Ain’t Them Bodies Saints opens Friday As phony-baloney as the strained title, David Lowery’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saints is a pastiche of films from the 1970s that were themselves artistic filterings of bygone Americana. Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara play “outlaws” in a version of Texas that we know mostly from Terrence Malick filmsnatural light, […]
David Fellerath
Bio: David Fellerath is INDY Week's culture and sports editor.Email: [email protected]: http://twitter.com/dfellerath
Posted inCulture
A tale of two alleged batterers: Durham, football and the legal process
Photo by David FellerathFrom left: NCCU interim head coach Dwayne Foster, NCCU Chancellor Debra Saunders-White and NCCU athletic director Ingrid Wicker-McCree at Thursday’s brief press conference Arrested on Monday, suspended on Tuesday, fired on Thursday. That was the fate of Henry Frazier III, coach of North Carolina Central University (NCCU). Arrested on Monday, practicing on […]
Posted inArt
Raleigh’s Wilton Barnhardt on his new novel
Lookaway, Lookaway By Wilton Barnhardt St. Martin’s Press; 368 pp. Barnhardt Appearances: Quail Ridge Books Aug. 23, 7:30 p.m. Regulator Bookshop Aug. 27, 7 p.m. McIntyre’s Sept. 7, 11 a.m. Flyleaf Books Oct. 11, 6:30 p.m. (to be preceded by a bourbon sampling) The past lives of Wilton Barnhardt include being a NASCAR beat writer […]
Posted inFilm & Television
The killer whale in the bathtub: Blackfish
Blackfish opens Friday In the first 10 or 15 minutes of the killer whale documentary Blackfish, there’s one basic, extremely worthy conclusion we’ll draw: Humans should not keep orcas in captivity. Let’s say it again: Humans should not keep these intelligent and social creatures, which can live 70 or 80 years and reach 8 or […]
Posted inFilm & Television
A man and a woman meet during Museum Hours…
Museum Hours opens Friday There have been news articles about how refined Hollywood script analysis is becoming. It turns out that certain story beats happen at more or less the exact same place in many current films: The statement of the theme comes in the first few minutes, the false victory after 55 minutes, and […]
Posted inCulture
Paul Schrader on working with Lindsay Lohan and The Canyons
IFC FilmsJames Deen and Lindsay Lohan in The Canyons Paul Schrader is one of the more intense members of the New Hollywood generation that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He first attracted notice as a writer, producing the screenplays for Sydney Pollack’s The Yakuza (1974) and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). He […]
Posted inSports
The people behind Bull City Summer
Sam Stephenson is a large man drawn to large projects. He’s part ethnographer, part collector, part Americanist and part project manager. In another century, he might have been a botanist, obsessively collecting plant specimens and categorizing them. In a sense, that’s what he does today, only his field of study is American cultural history. For […]
Posted inFilm & Television
The Hunt, a dark drama about child abuse allegations from Denmark
The Hunt opens Friday Fewer than six million people live in Denmark, but judging by that nation’s film industry, it feels like a much bigger country. Going all the way back to the silent era, the Danes have specialized in a brand of religious and moral melodrama, from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Surviving the Holocaust underground in No Place on Earth
No Place on Earth opens Friday No Place on Earth is unhappy evidence that, no matter how many Holocaust movies one has seen, the extent of the depravity was such that there are always more untold stories. In Janet Tobias’s workmanlike documentary, the setting is rural Ukraineabove and below. The film begins with an unusual, […]
Posted inFilm & Television
The Danish drama A Hijacking is tense but formulaic
A Hijacking opens Friday The scourge of piracy in the Indian Ocean is a tricky subject for a modern movie thriller. It’s hard to know exactly who to root for. While the pirates are lawbreakers and often murderers, they’re also dark-skinned renegades from one of the most god-forsaken regions in the world; one could argue […]