The trailer for Wim Wenders’ new film, Every Thing Will Be Fine, was released today. In case knowing that James Franco will star as twins in David Simon’s next series and is writing a book about Lana Del Rey wasn’t enough recent Franco-fuel for you, the trailer provides a whole lot more of it — 12 years’ more, to be exact. He plays the lead in Wenders’ (director of Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire — later unfortunately adapted into City of Angels) film about a man grappling with the tragic aftermath of a car accident. Charlotte Gainsbourg also stars in the film; for more details, go to /Film, or watch the trailer below:
It’s been a good day for trailers for films by highly influential directors — for it also saw the release of Jafar Panahi’s Taxi trailer, yet another film the director completed while still forbidden from making films by the Iranian government. Taxi won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival, and its trailer can be seen on IndieWire.
In the pop music sphere, a couple of news stories are floating around about particularly bizarre celebrity effigies. First, The Guardian reports that Nicki Minaj’s wax sculpture is being redesigned by Madame Tussauds after their current, twerking wax Minaj — which, as an inanimate object, obviously cannot carry the empowerment of Minaj’s gesture — started being used as a prop in lewd photographs. And if you can stretch your imagination and call an ice cream container (sort of) named after a celebrity an effigy, this is similarly related: Lady Gaga has written a cease and desist letter to the British ice cream company The Licktators, who made a breast milk-based ice cream called “Royal Baby Gaga.” Though it seems more Royal Baby than Gaga based (well, technically it’s breast milk based), it’s been requested that they discontinue the flavor in 14 days.
As far as more flattering reproductions of artists go, Hyperallergic has a piece on a Fringe NYC play that lets audiences behold a fictional, stoned conversation between Frida Kahlo and Sylvia Plath. Meanwhile, Ziye Liu has used CGI to animate select works by Ai Weiwei and Yayoi Kusama. The Creators Project, (on which you can watch the video), notes how Liu has warped works such as Weiwei’s Grapes and Kusama’s Narcissus Garden to “explore ‘the infinite possibilities’ of each artwork—conversing with, rather than ‘improving’ upon them.”