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Winter is coming and Canada Goose is ready. The high-end outerwear brand, which has become ubiquitous on the streets of New York and in cities around the world, launched its first global marketing campaign on Tuesday. In an intimate setting at The Explorers Club in Manhattan, the Toronto-based brand showed “Out There,” a four-minute film depicting the outdoor explorations of five prominent adventurers who wear Canada Goose coats.

Filmed in New Zealand and directed by Paul Haggis of “Crash” and “Million Dollar Baby” fame, the piece shows a dogsled chased by a polar bear, a plane nearly crashing in the Canadian Arctic, and a woman falling through the frozen tundra in the Arctic Circle — all are actors portraying events inspired by history. Viewers can watch the film on Canada Goose’s website and pause it at any point to hear the actual adventurers tell their story with voiceovers and archival footage.

“We’re not a traditional magazine ad campaign-type brand,” said Kevin Spreekmeester, CMO for the 58-year-old retailer. “We try to find smarter, more tactful ways to deliver our message.” He noted that the campaign is primarily digital with a few out-of-home billboards. In Europe, the film will be shown in unauthorized “guerrilla-type screenings” on the walls of prominent buildings such as a well-known castle through the end of November. Part of the campaign’s budget, which was in the single-digit millions, was set aside for fines associated with such broadcasts.

The film marks only the second time that Mr. Haggis, a Canadian, has ventured into the world of commercials. When Canada Goose approached him with the script, he agreed to direct because of his national pride and personal affiliation with the brand. “It’s the unofficial coat of film crews,” he said. “I’ve been wearing it myself for 25 years.”

Canada Goose worked with Creative Artists Agency, its agency of record, and Huge on the campaign.

Continue reading at AdAge.

Set in Yonkers, N.Y., in the late 1980s and early ’90s and starring Oscar Isaac as an ambitious, embattled young politician, it bears all the hallmarks of the Simon style – the exploration of place through character and of character as an expression of place; naturalistic acting and dialogue; intercut multiple story lines that make the pace feel leisurely in its parts and propulsive overall; and a propensity to ask questions rather than to fix answers.

Written by Simon and longtime colleague William F. Zorzi – they worked together at the Baltimore Sun, and Zorzi later wrote for “The Wire” – and directed in its entirety by Paul Haggis (“Crash”), the series takes its substance and characters from a 1999 book by then-New York Times reporter Lisa Belkin; the title quotes F. Scott Fitzgerald – “Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.” (In the series, a newspaper reporter pronounces and explains the line, which is just the sort of disillusioned thing reporters in the talking pictures say.)

Belkin’s book – which Simon first pitched to HBO in 2001 and which Zorzi spent years re-reporting – tells the story of the Yonkers housing case. Sued in 1980 by the Department of Justice and the local branch of the NAACP over segregated schools and housing, the city was under court order to build 200 low-income and 800 affordable units in white, middle-class neighborhoods.

Continue reading at LATimes.com.

British director Martin Campbell (Casino Royale, Goldeneye), is in talks to direct Jackie Chan in a new thriller that was previously titled The Foreigner. The movie, from China-backed STX Entertainment, revolves around “a restaurant owner in London’s Chinatown who is tracking down a group of Irish terrorists responsible for the death of his daughter.”

The movie did have actor/director Nick Cassavettes at the helm, but he doesn’t seem to be attached to the project at all now. The movie, which is being produced by China-based backers STX Entertainment, is based on a book named The Chinaman by Stephen Leather, which was first published back in 2008.

Source: The Hollywood News

Serta’s lead creative agency, Doner, worked with director John Hamburg (Along Came Polly, I Love You Man) and Aardman animation director Peter Peake to launch “It’s Over” for the brand, in time for Memorial Day.

The 30-second “We Need to Talk” mixes selling points, animated sheep and sexual innuendo with not-so-hilarious results. Counting sheep in a mattress ad is a tired device to say the least. Doner plays with the idea a bit here, but something about the attempts at humor fall flat, and the woman holding up a tablet with the five common sleep problems Serta helps solve is painfully forced. The sheep return for “You’re Not Helping,” a 15-second spot that takes a more minimal approach.

Continue viewing on Adweek.

Last night, at the 36th annual Sports Emmy Awards, We Could Be King—a collaboration between Tribeca Digital Studios and The DICK’s Sporting Goods Foundation—won the award for Outstanding Sports Documentary. Released last August, the film, directed by three-time Emmy-nominated documentarian Judd Ehrlich (Magic Camp, Run For Your Life), takes an in-depth and intimate look at urban America’s education crisis, specifically in Philadelphia. Due to minimized budgets, Philly’s Germantown High School was absorbed into their biggest rival, Martin Luther King. Through football, the MLK Cougars move past the longstanding rivalry aside and motivate an entire community.

We Could Be King was produced as part of The DICK’s Sporting Goods Foundation’s first-ever Sports Matter program. More than 180 youth athletic teams from across the country were awarded funds through The DSG Foundation toward their athletic programs, including MLK. Learn more at sportsmatter.com.

Continue reading at Tribeca Film.

