbed, modular-synth-heavy soundworlds, complimenting the footage of glowing, undulating creatures. Tangerine Reef began at last year’s Borscht Film Festival in Miami, where Animal Collective performed over video projections made by Coral Morphologic’s Colin Foord and J.D. McKay. The final album, which Animal Collective has dedicated to the International Year of the Reef effort, features three members of the four-man group: Dave “Avey Tare” Portner, Brian “Geologist” Weitz and Josh “Deakin” Dibb. It’s out next week on CD, double-LP … [Read more...] about Inside ‘Tangerine Reef,’ Animal Collective’s Trippy, Gorgeous Coral Porno

In 2021, CD sales increased for the first time in 17 years. That’s mostly because of Adele , whose new album sold 898,000 of those shiny little discs. The last time CDs were this hot, Usher, Ashlee Simpson, and Hoobastank were the ones selling them. Now it’s Adele, BTS, and Taylor Swift . It’s part of an overall revival for physical media — vinyl is booming even bigger . But for those of us who love the humble compact disc, it’s a question worth pondering: Are we finally seeing the CD revival? Why are music fans falling back in love with the gadget that once promised “perfect sound forever”? Compact discs were never about romance — they were about function. They just worked. They were less glamorous than vinyl, less cool, less tactile, less sexy, less magical. They didn’t have the aura that we fans crave. You didn’t necessarily get sentimental over your CDs, the way you fetishized your scratchy old vinyl, hearing your life story etched into the nicks and crackles. Your copy … [Read more...] about Jewel-Box Heroes: Why the CD Revival Is Finally Here

Gallery Launch Gallery Getty Gaspard Ulliel -- a well-known French actor and face of Chanel -- has died ... this according to his agent. The sad news comes after word of Ulliel's involvement in a serious skiing accident in the Alps Tuesday, which left him hospitalized in Grenoble. He's said to have collided with another skier on the slopes, and suffered a devastating blow to his skull ... needing a helicopter transport. While Ulliel was a bona fide star in his homeland, he was pretty prominent here in the States as well ... especially among horror fans, who might recognize him as a young Hannibal Lecter in the 2007 flick 'Hannibal Rising.' He's also notable for portraying fashion mogul Yves Saint Laurent in the biopic 'Saint Laurent,' as well as for roles over the years in projects like 'A Very Long Engagement,' 'It's Only the End of the World,' 'The Art of Love,' 'The Dancer' 'Twice Upon a Time,' 'One Nation One King' ... and many other films and TV … [Read more...] about French Actor Gaspard Ulliel Dead at 37 After Ski Accident