Watch: 3 Must-See Trailers

Ryan Gosling stars as a stunt driver who moonlights as a wheelman for criminals.  When he agrees to help the husband of his beautiful neighbor (Carey Mulligan), matters go awry and he must protect the neighbor and her son.  Christina Hendricks, Bryan Cranston, Ron Perlman, Oscar Isaac, and Albert Brooks also star in Drive, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn.

Release date: September 16, 2011

Our take based solely on the trailer: Steve McQueen’s Bullitt x The French Connection x Playstation’s Driver x Winding Refn’s dark directorial style + one angry Gosling = cinematic gold

Sidenote: If you’ve never seen any of Winding Refn’s previous films we highly suggest watching Bronson, The Pusher Trilogy and Valhalla Rising. 

In Another Earth, Rhoda Williams (Brit Marling), a bright young woman accepted into MIT’s astrophysics program, aspires to explore the cosmos. A brilliant composer, John Burroughs (William Mapother), has just reached the pinnacle of his profession and is about to have a second child. On the eve of the discovery of a duplicate Earth, tragedy strikes and the lives of these strangers become irrevocably intertwined.

Release date: In select theaters now

Our take based solely on the trailer: This sci-fi drama that focuses on parallel worlds as it relates to Multiverse theory should stir both your heart and head.

The first full trailer for season 2 of AMC’s The Walking Dead, which premiered at the show’s Comic-Con panel, gives us four intense minutes of footage. At the panel, producer Frank Darabont said that season 2 will pick up right where season 1 left off, with no time jump, and Walking Dead comic creator Robert Kirkman promised “it will blow your mind.”

Premiere date: October 16, 2011

Our take based solely on the trailer: Let’s just hope the zombie apocalypse doesn’t hit before the second season of The Walking Dead is over.

Listen To/Download: Geoff Geis “Princess”

Geoff Geis, an integral member of multiple Los Angeles-based bands including Big Whup and Pizza!, spent the opening months of 2011 collecting the material that has become Princess, the first release for his boutique cassette label Vanity Projects. To say Princess is a strange hodgepodge of sounds would be an understatement. It pulls equally from the contradictory sounds of lo-fi Electronica, old school Country, 80′s synth pop and blue-eyed soul, while still finding time to touch upon a dizzying variety of other genres in its brisk 24 minutes run time. In less skilled hands a combination of that sort could sound muddled or worse yet ridiculous but Geis’ attention to arrangements, honest vocal delivery and ear for melodies keeps Princess unified in its charming appeal.

Download: “Where Have You Been (All My Life)?” (cover song) here (right click + save link as)

Download: “Mother of All” here (right click + save link as)

Watch: The Murder of Fred Hampton (documentary)

The Murder of Fred Hampton began as a film portrait of Hampton and his leadership of the Illinois Black Panther Party, but half way through filming, Hampton was killed by Chicago police. In an infamous moment in Chicago history and politics, over a dozen armed officers from Illinois State’s Attorney’s Office, in conjunction with the Chicago Police Department and FBI, burst into Hampton’s apartment on December 4, 1969 while its occupants were sleeping, killing Hampton and fellow Panther Mark Clark and brutalizing the remaining occupants including Hampton’s pregnant girlfriend. In ten minutes, 99 rounds were fired by the police during the raid, two of which were point blank shots to Hampton’s head. Filmmakers Mike Gray and Howard Alk arrived a few hours later to shoot film footage of the crime scene that was later used to contradict news reports and police testimony.

The pre-dawn raid was organized to serve a warrant for illegal weapons. Originally the officers claimed self-defense, stating the Panthers fired multiple shots at the officers first. The only shot fired by the Panthers was later determined by a 1970 Federal grand jury to be a reflexive reaction in Clark’s death convulsions after being shot by the raiding team while he was holding a shotgun. The same grand jury concluded that the original investigations by the Chicago Police internal investigation division and the Cook county coroners’ office  were complete shams, with each officer being asked questions which had been previously written up and given to them, along with a set of answers. The 243 page report would go on to say, “Physical evidence, standing alone and unexplained, is sufficient to establish probable cause to charge the officers with a willful violation of these survivors’ civil rights.”