By Joshua Rothman

There were many books I read this year and expected to love—Elena Ferrante’s “The Days of Abandonment,” Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle: Book Three”—and I read them and loved them, as expected. But “Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed” took me by surprise. It’s a six-hundred-page book of interviews with the German director, in which decades’ worth of conversations have been edited down into a dozen seamless exchanges. Herzog’s interlocutor, the film scholar Paul Cronin, asks innocuous questions (“Could any of your films be categorised as ethnography or anthropology?”), and Herzog replies by telling incredible stories from his life in filmmaking. He talks, for example, about a near-death experience in a snow cave on Cerro Torre, about a plane crash narrowly avoided in Peru, about forging the documents that allowed him to make “Fitzcarraldo.” The stories are riveting—often, it seems as though Herzog is trying to top himself—and, if you want, you can try out his Bavarian accent as you read. The book is full of useful advice about the creative life; it has a self-help quality. “May I propose a Herzog dictum?” he asks at one point. “Those who read own the world. Those who watch television lose it.”

Continue reading on The New Yorker.

Cannes 2014: The Salt of the Earth review – photographer Sebastião Salgado is a magnetic subject. A documentary portrait of the renowned Brazilian photographer by Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado manages to be both illuminating and uplifting.

Sebastião Salgado is the Brazilian photographer whose nightmarish pictures of teeming, dirt-swamped gold miners electrified the world’s media in the mid-1980s. Now 70, Salgado has had his life story told by the joint force of his own son Juliano and Wim Wenders, and it’s a story that has turned out to have its own uplifting dynamic and character arc.

From his early years growing up on a Brazilian farm and a brief career as an economist, through his increasingly large-scale, and time-consuming, photographic projects that took him to many of the world’s most hostile and dangerous conflict zones, his timeline ends with a late-life return to his homeland and a determination to connect with the ravaged natural environment. This, at least, is the outline, and Salgado makes a magnetic subject – seeming, in his reflective, autumnal mood, a little older than he actually is. You do get the impression someone unswervingly focussed on his photography, to the extent of sacrificing large chunks of his family life to spend years on the road.

One obvious paradox is that Salgado’s pictures benefit from, and indeed are distinguished by, his habit of befriending and connecting with his subjects; that obviously was less the case with Juliano. That particular byplay is glossed over in the film, with Wenders’ reverential voiceover nudging things along. It’s testament to the strength of Salgado’s purpose, and the brilliance of his work, that the reverence never seems out of place, as his career is tracked from the gold mines, through the Sahel and the Gulf war oil fires, and into the death-frenzy of mid-90s Rwanda. It’s made clear that here, in the Rwanda-Congo border country, that Salgado came to the end of something; not compassion, exactly, but the ability to force himself into the lives of utterly miserable and desperate human beings; his subsequent retreat into environmental activism and nature photography making perfect sense.

Continue reading on TheGuardian.com.

The Barbican’s City Visions film season opens with Wim Wenders’ Cathedrals of Culture, a collection of short films by a star-studded line-up of directors.

Guardian writer, Chris Michael, catches up with Wim Wenders about his home city, Berlin.

Continue reading on Guardian.com.

Starring in the Australian real estate company’s latest campaign called Australia Lives Here, Arnold Schwarzenegger draws on his signature sense of humour and Austrian accent to deliver the sell.

Walking onto a staged movie set and approaching his assistant named Dylan, the Terminator actor seems to have plans of making a move Down Under.
‘Dylan, I’ve decided it’s time for me to move back to Austria,’ the actor told his assistant.

‘I’ve been looking at realestate.com.au and Austria has some great places,’ he continues, mistaking Australia for his home country of Austria.
‘Realestate.com.au is Australia sir,’ Dylan politely interrupts, but the former Governor of California maintains his confidence and certainty.

‘Dylan you pronounce things so funny, that’s what I like about you,’ he laughs.

And getting even more passionate about his relocation plans, he points to his phone and says, ‘but look at these places here. Sydney, Wagga Wagga.’

‘But no Vienna right?’ Dylan enquires, hoping the celebrity will realise his mistake.

‘I know so much has changed,’ Arnold says, completely oblivious to his employee’s hints.

And he goes on to truly deliver his marketing pitch, outlining the favourable features of the website.

‘This gives me the tools, the information, the market data, I mean this is fantastic,’ he exclaims, before adding: ‘Book me some inspections, alright?’

And it seems that the star is so eager to jet set across the world that he decides to skip filming his flick, relying on his body double.
‘Hello, how are you doing?’ he cheekily says, staring at his reflection in the mirror.

realestate.com.au Group Manager Marketing Strategy, Natalie Feehan says, ‘Through Arnie’s discovery of realestate.com.au, we get to see other parts of the site that are helpful for consumers like suburb profiles, sold price information, investment data and editorial content.’

Continue reading on The Daily Mail

Director Michael Apted — whose work has spanned features such as the James Bond filmThe World Is Not Enough and documentaries including the Up series — turns the camera on photographers and their lenses in his new documentary, Bending the Light, which is scheduled to premiere this weekend at Michael Moore’s Traverse City Film Festival.

Canon commissioned the documentary, in part to mark its production of lenses — it has produced more than 90 million of them, a statistic, it claims, that is higher than other lens manufacturers.

Apted had creative control over his unique look at Canon’s iconic lenses as he explored the art of photography through the words of photographers themselves, as well as through interviews with the craftspeople who lovingly make the glass at Canon’s Utsunomiya, Japan factory.

“I didn’t want to make it a technical film; I wanted to give it human context,” Apted tells The Hollywood Reporter.

Continue reading on Hollywood Reporter.