David Jacobson’s Down in the Valley begins with seductive compositions that recall the cinema of the 1970s, with wide-screen compositions of sun-baked, hot-hot Southern California landscapes, smog-choked cars packed onto scorched highways and an image of a teen girl in cut-off shorts and a halter top smoking a cigarette. But before David Jacobson’s film is […]
David Fellerath
Bio: David Fellerath is INDY Week's culture and sports editor.Email: [email protected]: http://twitter.com/dfellerath
Posted inFilm & Television
When bondage was innocent
If there was a golden age in American life, it surely was the two decades between the wars–that is, the Second World War that ended in 1945 and the Vietnam War, which was fatefully escalated in 1965. The landmarks between those years are impressive: the elimination of polio, the eradication of the color line in […]
Posted inNews
X-Gen
While Durham’s boosters–from the Chamber of Commerce to the artists in their urban studios–see a profitably funky downtown in the future, some local filmmakers aren’t playing along. In true, accentuate-the-negative punk fashion, a film that premieres this weekend on the Duke campus suggests that the notion of a harmonious and prosperous creative class is little […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Up with love
This weekend’s big Hollywood movie is directed by Raleigh native Peyton Reed. The Break-Up pairs Jennifer Aniston with Vince Vaughn to tell the story of a couple that has broken up, and their efforts to eradicate one another from their lives. It’s just the kind of twist on romantic comedy that made a smash out […]
Posted inGuides
Outside art
Is it too hot for art in the summertime? When it comes to literature, summer is the time to put away the Toni Morrison and pick up the Terry McMillan, so why should the other arts be any different? Traditionally, museums find it more difficult to draw people to exhibits during the sultry months. But […]
Posted inFilm & Television
The graduate
Sean Overbeeke’s short film Christmas Wish List is poised to win the Student Academy Award in Los Angeles on June 10. But as we talked over coffee in Durham one morning last week, the film that really interested him was The Da Vinci Code, which he was going to be seeing in a sneak preview […]
Posted inArt
Last refuge of the spandrel
To take a walk through downtown Durham with artists Sabri Reed and Andrew Barco is to see the city in multiple dimensions of time. By professional inclination, they do a lot of thinking about Durham’s urban future–the one with lofts, restaurants and culture all linked up by light rail–but right now, as we walk behind […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Childish things
L’Enfant, the latest trip out to society’s margins from the masterly Belgian team of Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, begins, as all their films do, in media res. After the opening credits, we see a teenaged girl march up the stairs of a miserable building and deliver angry kicks to an apartment door. She’s also holding […]
Posted inFilm & Television
The emperor and his clothes
The title itself is worthy of a quiet smirk: Art school? Confidential? Boasting a title of the sort usually reserved for celebrity sex exposés, ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL is the follow-up collaboration between the creators of Ghost World: director Terry Zwigoff and comic book artist Daniel Clowes, based on one of his stories published years ago. […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Three and out
Rarely in the course of a single year do three movies as thoroughly mediocre as The Promise, Don’t Come Knocking and One Last Thing… open on the same weekend. But bad movies come to art houses, too, and in this lull between the current hits Thank You for Smoking and Friends with Money and the […]
