Those arriving last Thursday at the Carolina Theatre in Durham for the festival formerly known as DoubleTake were greeted with altered signs and an unfamiliar name on the program. Suddenly, the festival was being called The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. The rechristening, which was made official at 1 p.m. that afternoon, would become the […]
David Fellerath
Bio: David Fellerath is INDY Week's culture and sports editor.Email: [email protected]: http://twitter.com/dfellerath
Posted inGuides
Race and Faith
You don’t have to be familiar with the specifics of the James Byrd lynching to be disturbed by the opening of the new documentary, Two Towns of Jasper. Beginning with a haunting tracking shot down the dirt road that proved to be the death of Byrd, the film is an absorbing, intermittently disturbing portrait of […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Day Tripping
Oscar time is coming up, and the hype machine is going into overdrive. Though the candidates are generally worthy ones, I’m struck by the fact that three of my favorite films from last year have essentially been ignored: Mulholland Drive, Waking Life and Ghost World. Each of these films has notable flaws, but one thing […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Not a Girl
“Whaddya think of Britney Spears? Hottie or trailer trash?” This was a question that came up in the conversational dregs of a well-oiled dinner party the other night. The question was addressed to me, so the gears in my cranium slipped and ground for a moment before I chose what seemed to be the better […]
Posted inArt
A Fan’s Notes
As every Triangle basketball fan knows by now, the men’s basketball team of the University of North Carolina is staggering through what could become the worst season in the school’s history. The team’s fortunes have fallen so far that it’s unlikely to be invited to the NCAA tournament, something that hasn’t happened since 1974, when […]
Posted inGuides
Blank Check for Progress
Raleigh’s population has nearly doubled in the last 20 years, and now nearly 300,000 people are jostling for space in the state’s capital. Suburban sprawl is lapping up against surrounding watersheds, and smog and traffic congestion are haunting a city that prizes its quiet neighborhoods of broad lawns and shady verandas. Now, city planners and […]
Posted inNews
Life as a house
Last Thursday, our nation’s mossbacked Attorney General was telling his critics that “your tactics only aid terrorists … [and] encourage people of good will to remain silent in the face of evil.” That night in Pittsboro, in a fitting rebuke, about 60 people of good will gathered to celebrate a man who has spent his […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Bad Boys and Girls
Riding in Cars with Boys recounts the rough ride of a bright teenage girl, from early pregnancy and marriage through single motherhood, and it culminates triumphantly in her mid-30s. Penny Marshall directs the material–which is based on the memoir of the same title by Beverly Donofrio–as wry comedy, and for the most part, the approach […]
Posted inArt
Electric, Eclectic
Most discussions of the difficulties of independent filmmaking center around the never-ending search for money. Filmmakers bemoan the high cost of producing a movie, but the struggle to complete a film often obscures an equally vexing problem: how to find an audience. There are, of course, hundreds of film festivals around the world promising exhibition, […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Heat Relief
Traditionally, summertime is a fallow season for cinephiles. While Hollywood studios pelt the country with a blizzard of special effects and dumb scripts, we timorous and pallid film lovers huddle around our VCRs, waiting for the first signs of fall, when intelligent and artful cinema once again noses its way out of the ground and […]