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May 2, 2017
SXSW 2017 World Premiere of The Most Hated Woman In America Available on Netflix [Video]
“It’s a Texas story in so many ways and it’s a Texas-sized stories in so many ways,” said cast member Josh Lucas.
If you missed the SXSW World Premiere of The Most Hated Woman In America, which took place at the historic Paramount Theatre on Tuesday, March 14, you can now watch the film on Netflix.
The Most Hated Woman In America is a true-crime biopic about the disappearance of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, founder of the “American Atheists” and pioneering firebrand in the political culture war. The film captures the rise and fall of a complex character who was a controversial villain to some and an unlikely hero to others. Cast: Melissa Leo, Adam Scott, Juno Temple, Vincent Kartheiser, Josh Lucas, Peter Fonda.
Director Tommy O’Haver grew up in Indiana where he spent his early years making Super-8 films. After his first short “Catalina” played at the New York Film Festival, he went on to write and direct his first feature, Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss, which premiered and sold at Sundance. He went on to make 2 films for Miramax: Get Over It and Ella Enchanted.
Get inspired by a multitude of diverse visionaries at SXSW – browse more 2017 Keynotes, Featured Sessions, Red Carpets, and Q&A’s on our YouTube Channel.
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The post SXSW 2017 World Premiere of The Most Hated Woman In America Available on Netflix [Video] appeared first on SXSW.
Source: SxSW Film
May 2, 2017
HOW TO BRIDGE MARKETING AND SALES IN YOUR BUYER’S JOURNEY
This article originally appered on Column Five.
Content marketing isn’t a nice-to-have these days; it’s an incredibly effective and necessary tool. Whether it’s increasing brand recall with an online video, generating more exposure through earned media, or delivering higher social engagement via microcontent, it is essential to your operation. That’s why 89% of marketers pursue content marketing, according to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2017 B2B Content Marketing Report.
But just creating content doesn’t mean you’re doing content marketing well. The best success comes when it’s executed correctly. Great execution entails many things:
- Building a solid content strategy
- Crafting a strong brand identity
- Creating content that connects with your customers on an emotional level
- Publishing consistently to maintain that connection
But even if you do all of these things, there is one thing that may be sabotaging your content marketing: approaching content with an advertising mentality.
Advertising is interruption marketing. It wedges itself into a buyer’s experience. True content marketing is engagement marketing. It participates in the buyer’s experience.
For many marketers, the advertising mentality is colliding with the content marketing mentality.
Many brands are approaching content marketing as a way to sell a product or service. As a result, their approach to content marketing is overly salesy. And they wonder why their efforts aren’t converting friends into customers.
MARKETING AND SALES: A FINE LINE
Sometimes it’s hard to know when marketing stops and selling begins. Because of that, there’s a tendency to create content with themes and ideas that are more appropriate in a sales setting.
When this happens, marketers end up doing sales—and that’s not their job. Their job is to attract people to your brand, to get them interested in learning about your perspective, what you have to say, and what you stand for. It’s hard for marketers to do this successfully if they are also aggressively trying to get people to buy stuff.
Of course, content serves different purposes at each stage of the buyer’s journey. As people become familiar with your brand and begin to express an interest in your offers, it is important to have those sales conversations with them—but only once they get to that point. (Unfortunately, the Content Marketing Institute found that only 53% of marketers craft content based on specific points of the buyer’s journey.)
So, how do you ensure that content marketing and sales collaborate instead of cannibalize each other? And how do you make sure nothing falls through the cracks along the way? By developing a killer buying experience that lets marketers deliver potential customers to the sales door and lets sales make sure they get through that door safely. Here’s the two-part process to help you do that.
PART 1: LET CONTENT MARKETERS CREATE CONNECTION
The first step and the biggest priority for content marketers is to develop a rapport between your brand and your would-be customers. You want to develop true “friendships” with your audience. The end goal is to develop some sense of interest, excitement, and attachment in the buyer.
The best way to do this? By telling brand stories that communicate what your brand stands for and what its values are. This helps your audience connect at a relationship level—it’s not a transactional experience.
There are many definitions of “story.” Ask 100 people and you’ll get 100 different answers. The stories I’m referring to are those that communicate your perspective and understanding of your customers’ experience. This content provides your audience value. It increases their knowledge, enhances their live, or relates to their experience.
