44 Plays for 44 Presidents The ArtsCenter Through Oct. 7 Just in time for election season, The ArtsCenter in Carrboro has mounted the fun and fast-paced 44 Plays for 44 Presidents, a collection of staged shorts concerning history, politics and the U.S. executive branch. Beginning with George Washington, 44 Plays addresses the presidents in succession, […]
Glenn McDonald
Posted inArt
Burning Coal’s spiky Jailbait
Jailbait Burning Coal Theatre at Murphey School Auditorium Through Oct. 7 In Jailbait, a spiky drama playing at the Murphey School Auditorium as part of Burning Coal’s Second Stage series, high school sophomores Claire and Emmy decide to play dress-up and sneak into a 21-and-over dance club. Their planbarely thought throughis to get drunk, flirt […]
Posted inCulture
DVD+Digital: Dirty jokes, Danish bacchanals and Klown
courtesy of Drafthouse Films The comedy of the idiot man-child has been a running theme in American movies of late, with an endless parade of films celebrating the joys of perpetual adolescence. The 2010 Danish hit KLOWN, new to DVD and Blu-ray this week, proves that the trend isn’t a strictly American phenomenon, and there’s […]
Posted inCulture
DVD+Digital: Sex, death and Steve Martin
courtesy of Lionsgate Home Entertainment This week’s Cognitive Dissonance Double Feature begins with THE CABIN IN THE WOODS, a twisty and postmodern horror movie from writer/producer Joss Whedon and his posse. New this week to DVD and Blu-ray, the film has been available via select video-on-demand for a while following its theatrical run this summer. […]
Posted inArt
Raleigh’s SPARKcon arts fest opens up
SPARKcon Sept. 13-16 Downtown Raleigh Raleigh designer Aly Khalifa realized that he had reached a landmark of sorts earlier this year. He was on the other side of the globe, and people wanted to know about SPARKcon, the unique street festival he helped found in 2006. “I was on a fellowship this year, traveling through […]
Posted inCulture
DVD+Digital: Titanic, 9/11 and the mad riot of home video
courtesy of Paramount Pictures The weird array of home video releases in any given week is stunning. Those few mainstream titles that cycle through Redbox and Blockbuster are just the tip of the iceberg. Every Tuesday brings a flood of material on DVD, Blu-ray and digital download — foreign films, classic reissues, independent movies, TV […]
Posted inCulture
The Words: Bradley Cooper and Jeremy Irons in a phony literary puzzler
courtesy of CBS Films THE WORDS** starsOpens Friday In 1922, Ernest Hemingway’s wife Hadley was traveling from Paris to Switzerland by train when she made a rather historic mistake. Getting up briefly to buy a bottle of water, she left behind a suitcase containing virtually all of her husband’s fiction writing up to that point. […]
Posted inCulture
DVD+Digital: In defense of the Jason Statham movie
courtesy of Lionsgate Home Entertainment Professional tough guy Jason Statham’s new film SAFE — new to DVD, Blu-ray and digital this week — is not a very good movie. But it’s not a bad one either, and it illustrates nicely the many reasons that Statham is the best action movie star working today. In Safe, […]
Posted inCulture
Dialogue, density and Robert Pattinson in Cronenberg’s tedious Cosmopolis
courtesy of eOne Films COSMOPOLIS* starOpens Friday It must have seemed like solid math at the time: Cerebral director David Cronenberg (+) postmodernist writer Don DeLillo (x) ascendent movie star Robert Pattinson (=) edgy art film with box office potential. Sometimes, the numbers just don’t add up. Cronenberg’s tedious and talky Cosmopolis, adapted from DeLillo’s […]
Posted inCulture
DVD+Digital: H.P. Lovecraft, Lovely Molly and Halloween in August
courtesy of Image Entertainment When The Blair Witch Project was released in 1999, it broke all sorts of molds. The creepy faux-documentary, about three student filmmakers who get lost in the woods, was the first to leverage the “found footage” idea into a full-length, mainstream horror movie. The film also employed new digital age promotion […]