Interview

Logorama, last night's winner for Best Animated Short, depicts a version of LA in which nearly everything–cars, buildings, people, animals–exists as one of over 2,500 logos and commercial mascots. Produced by French collective H5, the seventeen-minute film includes a shootout involving a pair of Michelin Men and Ronald McDonald, a catastrophic earthquake, and a campy take on Mr. Clean's signature look. Watch it in its entirety above.

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TRAILER FOR TINY FURNITURE

Filmmaker Lena Dunham treads the turbid shallows of post-college fallout. In her latest, Tiny Furniture, the artist turns the camera on herself and her immediate family. Dunham favors a sort of hybrid of allegory and docudrama, evidenced in her collaborative shorts Delusional Downtown Divas (in which childhood friends Joana Avillez, Isabel Halley and Gabriel Held play childhood friends). In her first full-length feature, Dunham again casts her own ambitions and insecurities as the star of the show. Tiny Furniture depicts a girl adrift and attempting to moor herself; the film is that moor that rescues Dunham from the ennui of a directionless year after college.

Dunham is the daughter of artists Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham, whom she cites as inspirations, but not necessarily influences on her own work. "I felt like my parents were always involved with abstraction, and I wanted to do something very specific," Dunham says. In Tiny Furniture, protagonist Aura (played by Dunham) returns home to Tribeca to her resentful younger sister Nadine and distant mother Siri, with no plans, an entitlement born of (the film implies) privilege, and a preternatural skill for emotional articulation bolstered by  years of therapy. Much of the film's charm resides in the believability of its characters, who occupy a territory in between theiractual personalities and  instantly recognizable "types." Tiny Furniture is site-specific cinema taken to its logical extreme, an inverse Truman Show where everyone plays himself but only the lead is completely in on the game.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT ART IN AMERICA.
TINY FURNITURE PREMIERES MARCH 15 AT SXSW.

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Despite recent efforts to curtail them, acceptance speeches are one of the Academy Award ceremony's signature elements. This year's winners are being forced to limit their statements to a mere forty-five seconds–award recipients will be encouraged to direct their excess gratitudte to a backstage "thank you camera"–and it's hard to believe that some degree of Oscar magic won't be lost along with the traditional recitation of names of friends, family members, colleagues, financial-backers, and higher powers. Though we'll have to wait until Sunday to see if a shorter broadcast is worth the lost minutes of tearful acknowledgements, the video above (featuring an all-star cast that includes Gwyneth Paltrow circa 1999) pays tribute to the endless award ceremony "thank you."

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Just a few months after his The Fantastic Mr. Fox, writer-director Noah Baumbach is set to release another film–a distinctly less kid-friendly one. On March 19, Greenberg, which was nominated for the Golden Bear at last month's Berlin International Film Festival, premieres in the US. The movie focuses on the unemployed Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) who, fresh off a nervous breakdown in New York, invites himself to crash at the empty LA home of his more successful brother in an attempt to get over his midlife crisis. In the clip above (released today), Roger and his former bandmate Ivan (Rhys Ifans) sum up the birthday blues.

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