Within a marketing context, you can tell your powerful stories by sharing:
- What has worked for you and what hasn’t worked
- What you’ve learned from your failures
- The secrets that have helped you grow
- What matters to you and your organization
- How you help your employees
Your audience relationship relies on transparency and understanding. Content that lets you show your human side, that demonstrates your willingness to help is key. To keep things simple, create content that is interesting and useful to other human beings.
PART 2: CARRY THAT CONNECTION INTO SALES
A SOLID BUYER’S JOURNEY IS A COHESIVE, COMPLETE EXPERIENCE. AS CONTENT MARKETERS CREATE THAT CONNECTION AND MOVE BUYERS TO SALES, THERE SHOULD BE A SEAMLESS TRANSITION. IF YOUR MARKETING GOAL IS TO CREATE AN EMOTIONAL CONNECTION WITH YOUR CUSTOMER, COMING IN WITH A HARD SELL WILL DISMANTLE ALL THE WORK CONTENT MARKETING HAS DONE.
Selling well against the backdrop of content marketing requires you to carry the same mentality in your sales as in your marketing: Put the customer first. The same friendly, helpful positioning should infuse your sales conversations. Make your customers a priority and ensure your customers’ goals are understood and addressed.
At the sales level, carrying over a content marketing mentality includes taking every opportunity to connect and engage. This may include:
- Having proper calls to action
- Keeping in touch regularly so they have an easy way to buy from you
- Being responsive
- Asking for feedback (so valuable!)
- Finding opportunities to meet and talk with your customers
- Offering exclusive deals
- Providing gifts (or other signs of appreciation)
Additionally, the goodwill fostered during the buyer’s journey should continue after the sale is complete. In this sense, content can come full circle. After you close a sale, sending a buyer a relevant blog post or interesting piece of data helps reinforce that relationship, making them feel genuinely cared for.
The goal is to marry your sales and content marketing to create a solid ecosystem.
SALES AND CONTENT MARKETING TEAMS MUST BE ALIGNED
One of the biggest barriers to creating a cohesive buyer’s journey is internal siloing. Many companies have separate leadership teams and use different playbooks for marketing and sales. This isn’t inherently wrong, but if these teams and these leaders aren’t talking, strategies won’t be as effective and your customers may suffer for it. (Learning how to build a solid inside sales team is key to helping create a cohesive operation.)
You can’t dictate the timeline of when or if anyone becomes a customer; it’s up to them to decide when they’re ready to buy. But if you design your content marketing process well and thoughtfully, the end result will feel invisible to the buyer. And that’s how you turn friends into customers—without selling stuff.
For more tips on marketing, learn about the strategy we used to increase our leads 78% in 6 months, find out what 7 traits will make you a better marketer, and learn how to create content that provides true value to your audience.
Source: Visual News
May 2, 2017
Introducing the StoryCorps Justice Project
In 2016, StoryCorps launched the Justice Project, an initiative to collect, preserve, and amplify the stories of people whose lives have been impacted by mass incarceration and the justice system nationwide. Our exploration, featured in part through stories released this month, focuses on people who have been incarcerated or detained in local jails.
The personal conversations recorded through this initiative reveal the complexities of how the justice system plays out in peoples’ lives. The impacts of mass incarceration on individuals, families, and communities are often long term, and can be invisible or misunderstood by those who have not lived these experiences directly. Through first-person narratives, the stories collected by the StoryCorps Justice Project illuminate the structural forces that shape who is disproportionately exposed to mass incarceration and what that can mean.
- Jayne Fuentes shares a story that shows how the economic burden of court fees affect families, even long after a loved one is released.
- As a teenager, Asad Kerr-Giles spent 28 months at Rikers Island in New York City, a jail designed for adults, before he was acquitted because he could not afford bail
- Even after serving time, people who have been incarcerated, like Jamal Faison, must navigate a culture rife with discrimination, barriers, and collateral consequences.
How does StoryCorps approach such a vast and complex issue? Our community engagement work and collaboration with local partner organizations is critical to our ability to record, share, and preserve the most comprehensive and inclusive collection of stories possible.
For nearly a year, we’ve collaborated with wide-ranging community-based organizations in Chicago/Cook County, IL; New Orleans; New York City; Connecticut; Ferguson/St. Louis County, MO; Pittsburgh; Atlanta; San Francisco; and Philadelphia.
