After its enthusiastically-received inauguration last summer, the Colored Pictures Short Film Festival is back for a second go-round in Durham’s Carolina Theatre. Encouraged and emboldened by the response to last year’s event, the festival’s brain trust of Sherri Daye Scott, Shani Harris Peterson and Russell Robinson have expanded the programming to two days, and have […]
David Fellerath
Bio: David Fellerath is INDY Week's culture and sports editor.Email: [email protected]: http://twitter.com/dfellerath
Posted inFilm & Television
Father, son and the man
With Baadasssss!, co-writer and director Mario Van Peebles has has offered a tribute to his father, Melvin Van Peebles. The film is also a case of cinematic one-upsmanship in which Mario himself stars as his father Melvin, warts and all, during the course of the older man’s production of his greatest claim to fame, the […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Lost in the desert
The setting is a newsroom where everyone has stopped to watch the television as the world’s most powerful man speaks. “My fellow citizens: The United Nations Security Council has not lived up to its responsibilities, so we will rise to ours. Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours. Their refusal to […]
Posted inNews
Kansas City Bomber
Kansas City Bomber For years now it’s been fascinating to watch each new generation discover and try on the mothballed cultural relics of its parents. Somewhere as this is being written, a child is unearthing a Members Only jacket, a pair of leg warmers or a Frankie Goes to Hollywood T-shirt. It’s also interesting to […]
Posted inFilm & Television
A Light that Never Goes On
The perverse new French film Love Me If You Dare is a rare date movie for romantic masochists. We know who we are. Yes, it’s a movie in which would-be mates prefer to punish each other rather than submit to their obvious, crushing love. But to the credit of the film’s director, a first-timer named […]
Posted inNews
in Durham encores
Ghetto violence as realist, journalistic entertainment has been a media staple for a generation now, since that Bush I-era perfect storm of N.W.A., Boyz in the Hood and the Rodney King beating. But just as two of thug life culture’s most successful practitioners, Sean (P. Diddy) Combs and Jay-Z (nee Shawn Carter), have begun to […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Twice told tales
The primary challenge facing a documentary project like Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me is whether it can succeed in bridging a huge cultural and social divide. It’s not news that cheap, greasy burgers are an anti-nutritious, mechanically produced simulacrum of food. We know fast food is addictive, fattening, dependent on unsustainable agricultural models, and that […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Sun and shadows
Sometimes the difference in the cinematic styles of two countries is as simple as geography. Has anyone ever seen a Scottish film that wasn’t drained of color and shot through with rain and fog? Thanks to Scotland’s oblique reception of sunshine, they have a national cinema suffused with substance abuse and gloomy, disaffected violence. Italian […]
Posted inFilm & Television
American travesty
Lars von Trier’s Dogville may be the least entertaining great movie since his own Dancer in the Dark, released four years ago. Dancer in the Dark spent two and a half hours detailing the escalating misfortunes of its central character, a blind factory worker played by Bjork, only to snap her neck on the gallows […]
Posted inGuides
Fahrenheits and lows
Right now, the biggest summer movie news is that Disney is refusing to let subsidiary Miramax release Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, for fear of offending either Jeb Bush, Disney World’s (no-)tax collector or the Bush supporters who consume Disney products. Since Moore has known about Disney’s position for over a year, much of the current […]
