Dan Eldon was young, beautiful, dashing, insouciant and cosmopolitan. Raised in Kenya in the Ngong country made famous by Isak Dinesen, he embarked on wild trans-African journeys, bounced around a few American colleges and tried his hand as a war photographer with Reuters. In 1993, Eldon was killed at the hands of a mob in […]
David Fellerath
Bio: David Fellerath is INDY Week's culture and sports editor.Email: [email protected]: http://twitter.com/dfellerath
Posted inFilm & Television
Old Brit things
Stephen Fry’s directorial debut is a cheerfully decadent and anarchic farce called Bright Young Things, and well it should be so titled. Its principal actors are mostly unknown, which means that Fry–a devoted, dandyish lord of British theater and letters–cast them for the best possible reason: They are exceptionally talented. Bright young things, indeed. The […]
Posted inFilm & Television
The blind masseur
Takeshi “Beat Takeshi” Kitano occupies a curious place in the pantheon of world cinema. When this quadruple threat actor/director/writer/editor was first introduced to a wide international audience with Hana-Bi (Fireworks) he was the coolest thing to come from the East since John Woo, Jackie Chan and the rest of the Hong Kong invasion. Fortunately for […]
Posted inNews
in vast conspiracies
in vast conspiracies It seems so long ago that the nation was brought to the shuddering brink of constitutional crisis with the impeachment of Bill Clinton. For that thank the zealotry of Ken Starr, who turned his initial charge to look into an obscure Arkansas land deal into a six-year, $70 million-dollar vendetta that resulted […]
Posted inArt
The queer cinematic eye
Given the sheer numbers involved in this year’s North Carolina Gay and Lesbian Film Festival (94 films, including shorts), it’s inevitable that the quality of the programming will be erratic. Still, the volume and breadth of the films on display will provide something for everyone. There are shorts and features, fictions and docs, domestic films […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Fear eats the family
Many of us recoil at the thought of our parents doing it–the specific intimacies they share in their bed. As a result, we’ve built a mental firewall between their sexuality and that of everyone else. But Paula, a 30-something woman in the new British drama The Mother, doesn’t have the luxury of denying the reality […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Melting pot
It’s rare to sit down at a Hollywood movie of any kind and enjoy a heady blast of refreshingly rude, irreverent attitude. Actually, with Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, a new comedy from Danny Leiner, it would be more accurate to call it a heady blast of acrid cannabis smoke. Harold and Kumar […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Madstone facility to reopen?
When the New York-based Madstone Theaters closed its operations in Cary and everywhere else on June 7, the Triangle’s art house screens were reduced by a third, from 18 to 12. But the local facility’s owner, York Properties of Raleigh, immediately went to work finding a replacement tenant. The Independent has learned that the realtor […]
Posted inFilm & Television
A geek’s progress
One of the biggest hits at this year’s Sundance festival was Napoleon Dynamite, a low-budget no-name comedy set in a small Idaho town. The first feature from the husband and wife team of Jared and Jerusha Hess, both of whom are in their early 20s, this film wears its lo-fi amateurism on its sleeve while […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Mongolia story
The Story of the Weeping Camel is a handsomely photographed ethnographic excursion into the world of Mongolian shepherding. With its story of a Mongolian family’s efforts to save a baby camel from a death resulting from his mother’s rejection of him, this is a hard, hard film to resist. There’s nothing poetic or metaphorical about […]
