If you’re interested in seeing the way creativity incubates, you may want to take advantage of two upcoming opportunities to see diamonds in the rough. N.C. State University and UNC-Chapel Hill will be showcasing student films and all interested cinephiles are invited to attend. Thursday, April 22, Lambda Pi Eta (a communications honors society) will […]
Maria Pramaggiore
Posted inNews
Y’all makin’ mah ea-uhs huht
You might call it a pet peeve. But if this were a Hollywood movie set in the South, you’d have to call it a “pay-ut pay-uve.” If you’ve ever actually heard a southern accent, then you know that the twisted vowels and sing-song delivery so prevalent in movies set below the Mason-Dixon line make it […]
Posted inArt
Framing History
Three programs at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2003 bring to the big screen the work of North Carolina filmmakers with a keen sense of history. Full Frame opens on Thursday, April 10 with the world premiere of Rebecca Cerese’s February One, an hour-long documentary that tells the story of the four Greensboro college students […]
Posted inFilm & Television
8mm Divas
You bought a mini DV camera for the family reunion. When you plugged the Firewire connection into your computer, you felt a twinge. Then you found yourself obsessively re-editing the footage. A few days later, you came up with the winning bid on a Super 8 camera on eBay, and now you’re torn: Should you […]
Posted inArt
Agony and Irony
How would a contemporary audience grapple with the profound emotional ambiguity of seeing extraordinarily talented African-American performers–in a minstrel show? What if the potential for discomfort were magnified by the play’s subject matter: specifically, the repugnant American tradition of lynching, a form of injustice that claimed the lives of at least five thousand people between […]
Posted inArt
Playing Politics
PlayMakers Repertory Company opened its 2002-3 season with Edwin Justus Mayer’s Sunrise in My Pocket: The Comical, Tragical, True History of Davy Crockett, a marathon epic of dramaturgy that was originally penned in 1938, performed in a single community theater workshop, and promptly forgotten. According to Artistic Director David Hammond, that long period of neglect […]
Posted inArt
Tears Fill Mary’s Ocean
What if the world came to an end under a blazing red sky–but grief still persisted afterwards? What if geophysical drought and its spiritual equivalent both became a way of life? These are the questions Archipelago Theater’s Nor Hall and Ellen Hemphill pose in And Mary Wept, a formidable work combining the intellectual rigor of […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Hollywood Secures the Homeland?
In its never-ending struggle to somehow remain relevant in a world of high speed connectivity, sophisticated computer games and TV series like The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, these days American cinema repeatedly attempts to tap into such free-floating cultural anxieties like terrorism and child abduction. But two new films, The Banger Sisters and Trapped, […]
Posted inGuides
International Compassionate Living Festival
International Compassionate Living Festival, Clarion Hotel Crabtree, Raleigh, Oct. 4-6 A decade before the religious right made “compassionate conservatism” an election-year oxymoron, there was the Culture and Animals Foundation. The nonprofit group, founded by N.C. State philosophy professor Tom Regan and his wife Nancy, awards grants to individuals whose work exhibits a positive concern for […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Stimulating Simulation
The premise of New Line Cinema’s current release, Simone, is hardly original. Its exploration of the sexual politics of the “man-made woman” derives from the classic Pygmalion story–of the King of Cyprus who fell in love with a statue of his own creation–and resonates with any number of films that riff on the theme of […]