Among the partner organizations with whom we’ve been actively engaged are: Mass Story Lab, The Osborne Association, Friends of the Island Academy, Bed Stuy and Crown Heights SOS, and Community Connections for Youth. The stories you hear as part of this initiative are possible because of these partners. Here is a full list of them.
Tanya Linn Albrigtsen-Frable, who came to StoryCorps in 2016 to manage the Justice Project, draws on her own practice as a public artist and community organizer, as well as her personal experience of navigating the justice system with her family, to seek out and work in partnership with organizations and individuals whose lives have been impacted by mass incarceration.
Tanya says, “I’m of the opinion that everybody is impacted by mass incarceration. We’re all complicit, and we’re all affected by this larger structural and systemic problem.
“The most interesting thing to listen to is the way people talk about the folks that they love, and their hopes and dreams for the future,” Tanya says. For listeners to these stories, Tanya hopes they “make a connection between their own lived experience and these structures in a way that they hadn’t before.”
The StoryCorps Justice Project is made possible with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Safety and Justice Challenge, #RethinkJails, and the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation.
Source: SNPR Story Corps
April 30, 2017
This Was the Worst Box Office of 2017 — But ‘How to Be a Latin Lover’ and ‘Baahubali 2’ Were Amazing
This weekend was the nadir of a what has become a bipolar year at the box office, but it comes with an amazing, if unsettling sidelight: Mass audience fare is no longer guaranteed, even with top stars and well-known IP.
“How to Be a Latin Lover” (Lionsgate) and “Baahubali 2: The Conclusion” (from previously unheralded Great India) ranked second and third, both over $10 million. Those are grosses better than not only STX’s “The Circle” (which had the benefit of Emma Watson and Tom Hanks, and is based on Dave Eggers’ novel) but also better than any new release on the same weekend last year. Studios concede the weekend before the new Marvel release in early April, but that’s also an opportunity that two smart distributors recognized.
That left “The Fate of the Furious” (Universal) as the default #1 again. $19 million for a third weekend, and $192 million total, is strong for any film — except in comparison to its performance in the rest of the world.
One other title of note. High-flying Blumhouse Prods.’ “Sleight,” acquired out of Sundance 2016, grossed only $1.7 million in 565 theaters via BH Tilt. It actually had the best reviews of any new studio or studio-adjacent film this week, but for once the Blumhouse magic didn’t transpire.
Jacob Latimore, Alex Theurer, Sean Tabibian, JD Dillard, Dulé Hill and Seychelle Gabriel, and Eric B Fleischman of “Sleight”
Daniel Bergeron
The Top Ten
1. The Fate of the Furious (Universal) Week 3; Last weekend #1
$19,340,000 (-49%) in 4,077 theaters (-252); PTA (per theater average): $4,756; Cumulative: $293,721,000
2. How to Be a Latin Lover (Lionsgate) NEW – Cinemascore:; Metacritic: 53; Est. budget: $
$12,019,000 in 1,118 theaters; PTA: $10,750; Cumulative: $12,019,000
3. Baahubali 2: The Conclusion (Great India 2) NEW – Est. budger: $39 million
$10,138,000 in 405 theaters; PTA: $23,855; Cumulative: $10,138,000
4. The Circle (STX) NEW – Cinemascore:; Metacritic: 43; Est. budget: $18 million
$9,320,000 in 3,163 theaters; PTA: $2,947; Cumulative: $9,320,000
5. The Boss Baby (20th Century Fox) Week 5; Last weekend #2
$9,050,000 (-29%) in 3,792 theaters (+42); PTA: $2,420 Cumulative: $9,050,000
6. Beauty and the Beast (Disney) Week 7; Last weekend #3
$9,050,000 (-34%) in 3,155 theaters (-160); PTA: $; Cumulative: $480,100,000
7. Going in Style (Warner Bros.) Week 4; Last weekend #4
$6,400,000 (-27%) in 2,761 theaters (-277); PTA: $2,029; Cumulative: $37,320,000
8. Smurfs: The Lost Village (Sony) Week 4; Last weekend #6
$3,315,000 (-32%) in 2,554 theaters (-183); PTA: $1,298; Cumulative: $37,735,000
9. Gifted (Fox Searchlight) Week 4; Last weekend #6
$3,300,000 (-28%) in 2,215 theaters (+229); PTA: $1,490; Cumulative: $15,830,000
10. Unforgettable (Warner Bros.) Week 2; Last weekend #7
$2,345,000 (-51%) in 2,417 theaters (no change); PTA: $970; Cumulative: $8,840,000
“Baahubali 2: The Conclusion”
The Takeaways
Many Theaters Reaching Limbo Levels
Next weekend with “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2” (Disney), the earth should tilt back its normal axis with its expected $150 million or better opening next weekend. The latest Marvel entry already opened in about 60 percent of the world (though not yet China or Japan) with a strong initial haul of around $100 million.
