Last Thursday, I pulled up to the Ukrainian Cultural Center at 7:01pm, and just as expected, I saw a woman in white waiting outside. My boyfriend, Ricardo, rolled down the window. “Is this for the…?” he asked, as we still had no idea exactly what this was going to be. The woman in white took a step forward. She seemed uncertain how to respond.

“We’re coming!! Wait for us!” I said and she smiled. Yes, she realized, we were here for the viral marketing campaign. We turned the corner and looked for parking in front of Scoops. I couldn’t have been more excited.

Brit Marling, the star and co-writer of of last year’s Another Earth and Fox/Searchlight’s soon to be released The Sound of My Voice, is proving to be a powerful cinematic voice. Another Earth is a hauntingly beautiful sci-fi film about a bright young 17-year-old girl in Conneticut whose life is irrevocably altered on the night a new planet that looks identical to Earth appears in the night sky. It’s a thoughtful and subdued film that takes a great sci-fi concept and explores the emotional possibilities of it with Bradbury-esque poetics.

So I was excited when I heard the first twelve minutes of Marling’s new film, The Sound of My Voice were streaming online. I was even more excited when I discovered the film had an interactive component: every couple of minutes, some detail– a line of dialog, a prop, a bar of soap– prompts an annotation to appear on the screen. Each one takes you to a different relevant concept on YouTube, Wikipedia, Tumblr– sources ripped from the fabric of cyberspace, and some delicately placed there by the filmmakers. Not only was this a fun experience, it also excited me about the future of narrative filmmaking. Sorry, Oscars: the movie theater will always have its place in the way we consume visual narrative, but the watching shit online has its merits too.

For instance, instead of a linear experience where you enter a movie theater, watch a movie, and then go home: you can watch the first twelve minutes online, and then go join the cult from the movie. The sixth annotation at in “The Sound of My Voice” takes you to a YouTube video uploaded by the cult from the movie (which has no name – their YouTube account is 4twentyseven2012, the release date of The Sound of My Voice). It stars the woman in white, who I met outside the Ukrainian Cultural Center:

Annotation #8 takes you the cult’s website, www.4272012.com. The site features a vaguely ominous video about the cult called “The Future Is Now,” and an invitation to join their meetings every Thursday at 7pm, at the Ukrainian Cultural Center on Melrose Ave, a five minute drive from my house. So of course I went to check it out!

Ricardo, a fellow named Scott Little from North Hollywood who showed up, and I were the only ones who ventured out last week, and we were rewarded by an hour’s worth of mysterious banter with “Mel,” the woman in white (Scott later discovered the personal website of the actress who played Mel: Christy Meyers, who you may have seen on All My Children). We did an amazing eye contact exercise where we stared at each other for a few minutes, and then she told us about hydroponic apples and the pain we all carry around, while searching for enlightenment or whatever.

It was awesome! Internet-based mysteries tied into independent films about cults are my favorite things! When Scott showed up, he asked “Mel” about the movie, and she reacted with confusion. A P.A. stepped out from a door and told “Mel” to pick up her phone, and someone on the other line gave her new instructions. I told Scott we should just play along with the narrative without breaking the 4th wall, and see where it goes.

We didn’t learn much about the inner workings of the cult, but Mel invited us back next week to learn more– even implying that we could graduate to different “levels” of knowledge. I plan on returning this week to find out more! Duh! I’m hoping to get to at least OT III by the end of this game. I invite everyone to come out with me and hang out with Mel. It’s like a murder mystery weekend! Where do I sign up to join Brit Marling’s cult??

Mike Mills is one of my favorite multi-hyphenate creative people, and has been for a long time. Back in the era of my tidal obsession with Air’s Moon Safari, I read up everything I could on the band, and Mills– the designer who’d crafted their rad cover art. I watched as many of his music videos as I could track down with the middling assistance of dial-up internet and my primary pre-YouTube rad video source, the late great RES Magazine. Ever since then, Mike Mills’ creations– in print, feature filmmaking, documentary, graphic design and music video have only grown successively more and more awesome.

