The Aristocrats has one of the best marketing pitches in years. By now, you’re probably aware that this movie, directed and produced by Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette, beckons us to queue up for a documentary about “the dirtiest joke ever told.” It’s a hook as nearly irresistible as “Garbo speaks” (or “Garbo laughs”) or […]
David Fellerath
Bio: David Fellerath is INDY Week's culture and sports editor.Email: [email protected]: http://twitter.com/dfellerath
Posted inFilm & Television
Before the revolution
If you’re reading this review on Wednesday or Thursday, drop this paper, clear your schedule–blow off work if you have to–and head to Cary’s Galaxy Cinema, because a one of a kind, six-hour cinematic spectacle awaits you there. The Best of Youth, an epic drama of one bourgeois family in the last 40 years of […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Bleeding leads
The governing maxim of television news is, “If it bleeds, it leads.” It generally doesn’t matter why the bleeding occurred, or if the bleeding is terribly important to the world’s business. Sensationalism is the only yardstick that matters, which is why, at this writing, the tabloid media is persisting in reporting on a white girl […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Matters of size
Whither the North Carolina Gay and Lesbian Film Festival? Since beginning in 1995, the annual gala at Durham’s Carolina Theatre has evolved from a summer film series into a premier cultural arts event for the queer community. The festival now offers a full menu of entertainment and enrichment. This year’s fest, which runs Aug. 11-14, […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Piano forte
Piano forte When bad movies beget good remakes It’s a commonplace in film studies that it’s easier to make a good movie from a pulpy or downright bad book than from a great novel. While the Anna Kareninas of the world contain more information–carefully conveyed on the page–than can be properly adapted to the screen, […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Wimps and gimps
Murderball was the monster hit of Full Frame last April. I missed it during the festival, which I found myself regretting as this film about wheelchair rugby players racked up the Audience award and a share of the Grand Jury prize. Now that I’ve seen this entertaining but not all that surprising film, I understand […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Gay boys
What a strange country we live in. Less than a year after John Kerry’s presidential campaign was surreptitiously torpedoed by–in addition to the Swift Boat attacks–the convenient appearance of anti-gay marriage amendments on the ballots of a dozen key states, the sure-fire hit movie Wedding Crashers is a marriage comedy that, in effect, consecrates a […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Great dames
What an awful title, Ladies in Lavender. Of course it’s an English film set in the sepia-toned past with tinkling teacups and endlessly burning hearths. And of course it has old ladies in it–in this case, the one-two punch of the cinema world’s greatest dames, Judi Dench and Maggie Smith. So, with all the anticipation […]
Posted inNews
Because of Winn-Dixie
It could be the heat, or it could be the paranoia I feel between the successive releases of the new zombie flick Land of the Dead and the new Spielberg-Cruise meltdown called War of the Worlds. But when, in the span of a single week, the north side of inner Durham lost two supermarkets, I […]
Posted inNews
in krumping
After years of the mainstream culture industry promoting black youth culture as a nihilistic celebration of guns, ‘hos and gangstas, a new generation of kids in South Central L.A. has had enough. In David LaChapelle’s Rize, we see how teens who barely remember the Rodney King riots have fashioned an aggressive, hyperkinetic dance style called […]
