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Casey Davies may be the least macho man you’ve ever met. When Casey Davies answers the phone, he is seldom surprised when the caller asks, “May I speak with Ms. Casey Davies?” Callers often assume that Casey Davies is a woman because Casey Davies is a woman’s name. When Casey Davies goes to work, his male co-workers sit around and read manly magazines and talk about manly things. When Casey Davies goes to the grocery store late at night to buy dog food, he is beaten and mugged by thugs on motorbikes. Casey Davies hardly puts up a fight.

Dark, sinister, and disarmingly hilarious, “The Art of Self-Defense” tells the story of how someone like Casey Davies learns to stand up for himself by signing up for karate classes. But it’s hardly that simple: Once enrolled, he starts to feel more confident in his personal life, even...

Shoot underway on Brooklyn and Taiwan-set drama from writer-director Jason Lester.

Shoot is underway on Us drama Taipei, starring rising actors Justin Chon (Twilight), whose film Gook, which he directed and stars in, will premiere at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, and Screen Star Of Tomorrow Ellie Bamber (Nocturnal Animals), recently cast in the upcoming Disney feature The Nutcracker And The Four Realms.

Based on the novel from Tao Lin, the film follows the unexpected, fast-blooming romance between Brooklyn writers Erin and Paul.

It tracks the pair through a spontaneous wedding, drug binges, all-night urban revels, and to Taiwan, the country of Paul’s birth, where the couple will confront their individual alienation.

Jason Lester wrote and is directing the film, which is his feature debut. Mark L. Lester and Jesy Odio are producing with Jeff Sackman and Berry Meyerowitz executive producing.

“Taipei is about love, alienation, loneliness, drugs, writing, technology – how we can exist and connect amidst...

Ellie Bamber and Justin Chon have joined the cast of Jason Lester's romance Taipei, based on the novel by Tao Lin. The film, which has begun shooting, follows the unexpected, fast-blooming romance between Brooklyn writers Erin (Bamber) and Paul (Chon). It tracks the pair through a spontaneous wedding, drug binges, all-night urban revels and to Taiwan, the country of Paul's birth, where the couple will confront their individual alienation. Jason Lester wrote and is…...

Justin Chon, better known to Twilight fans as Eric Yorkie, together with Ellie Bamber, most recently seen in Nocturnal Animals and now cast in Disney's big-screen remake of The Nutcracker, have nabbed lead roles in the upcoming drama Taipei.

The film, which began principal photography Friday, is being directed by Jason Lester in his feature-length debut and is based on the acclaimed 2013 novel by Tao Lin. The story follows the fast-blooming romance between Brooklyn, N.Y., writers Erin and Paul, tracking the pair through a spontaneous wedding, drug binges, all-night urban revels and a trip to Taiwan, the country of...

11 new dramatisations are coming to BBC Radio 4's Dangerous Visions season, feat. Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, and new writers...

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Attention sci-fi fans looking grumpily ahead at the next few weeks' shorts-and-spherical-object-packed TV schedules: radio is your sanctuary.

Specifically, BBC Radio Four and its second season of dystopian and science-fiction drama is your sanctuary. Tomorrow, Saturday the 14th of June, a run of eleven new dramatisations offering "clever, imaginative and disturbing takes on what the future might hold" begins under the umbrella title: Dangerous Visions.

First up in the fortnight of programming is modern sci-fi classic, Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man, with Game Of Thrones' Iain Glen voicing the title role, airing this Saturday at 2.30pm. That's closely followed by a new dramatisation of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? broadcast on Sunday the 15th of June at 3pm, featuring An Adventure In Space And Time...

Past the Bonfire of the Exes and Mount Amazon, take a shortcut through The Atwoods, avoiding the Reef of Pretension and the Twitter whirlpool – the picture above is a map of the modern writer’s mind. It was drawn by Joe Dunthorne, author of Submarine, who is one of 16 high-profile contributors to Where You Are. A box-set of “personal maps” by Alain de Botton, Tao Lin, Adam Thirlwell and Olafur Eliasson among others, it will be published by Visual Editions in December; an interactive website is live now at www.where-you-are.com.

Filmmakers Tao Lin and Megan Boyle aren't the first people to find causal connection in drugs and art, but they may have broken new ground in their conspicuous consumption. The name of their production company, MDMAfilms, is the embodiment of truth in advertising: They take drugs and then they make movies. Since forming the company last November, they have produced three features: "Mdma," "Bebe Zeva" and "Mumblecore," all of which ...

Filmmakers Tao Lin and Megan Boyle aren't the first people to find causal connection in drugs and art, but they may have broken new ground in their conspicuous consumption. The name of their production company, MDMAfilms, is the embodiment of truth in advertising: They take drugs and then they make movies. Since forming the company last November, they have produced three features: "Mdma," "Bebe Zeva" and "Mumblecore," all of which ...

Filmmakers Tao Lin and Megan Boyle aren't the first people to find causal connection in drugs and art, but they may have broken new ground in their conspicuous consumption. The name of their production company, MDMAfilms, is the embodiment of truth in advertising: They take drugs and then they make movies. Since forming the company last November, they have produced three features: "Mdma," "Bebe Zeva" and "Mumblecore," all of which ...

Last year, after becoming a fan of Nicholas Rombes’s “10/40/70″ series at The Rumpus, I did a short interview with him for the blog. I asked about his approach to film criticism, which involves extrapolating larger meanings from a film’s isolated moments. (His “10/40/70″ series critiqued films by looking at the scenes occurring at those precise minute marks). His reply:

When I first started teaching film in the early 1990s, we’d screen them on via VHS tapes playing on VCRs hooked up to TV sets. Pausing a film for an extended period of time to look at the composition of a frame wasn’t practical. It was only with the advent of the DVD it and large-screen projection that it became feasible, in my film classes, to pause a film with clarity and really explore the meaning of the image. This—and an essay by Roland Barthes called “The...