His latest endeavor is his most intimate and most emotionally evocative work yet, the film Beginners. It tells the story of a sad graphic designer (Ewan McGreggor) learning to love (Melanie Laurent) late in life, and his elderly father (Christopher Plumer) who comes out of the closet in the twilight of his life. It’s a simple story but its scope is epic: it’s about mortality, growing up, the unchangeable nature of historical circumstance and seeking connection in a disconnected family. As heavy Beginners‘ themes are, Mills juggles story and concepts with significant grace, blending melancholy and humor in a way that somehow manages to reveal the intimate inner lives of his characters.

Beginners is in theaters now, and I strongly urge you to check it out on the big screen. And luckily, since Mike Mills can’t be confined to one medium, he’s released a companion book to the film called Drawings From the Film Beginners. It’s full of funny and charming sketches that relate to the Ewan McGregor’s character in the film, who also designs album covers for a living.

Thanks to Focus Features, I’m stoked to announce that we’re giving away a copy of the book, as well as a dropcard that will let you to download the Beginners soundtrack for free. Comment with your favorite work by Mike Mills and we’ll choose a winner at random this Friday!

Watching L’amour fou, the documentary about the art auction conducted by Pierre Bergé after the death of his partner of 50 years, Yves Saint Laurent, is a little less inspiring than watching Herb & Dorothy, the 2009 documentary that’s also about art collecting (and then unloading late in life). But I’ll get to the reasons why in a minute, because first I want to praise this movie for what it gets excellently right:

1. You get to see a tiny amount of very intimate, loving footage related to the relationship between YSL and Bergé. Bergé’s eulogy for his deceased husband is as moving a moment as you’ll see in theaters this year. And, earlier, some vintage one-on-one conversation footage where YSL playfully tells his man that he enjoys male “body hair” and that he wants to live in “a large bed, a full one,” should clear up any clueless viewer’s ideas about them being strictly business associates. Bergé was YSL’s daddy bear.

Left: Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé. Right: one of YSL’s Mondrian-inspired dresses.

2. Bergé is not the kind of guy to waste time mourning the past. His clear-eyed approach to the dismantling of the couple’s astonishingly large art, furniture and rare object collection is a study in not being attached to things when it’s time for them to exit your life. Besides, he had plenty of time to mourn while YSL was alive and trying to simultaneously drown himself in booze and snort up all the cocaine on the planet. During that time Bergé stood by and took care of his clinically depressed, sickened, addict partner and kept all the paperwork in order so that YSL could design clothes and then hermit himself in a private room, put on a caftan and inhale a small pyramid of blow.

3. You get to see a healthy amount of Loulou de La Falaise and Betty Catroux, YSL’s muses. One light and warm (de la Falaise), one dark and swaddled in black leather (Catroux), they are cool injections of French womanhood into YSL’s insular gayness. Catroux, especially, is like something a writer would invent, never without her sunglasses, even at night.

Loulou de La Falaise and Betty Catroux

4. Their lives were an orgy of luxury and shopping. They bought houses, art and more houses and more art. “One fine day a Mondrian came into our lives,” says Bergé, like it flew into their window and decided it was happiest living next to that Picasso over the fireplace. And then, when it was done, Bergé sent it to the auction house, a place he describes as “the undertakers of art.”

5. Thrill to the head-scratching vagaries of the art auction secondary market where an Ensor fetches more than a Degas.

6. This sort of thing:

And if, in the end, it’s all a little less inspiring than Herb & Dorothy, it’s because of that wealth. Extreme capitalism, even when it’s predicated on the work of a design visionary like Yves Saint Laurent and subsequently used in the service of building an awesome art collection, is sort of automatically less interesting than going on a journey with two extremely ordinary, working class collectors like Herb and Dorothy Vogel, whose lives revolved around living on her librarian’s salary and amassing crazy amounts of conceptual and minimalist pieces (when no one else wanted them) on his postal worker’s income. It’s easy to see a Brâncusi and say, “I’ll take it,” when you’re swimming in cash, or getting a Warhol piece for free because you hang out with him and he decides to photograph you. It’s way more dangerous to risk your retirement savings on work you love just because you love it, become Christo’s cat-sitter and then later donate all of it to various museums without asking for anything in return.

