Danish director Bine Bach Damsgaard has joined the roster of Scandinavian production house Bacon. After working as a creative with Wieden+Kennedy New York, she stepped out as a director on her own two years ago with an award-winning film for Danish department store Magasin. Since then, she has done video content for Instagram phenom Leandra Medine Cohen and designer Gelareh Mizrahi, and her latest film for feminine care innovators Billie was recently shortlisted for a Young Director Award….
Buddy Guy: The Blues Chase the Blues Away, a production of RCA Records and Scheme Engine in association with American Masters Pictures, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and is scheduled to air on PBS on July 27. The documentary feature chronicles the life of legendary blues musician George “Buddy” Guy. Charles Todd, creative director of Scheme Engine, is one of the directors of the film, along with Devin Amar and Matt Mitchener. John Beug and Sheira Rees-Davies are the producers. Michael Kantor, Camille Yorrick, Devin Amar and Sheira Rees-Davies are executive producers. After spending his early years as a sharecropper in Lettsworth, Louisiana, Guy became one of the most influential guitarists of all time. A pioneer of Chicago’s fabled West Side sound, he is a living link to the city’s halcyon days of electric blues. Over the course of his career, Guy has garnered eight Grammy Awards and was honored with induction into The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Todd explores storytelling through experimental mixed-media, cinematic narrative, and live concert direction for clients and artists, such as Nike, the NBA, Nikon, HBO, Rihanna, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, and Travis Scott. His original shorts for Apple Music have evolved the music documentary genre into innovative films for artists like Lil Baby, The 1975, H.E.R. Marc Anthony, and Christine and the Queens. Scheme Engine is a BIPOC-owned creative studio and production/postproduction company….
Review: Writer-Director Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance”
In its first two hours, "The Substance" is a well-made, entertaining movie. Writer-director Coralie Fargeat treats audiences to a heavy dose of biting social commentary on ageism and sexism in Hollywood, with a spoonful of sugar- and sparkle-doused body horror.
But the film's deliciously unhinged, blood-soaked and inevitably polarizing third act is what makes it unforgettable.
What begins as a dread-inducing but still relatively palatable sci-fi flick spirals deeper into absurdism and violence, eventually erupting — quite literally — into a full-blown monster movie. Let the viewer decide who the monster is.
Fargeat — who won best screenplay at this year's Cannes Film Festival — has been vocal about her reverence for "The Fly" director David Cronenberg, and fans of the godfather of body horror will see his unmistakable influence. But "The Substance" is also wholly unique and benefits from Fargeat's perspective, which, according to the French filmmaker, has involved extensive grappling with her own relationship to her body and society's scrutiny.
"The Substance" tells the story of Elisabeth Sparkle, a famed aerobics instructor with a televised show, played by a powerfully vulnerable Demi Moore. Sparkle is fired on her 50th birthday by a ruthless executive — a perfectly cast Dennis Quaid, who nails sleazy and gross.
Feeling rejected by a town that once loved her and despairing over her bygone star power, Sparkle learns from a handsome young nurse about a black-market drug that promises to create a "younger, more beautiful, more perfect" version of its user. Though she initially tosses the phone number in the trash, she soon fishes it out in a desperate panic and places an order.
The one rule to follow is that... Read More