UPDATED: Due to weather, the free screening of The Sternberg Project will be held next Monday, August 30 at 8pm.

Zena Bibler of The Dance Film Lab will be screening (for free) her newest site-specific film, The Sternberg Project, at the Sternberg Handball Court on Monday, August 30 at 8pm. The event will also include a short live performance and dance film by Itziar Barrio.

The Sternberg Project will be an interactive, crowd-sourced, multi-media time capsule of July in Sternberg Park and its surrounding area. The project is an assemblage of short videos made on anything from an HD camcorder to a camera phone that capture and create the movement of the park including dances, conversations, home runs, images, narratives, stills, sounds for the month of July 2010.

[More at moviehouse]

The film adaptation of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, the 2005 novel by Brooklyn’s own Jonathan Safran Foer, just got more (or less) interesting, depending on your opinion of two Academy Award winners. It was announced that Tom Hanks (That Thing You Do!) and Sandra Bullock (Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous) have been cast as the parents of Oskar, the nine-year-old Manhattanite at the center of the story. Foer’s novel follows Oskar as he roams the boroughs of New York searching for the matching lock to a key found among the belongings of his father (Hanks), who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11. Director Stephen Daldry (The Reader) and screenwriter Eric Roth (Forrest Gump) have been attached for some time.

The film won’t be released until sometime in 2012, but elements of its eventual trailer can easily be speculated. “Academy Award Winner” will precede at least 2/3 of the names (and possibly outrank them in font size), “the story of one boy’s search” will be used in either narration or text, and a shot of a tearful Sandra Bullock coupled with 30-seconds of strings provided by Thomas Newman will seal the deal.

In 2002, Pat Tillman left the NFL and a contract worth millions of dollars to join the US Army along with his brother, Kevin. By April 2004, he was dead. Though initial reports claimed Tillman was killed by hostile forces, it was eventually revealed that the bullets came from US soldiers. Pat Tillman was a victim of fratricide – friendly fire. With great intensity and surprising restraint, Amir Bar-Lev’s The Tillman Story argues that everyone, from those on the scene to George W. Bush, covered up the actual events surrounding Tillman’s death as a way of improving public opinion of the war.

Throughout the initial reports and eventual revelation of fratricide, Tillman’s death was a top story covered daily by major news outlets. Despite this, Bar-Lev methodically unravels the story as if it had never been told before. And in a way, it hasn’t. The key difference between the story we’ve heard for six years and the one told here? Pat Tillman’s family – particularly his mother, Mary. She spent years scouring military documents to uncover the truth about her son’s death and serves as the driving force behind the film.

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When you think of the Flatiron District, its wholesale shopping, its long surpassed skyscrapers still reaching heavenward, rarely would you have had occasion to consider the morality of homosexual dolphins, the predatory instincts of bears, or to ponder the reproductive imperative of ants. But thanks to the Museum of Sex‘s latest exhibit “Sex Life of Animals” you may find yourself doing just that.

It begins innocently enough: slightly flirtatious manner, revealing clothing, subtle innuendo. In 15 minutes though we are in an orgy in Death Valley, fondling naked Realdolls, watching Looners erotically busting balloons, Gainers suggestively eat cake, engrossed in Robot reproduction, we are watching Pam and Tommy do, what we imagine Pam and Tommy do, in just another 5 minutes we are lost, like foreign tourists, asking directions on our own sexual road-map.

Our minds think back to simpler times. I was 16, she was 18, it was a cool summer’s night, we were in love. Flickering candlelight cast long foreboding shadows against the back wall as we undressed. Cruelly, ridiculously, she played Madonna’s greatest hits as we lay together, forever coupling my first time with “Like a Virgin.”

Such innocence has no place here, not the Museum of Sex, not in modern New York, when the Puritans set sail from Plymouth covered head-to-toe in frilly knickers, wide-brimmed hats and God’s honest truth, one imagines that this compendium of kink is exactly what they were fleeing.

