More than Grown-ish After ‘Just Add Water’ and ‘The Good Place’, ‘Grown-ish’ actor Emily Arlook fully burst onto the scene with her new role as college student, Nomi Segal. A spinoff to the successful ‘Black-ish’ series, ‘Grown-ish’ follows the lives of a group of college students and cleverly touches on tough, contemporary issues for young […]
American Jeans The story of denim is a true love story steeped in American culture and has all the elements of a true love story. This story has been told compellingly with a sharp attention to detail in Christian D. Brunn’s documentary, Blue Gold: American Jeans. Brunn, a Denmark native holding a Masters from the […]
A New Kind of Hero Those select few who have managed to carve out careers within Hollywood’s television and film industry can tell you, the pursuit of professional acting is a challenging one. With English as your second language and your homeland across the ocean, this challenging pursuit becomes even loftier—but not impossible as proven […]
International Fashion Film Festival The classic glamour of Hollywood film society has always paired splendidly with the pinnacle of haute couture fashion. Today, the new genre of the fashion film is considered by many to be the most integral part of a fashion brand’s advertising campaign. Among the palm-lined streets of sunny, coastal La […]
San Francisco has a deep and rich history in unique architecture. The current technology boom is a magnet for the culturally savvy entrepreneurs that make up SOMA’s core readership. Cue Equinox, whose latest 35,000 sq. ft. fitness club (its fourth in Northern California), opened this June in San Francisco on Union Street. “There has been […]
Shawn Ashmore The Actor Who Came in From The Cold Shawn Ashmore’s recurring role as Ice Man in the incredibly successful X-Men franchise may seem like a lucky break, but the unassuming, well-spoken Canadian had already enjoyed a long and successful career in his home country, having acted since he was eight or nine. “It’s […]
Text by Zee Chang Wednesday night on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine, the front doors of Pantages Theatre are flooded by masses of people, fanning out on either side of the block. The young adults who allotted a portion of their meager student budgets to see The Book of Mormon can barely contain […]
We loved her on the George Lopez Show, adored her as Jamie Batista on Showtime’s hit series Dexter, and were crazy about her on the red carpet. Now Aimee Garcia stars in RoboCop alongside Gary Oldman and Michael Keaton and is being praised for her performance as a brainy scientist. The film, directed by José […]
Mohammad Gorjestani is an Iranian-American filmmaker based in San Francisco who has been named one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film” by Filmmaker Magazine and whose film Refuge has been getting quite a bit of attention. Featured at the Tribeca Film Festival and as an episode of the PBS series, Futurestates, Refuge is […]
Through three decades of filmmaking, Richard Linklater has walked a varied path without ever shying from our suspicions of iconoclasm. He seems to carry the same inertia in his filmmaking that he articulated in the vignettes of misanthropic youth that propelled Slacker to its iconic status in the independent film world. We still see the […]
A low electronic growl. A flicker of light across a black screen. A nude female figure, stark white, writhes in restraints, fading in and out of the darkness. The soundtrack sizzles and pulses, and the images grow choppier. Lightning strikes. Patterns fly across contorted struggling bodies—electric stripes, stark cross-hatching. Luminous purple cloth flutters in slow […]
“In Colombia, we are living in a war that is not ours.” This statement by Flor Ilva, one of the subjects of first-time filmmaker Nicole Karsin’s We Women Warriors, captures the striking premise of the documentary. The film manages to condense the multifaceted conflict of Colombia by focusing on the account of three women: Doris, […]
Text by Ellen Georgiou Constantinos Isaias could never be cast in one of his movies. Film noir is shot in gloomy grays and sinister shadows, revealing the dark side of human nature. The protagonists are cynical and doomed, and there is a foreboding atmosphere of menace and suspicion where anything can go wrong. Isaias is […]
How much does the building weigh? This question seems to haunt every project Lord Norman Foster designs. Challenged by Buckminster Fuller in the ‘70s, Foster began to seriously investigate weight, energy and performance to answer this difficult question. And his architecture shows it. When you ask Foster to define his modus operandi, he isn’t able […]
As I walked into filmmakers Jason Cohn and Camille Servan-Schreiber’s home in Berkeley, California, a wave of déjà vu swept over me. An abundance of color and warmth, a pronounced playful sentiment… then the connection struck me: the décor bore many of the elements found in the work of two of the most influential mid-century […]
The circulating story of Drive revolves around an awkward silence between two men broken by REO Speedwagon’s “I Can’t Fight this Feeling Anymore,” sung obnoxiously by a Dane hopped up on flu medication. The voice in question belonged to Nicolas Winding Refn, a self-professed “fetish filmmaker” from Copenhagen whose Pusher trilogy and recent English-language films […]
Photography by Kat Borchart They call them dynasties: Barrymore, Carradine, Redgrave, Bridges. Some begin their film careers as toddlers on the silver screen, some grace theater stages from adolescence through seniority, and some, like Jordan Bridges – son of Beau, grandson of Lloyd, and nephew of Jeff – do a little bit of both, taking […]
Photography by Kat Borchart Aimee Garcia is a rare talent, even by Hollywood standards. Like a handful of starlets who wind up in a lecture hall somewhere along their career – see Natalie Portman, her competition for the lead in Baz Luhrmann’s celebrated Romeo + Juliet – the 32-year -old actress, former Morgan Stanley employee, […]
Gabriel Leif Bellman was working as a producer at MTV in New York in 1999, when he purchased his grandfather’s autobiography at the NYU Bookstore. The writer-director was reading the first chapter on the subway on his way home when he noted that his grandfather’s father owned a store on Bergen Street in Brooklyn—the same […]
Iara Lee’s amazing documentary Cultures of Resistance takes us into some of the most troubled, violent and politically charged places in the word and shines a light on the individuals and groups that are using art and grassroots organizations to push against the horrors and injustice that they see on a daily basis. An almost […]
Cam Archer loves images. A look at his work reveals a deep connection between that burning iris image of both photographers and filmmakers. Based in Santa Cruz, California, where the combination of beach and communal existence adds a shade of light to some of the grays Archer plays with, he made his splash at Sundance […]
On using new technology, the challenges of capturing dance onscreen and the hope for 3D as a tool for future cinematic travel. Among the world’s greatest filmmakers, Wim Wenders has persistently resisted easy categorization. One of the leading representatives of New German Cinema in the 1970s, he also has to his credit a $20 million […]
The U2 Connection Bill Carter has had a long and varied career as an assistant director, bartender, adobe mason, firefighter, commercial fisherman, photographer, journalist and filmmaker. In 1993, he landed in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War and joined The Serious Road Trip, an unofficial aid organization that delivered food to children affected by the war. […]
“Shake it,” an 82-year-old Vidal Sassoon demands an elegant waif as his hand vigorously enters and ruffles her hair. Mr. Sassoon has just exited a limo and is striding, entourage in tow, along a downtown LA street en route to a press conference. All that’s missing from making this look like an outtake from Austin […]