That might undo some of the carnage of this weekend, but the weakness of “The Circle” as the sole wide opener can’t be overlooked. Its failure to out gross two very niche audience films despite its access to twice as many theaters as “How to Be a Latin Lover” (Lionsgate) and “Baahubali 2” (Great India) showed that some audiences will stick flock to certain movies.
Two sleepers targeted for ethnic audiences couldn’t keep the Top Ten from coming in as the worst of this year so far. At $79 million, it was 20 percent worst than last year. But without “Latin Lover” and “Baahulabi 2,” it would have come to barely more than $60 million. That would have been close to panic time for theaters. As it is, the riches from the Latino and Indian audiences were unevenly spread so that many theaters had bottom-level results.
The Stellar Achievements of “How to Be a Latin Lover” and “Baahulabi 2”
A rare growth market in American theaters in recent years has been Spanish-language and Indian films. Usually shown in multi-hundred rather than wider releases, grossing sometimes in their first weekend enough to climb into or come close to the Top 10, they increasingly demand attention from discerning movie chains. This weekend shows they can not only hold their own, but can also thrive.
In retrospect, “Latin Lover” $12 million victory in its 1,118 theaters was predictable. Star Eugenio Derbez, well known in Mexico, already had a breakout success with “Instructions Not Included” in 2013. That opened in 348 theaters to $7.8 million, then expanded to twice as many and ultimately $44 million. That made it among the best-grossing Mexican (and Spanish-language) domestic releases ever.
This Pantelion production opened in triple the theaters, and had a bigger budget (though not officially revealed) and a more American slant (it’s set in California, and bilingual) to widen its appeal.
Still, the core audience was Latino. This group is far more loyal to movies in theaters than most, and critical mass has now reached the point that it could open better than many studio releases.
Top Indian films have international releases not only because of its wide diaspora but also from fears of rampant piracy with delays. Still, the $10 million realized by “Baahubali 2” in one weekend — the best opening of any Indian studio release ever.
This nearly $40 million production (sky high for India) is a sequel, which gave this heft. It’s an epic, and the smartly chosen date gave it access to IMAX theaters. That accounted for $1.8 million of the gross in only 66 locations.
This is exciting for theaters finding supplemental and needed revenue. But it also reinforces the increasingly international nature of the business and the decline of more conventional, non-event releases like “The Circle.”
“The Circle”
“The Circle” Is Broken
This film also had foreign roots (it comes from French-based EuropaCorp, now releasing through STX) with financing from the United Arab Emirates. But it is otherwise mainstream America: Dave Eggers is a strong fiction brand, and its dystopian tale is California set. And Tom Hanks (in a rare bad-guy role) is protypically domestic.
But the main draw here was supposed to be Emma Watson, coming off “Beauty and the Beast.” It may be no one could have carried this, much less an actress with more period than contemporary appeal. Audiences hated it; its D+ Cinemascore is nearly as bad as it gets. It also was the worst reviewed of the week’s releases.
Still, the bottom is falling out. With little competition at many theaters, the results were a worst-case scenario. A long production delay and an already dated storyline about internet privacy might have hurt, but it shows the risk from a standalone project with less-than-guaranteed international appeal. It will count as a strike against similar films.
Holdovers
Fifth to ninth places were taken by five holdovers that fell 34 percent or less, all solid performances. As usual, they were helped by less than normal competition. “Going in Style” continues to defy its initial impression, with the best hold (down only 27 percent) with an unexpected $50 million now likely. “The Boss Baby” continues to thrive, down 29 percent. “Gifted” was helped by additional theaters, with Fox Searchlight’s hearttugger at $16 million and headed for more. Kids and families kept “Smurfs: The Lost Village” and “Beauty and the Beast” to modest drops.