Laid out across three floors, the MOS covers everything we wanted to know about sex but never knew to ask, Jungle Quest anyone? Film, photography, art, politics, disease, contraception, it flicks between erotic ‘how-to’s’ to parental ‘don’t-do’s’.

Ever wanted to be wrapped like a thanksgiving Turkey, apple in mouth, legs bound to your body, then stuffed in a mock oven? Maybe Cannibal play is for you. Ever wanted to dress up like a frontier pioneer and ride your mate like a Blackpool pony? Ponyplay, I’m just saying. Ever wanted to dress head-to-toe in latex like a living doll? Ok now that’s just strange. Ever wanted to dress up in leather gimp gear and have mock-doctors inject an obscene, leg-crossing quantity of fluid directly into your scrotum? Medical play is just a google away.

[Some images after the jump are mildly NSFW]

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The first trailer for Darren Aronofsky’s newest, Black Swan, has finally been released. In it, Natalie Portman stars as Nina, a ballerina in the New York ballet circuit who has recently won the lead in Swan Lake. Her blossoming career takes a tense and competitive turn when a new dancer (Mila Kunis) joins the cast. If that sounds surprisingly tame coming from the director of Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain, the trailer will certainly remind you of who’s at the helm as it quickly transitions from dramatic rivalry to psychological thriller. I had no idea ballerinas could be so unsettling.

Black Swan will open the Venice Film Festival in September and will be released in select cities on December 1. Until then, watch the trailer. [UPDATE: It's on youtube now too. We've embedded it after the jump.]

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Yep, that’s right. There’s going to be another Tron movie. (Ah, the nostalgia). And Daft Punk is on the soundtrack. According to Cinemablend, there are nine songs in all. Here they are below!

We’ve got the rest after the jump. [via]
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Rooftop Films is presenting the First Annual Kickstarter Film Festival tonight on the roof of The Old American Can Factory (232 3rd St at 3rd Ave.) in Gowanus/Park Slope with “an evening celebrating projects supported by the new crowd-source funding website Kickstarter.com.” The 90-minute screening will feature a dozen or so film and video projects funded by the Kickstarter community, as well as all sorts of food and drink.

Advance tickets sold out but you can still get them at the door. Let’s watch a video!

Schedule:

• 8:00 Doors Open
• 8:30 Live Music by Zlatne Uste Balkan Brass Band
• 9:00 Films Begin
• 11:30 Reception in Courtyard

The lineup, via Rooftop Films, is after the jump.

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Something irks me about reposting online deals, but this seems too sweet a snag to pass-up.

Kgbdeals is offering $4 mailed movie tickets to any AMC or Loews theater today. (Just unsubscribe from the mailing list afterward?)

Takes 2-4 weeks to arrive, but summer blockbusters suck anyway right?

Well OK, I guess I’ll shell out $18 just to cry for you, Toy Story.

[via]

Christopher Nolan's 'Inception'

Given the steaming pile of shite that’s currently stinking up the multiplexes — is this the worst year ever for film? — we’re excited to see that a leaked Rolling Stone review for Christopher Nolan’s latest, ‘Inception,’ is pretty glowing:

The mind-blowing movie event of the summer arrives just in time to hold back the flow of Hollywood sputum that’s been sliming the multiplex. ‘Inception’… will be called many things, starting with James Bond Meets ‘The Matrix.’ You can feel the vibe of Ridley Scott’s ‘Blade Runner’ in it, and Nolan’s own ‘Memento’ and ‘The Dark Knight.’ But ‘Inception’ glows with a blue-flame intensity all its own. Nolan creates a dream world that he wants us to fill with our own secrets. I can’t think of a better goal for any filmmaker. Of course, trusting the intelligence of the audience can cost Nolan at the box office. We’re so used to being treated like idiots. How to cope with a grand-scale epic, shot in six countries at a reported cost of $160 million, that turns your head around six ways from Sunday? Dive in and drive yourself crazy, that’s how.

[via]

I feel you, McGinley– sometimes I wanna throw glass bottles at models’ heads too. Whoever can tell us who soundtracks the film (in the comments) gets a present! [Via]