Writer-director David Gordon Green has crafted a quiet miracle in his feature-film debut, George Washington. Using a cast of non-professional actors and a crew of classmates from the North Carolina School of the Arts, Green tells the story of George, an African-American boy who must wear a helmet because his fontanel (the soft spot on […]
Kyle Creason
Posted inFilm & Television
Drugs, Sex and Freedom of Speech
The most celebrated film of the year, Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic is being hailed as both a modern masterpiece and an important indictment of America’s ineffectual war on drugs. Most North American critics have identified Soderbergh as the latest “thinking person’s” filmmaking messiah, as if he has risen from the black soil of Baton Rouge, La., […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Tarheel in Tinseltown
A Raleigh native and graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, Peyton Reed has brought his playful and literate style of filmmaking to movies like The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes and The Love Bug for the “Wonderful World of Disney” series on ABC. Also the director of music videos for such Triangle mainstays as The Connells and Superchunk, […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Hollywood Alchemy
The mystical art of alchemy has often been compared to the act of writing fiction. Each requires dedication to an ethereal and misunderstood art. Both involve struggling to create precious gold out of ordinary, everyday things: base metal and words. Yet, if the motto of the medieval alchemists was “Our gold is not the common […]
Posted inFilm & Television
The state of production
“Filmmaking in North Carolina is kinda coming back with a vengeance,” says Bill Arnold, director of the North Carolina Film Office for the past 20 years. “We’ve actually got them [film productions] standing in line now to come in and shoot.” What has Hollywood clamoring for North Carolina studio space is the threat of a […]
Posted inArt
Finding home
In Bull Durham, Ron Shelton’s 1988 homage to America’s two favorite pastimes, baseball and sex, Susan Sarandon’s Annie Savoy comments, ” If you know where home plate is, then you know where first base is, and second and everything else–’cause they’re always in the same place in relation to home. Don’t you see? If you […]
Posted inNews
An arch-druid, a mwng and a tart
An arch-druid, a mwng and a tartby kyle creasonWhen talking about the current state of Welsh rock music the saying, “Heb ddyfalbara athrylith ydy a ‘n amhlantadwy gorweddfa” certainly comes to mind. For a territory the size of New Jersey, Wales has done amazingly well for itself, giving the world John Cale, Richard Burton, Anthony […]
Posted inFilm & Television
American teeth
For an action movie to win the heart, it should be thrilling, clever, or in the very least, active. Amazingly, M:I-2 is a creature I never thought I’d encounter, a boring John Woo picture. The director of such hits as Face/Off, Broken Arrow and many hyperkinetic Honk Kong flicks, Woo has a keen enough grasp […]