Not the fate for “Unforgettable,” which saw a second weekend drop of 51 percent, sealing the fate of the Katherine Heigl-Rosario Dawson thriller. The biggest disappointment, though, is “Born in China” (Disney) which dropped out of the Top Ten. Similar nature docs have usually sustained a much higher interest.
Source: IndieWire film
April 30, 2017
Leonardo DiCaprio, Jane Fonda and More Take Part in the Climate March
In what’s become a semi-weekly tradition, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in protest of the Trump administration and its policies yesterday. The People’s Climate March took place in Washington, D.C. and several other cities, counting several celebrities among its high-profile supporters and attendees: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jane Fonda, Kerry Washington, Jared Leto. All of them had something to say about it.
READ MORE: ‘Before the Flood’: Watch Leonardo DiCaprio’s Climate Change Documentary Now for Free
DiCaprio has long been vocal about the urgency of combating climate change — other than acting and dating supermodels, you might say it’s his raison d’être — and has produced the documentaries “Before the Flood” and “The 11th Hour.” “Honored to join Indigenous leaders and native peoples as they fight for climate justice,” he tweeted yesterday. “Join me in standing with them.”
The Environmental Protection Agency removed all data about climate change from its website yesterday, and Scott Pruitt, who heads the EPA, has said that the science is “far from settled.” Here are more tweets from yesterday’s event:
Honored to join Indigenous leaders and native peoples as they fight for climate justice. Join me in standing with them. #ClimateMarch pic.twitter.com/Zrgt090lI6
— Leonardo DiCaprio (@LeoDiCaprio) April 29, 2017
It’s time to change climate change. Join the #PeoplesClimate March today: https://t.co/GoejKrwmj0 #ClimateMarch
— JARED LETO (@JaredLeto) April 29, 2017
In Washington DC for the #ClimateMarch. Anyone one else here??
— Lee Pace (@leepace) April 29, 2017
We march for many reasons – but we march together. #climatemarch pic.twitter.com/TYjPhdeit9
— Jane Seymour Fonda (@Janefonda) April 23, 2017
Sending love and prayers and sooooo much gratitude to all you folks at the #climatemarch
✊
#wematter
— kerry washington (@kerrywashington) April 29, 2017
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Source: IndieWire film
April 30, 2017
‘A Dark Song’ Review: A Feature-Length Seance Digs Out the Ouija Board Very, Very Slowly
Sometimes it isn’t the house that’s haunted; it’s the people inside. That’s certainly the case for “A Dark Song;” in writer-director Liam Gavin’s debut, a woman is so grief-stricken that she subjects herself to what might be the most arduous, drawn-out séance ever captured onscreen. Called the Ambramelin, this obscure ceremony is almost as stressful to observe as it is to enact — Gavin wants us to feel the mental, physical, and spiritual toll it takes on those desperate enough to invoke it.
Intially it’s unclear exactly what the Ambramelin might be, but it’s clear the prep involves much more than digging out the Ouija board. In anticipation, Sophia (Catherine Walker) spent nearly half a year abstaining from all sex and following a strict diet. Lately she’s only been allowed to eat between dusk and dawn; for the next few days, she’ll fast entirely.
Soon we learn that Sophia is attempting to contact her dead child, although the circumstances of his death remain opaque. That revelation is what persuaded a reluctant and deeply unpleasant spiritualist named Joseph (Steve Oram) to take up her cause; an offer of £80,000 apparently wasn’t enough.
Initially, Joseph is as skeptical about the prospect of communing with spirits as viewers might be. “I’ve done this three times,” he tells Sophia. “Once it worked, twice it didn’t.” As he pours a salt border around the remote house she’s rented in Wales, he informs his employer that there’s no turning back now.
Séances are rarely given such serious treatment on film. (For what it’s worth, the invention of the Abramelin and its demand for intricate, long-term preparation is credited to 14th-century Egyptian magician Abra-Melin.) It makes sense that if there could be a kind of pact between the dead and the living, it wouldn’t be taken lightly. Like a binding contract, the Abramelin must be carried out by someone of sound body and mind — a tricky proposition, given that the bereaved would be a prime target audience. Taking place in stages over six days and demanding an ascetic routine that initially includes the denial of food and water, the process seals off the secluded country estate from the outside world in more ways than one.
“A Dark Song” attempts to carve out a space for itself in the space between belief and doubt, superstition and knowledge. “Science describes the least of things,” Joseph says. “The least of what something is.” Oram makes this figure as detestable as he is knowledgeable, a last-resort guide who cares not for Sophia’s plight. His allegiances are to the Abramelin and himself, not necessarily in that order.