But again, this isn’t meant to harsh on these guys. YSL backed up his decadence with a legacy of his own amazing art worn by fancy ladies the world over. The planet needs people like him, people who live their lives exactly as they please. And if that life involves getting high with Mick Jagger and flying around France in your own private helicopter and asking Betty Catroux what she wants for dinner and she says, “Cigarettes,” then that’s cool, too.

Dave White is the author of Exile in Guyville, film critic for Movies.com, a contributor to L.A.’s “Slake” and KCRW’s “UnFictional.” Find him on Facebook.

Leilah Weinraub has spent eight years working on Shakedown, “the story of a black lesbian strip club in Los Angeles.” What started as documentation of the club’s by-women for-women performances (which Weinraub used for video installations) soon grew into something much more personal and meditative, as she began to focus on the lives of the performers outside the club. The deeper she became invested in the project, the clearer it became that a wider narrative of labor, community and symbiosis was being woven through the individual tales of the women who make up Shakedown’s extended family:

The film is anchored in the stories of three women: Ronnie Ron, the creator and emcee of Shakedown, a large butch/stud lesbian and former Jehovah’s Witness; Egypt, a single mother, beauty pageant fanatic, and dedicated self – (re)inventor; and Jazmyne, the complicated and sometimes conflicted “Queen” of Shakedown.

Go check out the video on Leilah’s Kickstarter page, and consider making a contribution towards the completion of this epic untold tale!

Mary Woronov is the raddest B-movie actress of all time. This is true not only because she is self-aware, saucy and sincerely good at what she does– but also because she’s an artist, a Factory Girl, and a prolific writer. She’s written novels, memoirs, and essays for Artillery on legendary artists from Edward Hopper to Takashi Murakami. She’s a trailblazer and I admire the winding and unconventional path she’s taken through life. When I look at the insane number of marvelous trashy movies on her IMDb profile, all I can think of is what a shame it is that she’s not in ALL the B-movies. Side note: I’m pretty sure there exists a clause in her contract stating that all Mary Woronov movies must have AMAZING posters (see below).

Woronov will be gracing one of my favorite L.A. galleries, Workspace, with her presence on Sunday, October 17th, for a reading called Notes on Film. It’s the latest installment in Nikki Darling and Kate Wolf’s excellent Five Point Readings series, and she’ll be flanked by CalArts faculty member/curator Michael Ned Holte and Peruvian photographer George Porcari. Go see a living legend in the flesh!

Mary Woronov’s Factory days: from 13 Most Beautiful… Songs for Andy Warhol Screen Tests

As promised: Harmony Korine’s new short film, Act Da Fool, featuring Provenza Schouler‘s new collection. Fashion label with imagination meets filmmaker with imagination. It makes me happy when Korine chooses to remind us that there’s a whole big incredible world out there, decaying and thriving and reinventing itself everyday. This is beautiful.

Satoshi Kon was not just an incredible director, he was a man who understood the inner workings of our collective fantasies. Dreams, no matter how strange or wonderful, aren’t just magically conjured from the ether—they are built very carefully, sometimes deliberately from the people, objects, and ideas we encounter every day. Even our most intimate, personal desires which seem to stem from a deep-seated, primal urge can only reveal themselves to the mind’s eye in the guise of things we have found in the world around us: love appears as a celebrity’s face, truth sounds like an advertising slogan, happiness feels weirdly similar to your old Power Rangers pajamas. Whatever mundane symbolic vocabulary you might need to converse with your subconscious, Satoshi Kon knew it and he was fucking fluent.