Read more about Fred Hampton’s death here

Read the declassified FBI files on Hampton here

New Music: Brilliant Colors “Again and Again”

Brilliant Colors are back with their second LP Again and Again.

Inspired by post-punk fervor and the spiky pop of C86 and early Flying Nun / Creation label output, San Francisco’s Brilliant Colors stake out a unique spot in the indie music landscape. Their 2009 album, Introducing, is one of the finest debuts in recent memory, and they followed it with 7-inches on Slumberland and Make a Mess and a European tour with La La Vasquez that led to the release of another great single on Germs of Youth. Most recently, they teamed up with Belfast’s brilliant Girls Names to release a split 7-inch in Fall 2010. All of these singles were recorded with Oakland garage phenom Ty Segall, who spiked the ladies’ punk-pop swirl with his own special grit.

Now Brilliant Colors have teamed up again with The Pool’s Alex Yusimov (who recorded their first album as well as Grass Widow and many of Portland’s finest indie bands) to create Again And Again, an album that represents a great next step for the band. The song-writing is still as infectious as ever, but the tunes are now more carefully arranged pushing the band far beyond their punk roots to something as elemental as pop gets. Songs like opener “Hey Dan,” the sprightly “Value Lines” and “Hitting Traffic” combine guitarist/singer Jess’ catchy-as-hell riffs with Diane’s steady, rolling beats and Michelle’s dense baselines to fashion songs that are deceptively simple — straightforwardly rocking but also richly layered, revealing new twists on each listen.

The mood is confessional and late-night dreamy; Jess’ unadorned vocals and eloquent lyrics are personal, direct and atmospherically deployed, mixed in with the songs like another instrument. They can be heard to great effect on tougher songs like “Back To The Tricks” and “Painting Truths,” tempering those tunes’ punchy punk dynamics with their melodic sensibility. Add in classic-sounding stormers like “Cult Face” and “How Much Younger” and you have all the makings of another great Brilliant Colors album, one that shows how finely they’ve honed their own unique brand punk-informed crash-pop.

Brilliant Colors’ Again and Again is out July 19, 2011 via Slumberland Records

Brilliant Colors – How Much Younger by Slumberland Records

Style Watch: “Natural Beauty”

Via NOWNESS:

Cheeky directors Lernert & Sander embrace the urge for cosmetic overkill in their surreal short Natural Beauty. Makeup artist Ferry van der Nat and his assistant Vanessa Chan helped to execute the vision, slathering a host of Ellis Faas products on  Belgian beauty Hannelore Knuts, who was recently named the new face of Swiss fashion house Akris. Lernert & Sander began collaborating in 2006; since then they’ve done everything from melt a chocolate bunny with a hairdryer to repurpose household appliances as sex toys in the name of video art. We asked the co-conspirators to break down the shoot in detail.

STATS FROM ON SET

Mission Statement: We wanted to apply 365 layers of makeup in one day to see how much is needed to go from a natural look to an outrageous one.

Production time: It was a relaxed shoot but it took us nearly nine hours non-stop to apply all the layers to Hannelore’s face.

Magic ingredients: Seven bottles of Foundation S103; two bottles of Creamy Eyes E107; three Milky Lips L205 pens; and two bottles of Blush S301. All together 228.40ml of makeup.

Lunch menu: Hannelore was fixed between panels for the whole shoot, so everything she ate or drank came from a straw: juice, and a granola and yogurt mix. I think she had sushi on her train back to Brussels.

Soundtrack: No music on our shoots! Unless we do a music video and the artists need to lip-sync. But we don’t like lip-syncing, so that never happens in our videos. Music distracts.

Prep work: We tested a 100-layer session a few days before on our intern, who is a man. We wanted to make sure that this amount of makeup wouldn’t kill a person. It didn’t kill our intern so we trusted everything would be fine on Hannelore.

Crisis averted: There was always the “we’ve run out of makeup” stress. But Ellis Faas has her office right around the corner so we could call and get more [Foundation] S103.

Souvenirs: We saved the white construction for Hannelore’s face, so if we plan to do a “two years of makeup” we already have the perfect face frame.