Like most films that gesture toward the supernatural, “A Dark Song” fares better at raising questions than answers. Hearing strange noises emanating from other rooms (if not other dimensions) is almost always more terrifying than seeing what’s actually causing the ruckus.
Whether this is consistent with its own logic remains something of a mystery, given how much of his occult knowledge Joseph keeps on a need-to-know basis. As “A Dark Song” builds toward its crescendo, individual notes matter less than the dissonant composition they come together to form. The effect is somewhere between a Gregorian chant and a sunn O))) song, as unsettling as it is compelling.
Grade: B
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Source: IndieWire film
April 30, 2017
Zosia Mamet Moves Beyond ‘Girls,’ But the Result is Disappointing With ‘The Boy Downstairs’ — Tribeca Review
One of the more high-class problems is struggling to break free of an iconic role that made you a star in the first place. Such is the challenge facing Zosia Mamet, whom most people know only as the high-strung Shoshanna on HBO’s “Girls.” If Shoshanna was the Miranda of her day (as many have said when comparing “Girls” to its predecessor, “Sex and the City”), Mamet has the best chance of the “Girls” crew to have a lasting career. Tony winner Cynthia Nixon, who played Miranda, lands plum film roles such as Emily Dickinson in Terence Davies’ “A Quiet Passion,” and is currently starring on Broadway opposite Laura Linney in the revival of Lillian Hellman’s “Little Foxes.” However, if Mamet aspires to such heights, she must choose better projects than “The Boy Downstairs.”
The debut feature from writer/director Sophie Brooks, “The Boy Downstairs” grinds a smart concept and structure into the ground with inconsequential results. Mamet plays Diana, an aspiring writer who has recently returned to New York from a graduate program in London. After moving into her dream apartment in a charming Brooklyn brownstone, Diana is shocked to find the name of her teddy bear of an ex boyfriend, Ben (Matthew Shear), on the mailbox of the basement apartment.
Her awkward attempts to befriend him don’t go so well, as Ben is clearly not as amused as she is by the unfortunate coincidence. Advising Diana are her widowed landlady, Amy (Deirdre O’Connell), and her sketch of a best friend, Gabby (Diana Irvine). Amy used to be an actress, and urges Diana to go for her dreams, while Gabby is either looking for casual sex or a boyfriend; she doesn’t really know, and neither does the movie. The plot hits all of its notes via flashbacks; the film opens with Ben and Diana’s final tearful goodbye, and chronicles their six-month courtship from would-be charming gallery dates and trips upstate to meet the parents.
“The Boy Downstairs” is best when Brooks juxtaposes the devolution of the first relationship with its potential rekindling. Just as Diana breaks younger Ben’s heart, the pair have an impromptu date at “a great Italian place just around the corner.” (If Brooks is actively courting cliche, she does it well.)
Though Brooks exhibits a command of storytelling structure, “The Boy Downstairs” suffers from an utter lack of point of view and comedic voice. Billed as a comedy, the only people laughing are the characters, at themselves. Witty banter isn’t the mention of LSD, nor is comedy making a character do aerobics with their landlady. Shear squeezes more charm out of his character than Mamet, though she has the harder task. Noah Baumbach fans will recognize Shear from “Mistress America,” co-written by Greta Gerwig, and he will soon appear in Baumbach’s Cannes-bound “The Meyerowitz Stories” and Wes Anderson’s “Isle of Dogs.” Shear’s puppy-dog demeanor and unconventional good looks are a bright spot.
While both are talented actors, Brooks did herself no favors by their casting as it invites comparison to Dunham, Baumbach, and Gerwig. Unfortunately, “The Boy Downstairs” only shares the most tiring and directionless parts suggested by that trio, and none of their humorous charm or tortured soul. In the only thing that could pass for a moment of reckoning, Diana tells Amy through sobs: “I don’t know what I’m doing.” Not only do Dunham, Gerwig, and Baumbach know how to make their existential crises funny, but you also believe in their pain.
Mamet does prove one thing about “Girls”: Dunham is a much better writer than people give her credit. Without a clearly drawn character, Mamet is lost onscreen. As the daughter of David Mamet, arguably the greatest living American playwright, she should have known: An actor is nothing without good material.
