1. This sounds promising: Fox Searchlight has greenlit the first film by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris since their 2006 Oscar-winner Little Miss Sunshine. He Loves Me, which will reunite the filmmaking team with Paul Dano, also stars his girlfriend, Zoe Kazan, who wrote the script. [via Deadline]
2. Battlestar Galactica star Edward James Olmos is joining the cast of season six of Dexter; he’ll be playing “an enlightened religious studies professor” who we’re guessing has something to do with Mos Def’s storyline on the show. [via Screen Rant]
3. Strange but possibly true: Is Lady Gaga planning to spend her summer in a new home on Martha’s Vineyard that she has dubbed “GG’s Playpen”? [via Boston Herald]
4. The Barbican has announced the flagship arts programming planned around the 2012 London Olympics, and the highlights include theater productions starring Juliette Binoche and Cate Blanchett, a major Bauhaus retrospective, and the UK premiere of Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach. [via Arts Journal]
5. The Kardashians are working on a novel that’s due out next November about “a glamorous, high profile and complicated family,” and they want your suggestions on what it should be called — but you won’t be paid if they pick your title. [via WaPo]
Bonus link: Take a Quiz in Honor of National Wine Day
Plays often fall into the trap of telling rather than showing. And then there are playwrights like Martin McDonagh, who crafts viscerally-charged stories that effortlessly unfold and always leave us wanting more. The world premiere of his latest, A Behanding in Spokane , Friday night at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre proved no exception, flying by in a taut, intermission-free 90 minutes. Its charmingly bizarre conclusion hits a lighter note than Mcdonagh’s previous works; it’s also his first to be set in America and originate on Broadway.
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Theater folk are no doubt freaking out this morning, as they’re want to do around early May every year: It’s Tony Nominations Day! The best way to get a good first impression of what’s going here is by nomination count. Check out our numeric breakdown/running commentary after the jump. Spoiler alert: Those three dancing brats from Billy Elliot managed to smoke everyone else’s ass. Read More »
Now that the broken sprocket holes have been swept off the projection room floors, and New York’s Village VII can go back to being a mediocre theater full of bloated summer blockbusters, let’s take a look at some of the cinematic highlights from this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, shall we? While there wasn’t any of the Spider-Man 3 glamor or United 93 controversies, of recent years, there were enough quality films to keep our eyes from crusting over. After the jump, a list (in no particular order) of a few favorites that we hope will be coming to a theatre near you some time soon. Read More »
The pains of being pure at heart are many in Bradley Rust Gray’s The Exploding Girl, a moody, osmotic character study that thoroughly stresses the “awk” in youthful awkwardness. The American accompaniment to wife and co-director So Yong Kim’s In Between Days (both winking allusions to the same Cure single), Girl mirrors the former in its observational focus on best friends whose relationship lies in between platonic and romantic. The contemplative long takes, extended silences, and artless conversations also define the film as a well-done translation of the exquisite Taiwanese art of is-this-it patience (Hou Hsaio-Hsien’s Café Lumière is Gray’s cited inspiration). Read More »
