Gunner Palace, the eponymous primary location in Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein’s engrossing documentary about American soldiers in Iraq, formerly was the home of Saddam Hussein’s son Uday. Dubbed “Uday’s Love Shack” by its new occupants, it has all the tacky grandeur you’d expect from a megalomaniacal playboy princeling: sumptuous chandeliers, sweeping staircase, bedchamber with […]
Godfrey Cheshire
Posted inArt
A Southern Sundance
Say you’re a North Carolina indie filmmaker with your first dramatic feature in the can. What are your chances of getting into the Sundance Film Festival? Back in the 1980s, when Robert Redford began turning his little snowbound convocation into the premier launching pad for American independent movies, the numbers weren’t too forbidding; a few […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Body and soul
Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby has been named the best film of 2004 by myself and numerous other writers (it won top honors from the National Society of Film Critics, of which I’m a member) and is the odds-on favorite to win Best Picture in the upcoming Oscar race. I also think it’s the best […]
Posted inFilm & Television
The hills are alive
Zhang Yimou has been foremost among mainland China’s contemporary directors since the international success of his debut feature Red Sorghum, which I encountered at the 1987 New York Film Festival. I first met Zhang himself in Beijing in 1992 when we were both visiting the set of Chen Kaige’s Farewell, My Concubine, which starred his […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Of stars and skies
Leonardo DiCaprio looks like he’s 12 years old. This is pretty astonishing, if you think of it. Eight years ago, in Titanic, he looked about 16. Now he seems to be sliding from a tenuous adolescence back toward a dewy, cherubic childhood. Is he really getting younger? Is this a case for Ripley’s Believe It […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Carnal ignorance
Is Western art in a state of decadent decline, purveying moral obtuseness where it once spread courageous enlightenment? That charge has been heard more and more in recent years, and from some surprisingly different sources. Much of the Muslim world now sees Western entertainment as an assault weapon aimed at conquering other cultures by overthrowing […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Natural born killer
Of the various places I’ve visited that are associated with Alexander the Great, two stand out in memory. Siwah Oasis, an astonishingly large and verdant depression in the Egyptian Sahara near Libya, contains the ruined temple whose oracle, world-famous in ancient times, reportedly revealed to Alexander his divinity as well as secrets that so stunned […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Tobacco road movie
Like many aspects of his films, the title of Ross McElwee’s Bright Leaves is rife with subtle resonances. The latest droll autobiographical odyssey by North Carolina’s (unofficial) cinematic poet laureate, the film begins as McElwee, returning once again to the Old North State, encounters a vintage Gary Cooper movie titled Bright Leaf, which, he muses, […]
Posted inNews
“Osama is free and laughing”
Kerry didn’t lose. America lost. Osama won. The numbers that kept recurring as the nervously expectant Big Night collapsed into a gloomy, foreboding Morning After weren’t blaring from any TV screen, and they weren’t new. They had been with us since the U.S. launched its unprovoked war on Iraq. Percentages ranging as high as 72 […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Let’s Go Get Stoned
There’s a moment maybe 30 or 40 minutes into Ray, Taylor Hackford’s biopic about Ray Charles, when the narrative’s lit fuse seems to hit cinematic gunpowder. We’re still in the early stages of the blind singer’s career at this point. Having survived a poor Southern upbringing, Ray (Jamie Foxx) has also made it past playing […]