Grade: C-
“The Boy Downstairs” premiered at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival.
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Source: IndieWire film
April 30, 2017
Tilda Swinton, Benedict Cumberbatch, John Waters and More Read ‘Moby-Dick’ in Its Entirety — Listen
Call me Ishmael. Or Tilda, or Benedict, or any number of other names, really, as Plymouth University has completed its “Moby-Dick Big Read,” an audiobook version of Herman Melville’s whale of a novel. All 135 chapters are read by a different voice, including Tilda Swinton, Benedict Cumberbatch, John Waters, Stephen Fry, Sir David Attenborough and David Cameron.
Launched in 2011, the project is based on the idea that “Moby-Dick” is not only “the great American novel” — it’s also “the great unread American novel.” Angela Cockayne and Philip Hoare describe the Big Read as “an online version of Melville’s magisterial tome: each of its 135 chapters read out aloud, by a mixture of the celebrated and the unknown, to be broadcast online in a sequence of 135 downloads, publicly and freely accessible.”
The book, which more than lives up to its prodigious reputation, has been adapted for film several times; most recently (and forgettably), it served as the inspiration for Ron Howard’s “In the Heart of the Sea.”
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Source: IndieWire film
April 28, 2017
2017 SXSW World Premiere of Dear White People Debuts on Netflix [Video]
“I want this to start conversations, this is a show that people can wake up in the morning and binge watch with your friends and go to brunch and talk about it,” said cast member Ashely Blaine Festherson.
If you missed the SXSW world premiere of Dear White People, which took place at the ZACH Theater on Monday, March 13, you can now watch the series on Netflix.
Based on the critically-acclaimed 2014 film by the same name, Dear White People is a send-up of the now post “post-racial” America that weaves together a universal story of finding one’s own identity, as told from a biting millennial point of view. Cast: Logan Browning, Brandon P. Bell, Antoinette Robertson, DeRon Horton, John Patrick Amedori.
Director Justin Simien burst onto the scene in 2014 as the writer/director of the critically-acclaimed film, Dear White People, which earned him the Special Jury Award for Breakthrough Talent at Sundance and the Independent Spirit Award’s “Best First Screenplay” honor.
Get inspired by a multitude of diverse visionaries at SXSW – browse more 2017 Keynotes, Featured Sessions, Red Carpets, and Q&A’s on our YouTube Channel.
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The post 2017 SXSW World Premiere of Dear White People Debuts on Netflix [Video] appeared first on SXSW.
Source: SxSW Film
April 28, 2017
If You’re Suffering From Sleep Loss, You’re Not Alone
If you have trouble sleeping, don’t worry. You’re one of the millions of people that struggle with sleep loss around the world. To get an idea of just how many people have difficulty sleeping at night, take a look at The Sleep Loss Map. By analyzing Twitter data for phrases containing any mention about sleep loss, the map determines where people are experiencing sleeplessness based on the geolocation tags.
The map can be updated to display results from the last 1 to 24 hours and includes a list of the top 10 countries and cities currently experiencing sleep loss. At the time of writing this, there are currently 60,390 people in Brazil having difficulty sleeping with the United States coming in at second with 58,509 people. In the last 24 hours, 257,499 people have tweeted about sleeplessness, just a small fraction compared to the 1,487,867 people who have tweeted about sleep loss since the map began in December of last year.
So why do so many people have difficulty sleeping? There are many factors that can affect sleep cycles, such as stress, sex, non-24 hour disorder, and even the cycle of the moon. In fact, studies have shown that new parents likely lose up to 6 months worth of sleep within the first 2 years of having a child and roughly 90% of American high school students are sleep deprived.
Even if you are one of the millions that suffer nightly from sleep loss, there are some strategies that can help you get some shut-eye. A great strategy to start would be to create a relaxing routine. One way to do so is to prepare for bed at the same time every night and stay away from electronics—especially your phone!—when laying in bed. Another strategy to keep in mind is to avoid heavy food and caffeine before bed by replacing those with calming teas and light snacks, such as almonds, to promote healthy sleep patterns. Additionally, writing a list before bed of anything that is worrying you will help to get it out of your mind until the following morning. If these tricks aren’t really helping, don’t stress. Just hop out of bed and do something calming and relaxing, like taking a bath, and once you start feeling drowsy, hop back into bed.
Check out the full map here.
Source: Visual News