The Bicycle Film Festival is back! Entries are due April 21.

Hey Girlfriend!

Lena Dunham, the creator, writer, director, and star of HBO’s highly anticipated new show Girls (which premiers April 25) is curating a film series at BAM, titled Hey Girlfriend! (awesome). The films featured will explore female relationships, and according to Dunham, inspired her to become a film maker. The series runs April 2nd-8th and features: This is My Life, Girlfriends, Mulholland Drive, The Last Days of Disco, The Craft, Clueless (YES), Vamps and Career Girls. Select nights will have Q&A sessions with Dunham as well. This whole event seems like Dunham’s idea of having some friends over for a goofy movie night, except all of Brooklyn is invited.

One film garnering a lot of positive press at SXSW this year was The Big Easy Express, a heavy nod to Festival Express, a film documenting the Grateful Dead, The Band, Janis Joplin and other performers as they toured Canada by train in the summer of 1970. This modern day equivalent features Mumford & Sons, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, and my personal favorites, Old Crow Medicine Show, as they travel by vintage train from San Francisco to New Orleans, stopping to perform at 6 sold out shows along the way. Says the director Emmett Malloy, ”It’s a hippie freakout fest that’s really triumphant.” Sounds good to me.

Filmmaker Casey Neistat recently made a film for a NY Times Op Ed piece where he locked up his own bike, and audaciously tried to steal it, seeing if anyone will notice or stop him. Every experiment is a failure, including stealing his own bike in front of a police station. Keep your eyes open, New Yorkers, and d eath to bike thieves.

The Central Park Effect is an awesomely nerdy looking film that will be screened at SXSW this week that explores the wide range of birds that flock to Central Park, the reasons for their migration, and the dedicated birders who love them. But perhaps more importantly, the film features author Jonathan Franzen saying “dweeb”.

Host a Take Away Show!

If you live in NYC/BK and love La Blogotheque and their Take Away Shows as much as I do, you now have a chance to host a show of your own! The team at La Blogotheque is heading from Paris to NYC this spring, and will be filming shows all over the area. Sign up and who knows, maybe Real Estate/Sharon Van Etten/Bon Iver/Arcade Fire/Grizzly Bear will show up at your door. More info here!

Sundance Shorts

Here’s a good way to spend your morning: Sundance has put nine of its short films online to view for free. I would highly recommend Debutante Hunters, a documentary about female hunters in South Carolina, but there’s lots of great films to choose from.

SHUT UP AND PLAY THE HITS!

So it looks like all of us who missed the last LCD Soundsystem show can stop being so bummed out: Sundance has announced it will screen SHUT UP AND PLAY THE HITS (which apparently Win Butler of Arcade Fire screamed at Murphy during the the show), a documentary following James Murphy around for the 48 hours surrounding his final concert. Cannot WAIT to see footage from this!

Alec’s Top 10

Turns out Alec Baldwin likes really good movies. Check out the rest of Criterion’s Top 10 Lists to see the favorite films of Wes Anderson, Steve Buscemi, James Franco and others.