In retrospect, there’s no studio era more fondly recalled than Warner Brothers in the 1930s. At the time, it was considered a cheap outfit with cut-rate actors and cheap sets, unlike the swanky productions of MGM and Columbia. Refugees from the Polish pogroms, Jack and Harry Warner wanted their films to have a measure of […]
David Fellerath
Bio: David Fellerath is INDY Week's culture and sports editor.Email: [email protected]: http://twitter.com/dfellerath
Posted inFilm & Television
Portrait in progress
Steve Channing places his much used telephone on his desk in the front office of Video Dialog, Inc. There’s a For Lease sign in front of the house on Durham’s Broad Street–which was built in the 1920s as company housing for an Erwin Mill supervisor–and Channing explains that he is moving downtown into a building […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Survivor: Rwanda
Not being able to watch football or anything else since I let my satellite television subscription lapse at the close of the most recent Sopranos season, I headed to a multiplex last Sunday afternoon to join a surprisingly large crowd of non-sports fans to see Hotel Rwanda. It’s the tale of the 1994 genocide, which […]
Posted inNews
in ones and zeros
The evergreen Flicker Film Festival plays film shorts to packed houses every other month, but out of aesthetic conviction, its offerings are restricted to celluloid productions. Now, a group of Triangle artists is presenting the 301 Film Forum–some of the fine short digital work that’s been produced by local filmmakers over the last couple of […]
Posted inFilm & Television
The mop of the world
The best Israeli films I’ve seen in recent years–and my viewing has been by no means exhaustive–have avoided explicit engagement with the Palestinian question in favor of explorations of surrogate forms of forbidden relationships. Films such as Late Marriage, Yossi and Jagger and The Holy Land all concerned illicit relationships and the battles of young […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Notes from a new Galaxy
Can a locally-owned, ethnically distinct art movie theater succeed where New York City sophisticates failed? This was the overriding question as I made my first visit to the gorgeously redecorated Galaxy Cinema in Cary, which opened Dec. 30 in the space formerly known as Madstone. But first, there’s the lobby. Above the concession stand is […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Child’s play
I have to admit that when I first encountered the name of Lemony Snicket, it struck me as unbearably cute, something that belongs on the plushie-Care Bears end of the children’s toy spectrum. When I discovered that this Lemony Snicket is actually a guy my age named Daniel Handler, and not a corporate entity like […]
Posted inFilm & Television
The beast with a billion backs
It’s been a rather slow fall prestige film season thus far, with only one high-toned entry finding full traction–that would be Sideways–and other would-be’s failing to make much of an impression, such as Closer and Alexander. Given the various unmet expectations, it’s a perfect moment for the old-fashioned and inspirational Kinsey to find the audience […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Dead soul
Well, the best reason to see The Machinist is also the best reason not to see it. That would be the spectacle of Christian Bale setting a new standard for actorly self-abasement. To get into his character of a haunted, anorexic insomniac, Bale lost over 60 pounds–perhaps a third of his body weight. Naturally, he […]
Posted inFilm & Television
A star is bored
Annette Bening is back, and if there’s any justice in Hollywood (there’s not) then she’ll be greeted with an Oscar for her turn as an aging stage star in Istvan Szabo’s Being Julia. Although there’s been good work by other actresses this year–Virginia Madsen in Sideways, Imelda Staunton in Vera Drake, Julie Delpy in Before […]