I first encountered Kon’s work as a rather disgruntled, closeted queer teen in the suburbs of northern Kentucky. Like so many other awkward weirdos before me I decided to create an imaginary sense of community for myself via nerdy obsession, in this case with Japanese animation. Even back in those pre-Adult Swim, Web 1.0 days when anime was still a relatively “new thing” from an American’s perspective, there were very few of those exotic Eastern oddities that could compare to the all-out nightmare head trip of Perfect Blue. Following the career of a young pop idol, Mima, who decides ditch her bubblegum-glamorous popular persona in exchange for a “serious” acting gig in a rape/revenge murder mystery, Kon dragged protagonists and viewers alike into a treacherous mass delusion involving stalkers, intrusive blogging, and self-assassination. To an out of place homo such as myself these images of oppressive social expectations, of friends and strangers trying to hijack your dreams and force you into their twisted idea of “what should be” made a lot of sense. Of course, my life was not nearly so scary or dramatic as Mima’s, but I never forgot Kon’s bizarre-yet-familiar vision of all the crazy shit you have to go through just to make a new identity for yourself.

Over the years, as anime became increasingly mainstream, Satoshi-san continued to produce a body of work that quietly and masterfully managed to blow my mind and alter the manner in which I think about the ways we are all fundamentally connected on a basic mental level. There was Paprika, part psychedelic group therapy session, part detective story, Tokyo Godfathers, a heartwarming, vaguely Kurosawa-ish tale of social outcasts working out personal issues by caring for an abandoned baby, and the TV series Paranoia Agent which explored the mysterious power of urban legends and showcased the bombastic genius of electronic maestro Susumu Hirasawa. For most people any of these things would be a career-defining achievement, but for Kon they seemed more like variations on a theme. From Magnetic Rose to Millennium Actress you could never quite be sure whose mind was imagining what in this endless circuit of shared perception, but the confusion was enthralling nonetheless because we were all in it together.

This past Tuesday, it was announced that Satoshi Kon had died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 46. He is survived by his final project, a movie called Dream Machine which others will now take up and complete. It seems oddly fitting that this last work should be passed along so gracefully. His last message to us was this:

With feelings of gratitude for all that is good in this world, I put down my pen. Goodbye now. Satoshi Kon

(Translation and some great images via Ryan Sands of Same Hat!)

It’s about girls who sleep in abandoned cars and set things on fire. It’s about the great things in life. The stars in the sky and lots of malt liquor.

Harmony Korine on Act Da Fool, his soon to be released short film for rad fashion label Provenza Schouler.
Consider us stoked. Peek at some behind the scenes photos and the film’s gorgeous poster after the jump, and read more about the collaboration at Nowness.

When Wu Tsang and Ashland Mines started Wildness– surely the most glorious of all L.A. club nights in recent memory– at The Silver Platter, they placed a huge spotlight on that small and obscure gay bar tucked away in MacArthur Park. The Silver Platter has for decades catered to a split clientele of discretely dressed macho Latino men and fabulous transgendered women, two factions once at odds that have slowly coalesced into an organic community. Wildness, through its unique mixture of contemporary art, drag, performance and hip DJs, attracted a brand new audience of artsy young queers spanning class and race boundaries to The Silver Platter.

Damelo Todo (Give Me Everything) is Wu’s bracingly intelligent and beautifully shot film that delves deep into the world of The Silver Platter, the hard social realities of transgender life, and the politics of partying. This innovative documentary/narrative hybrid has been in production for nearly two years, fueled by hard-won grants, small donations, and the tireless efforts of a devoted crew. Now Wu needs your help to finish the film. The Kickstarter finish line is less than $500 away, so every dollar invested in these final 4 days will make an enormous difference! Does the world need Damelo Todo in it? Yes, it does. And it’s up to you to make it happen.

+ Don’t miss Wu’s blog, Class.