Rachel Getting Married opens Friday in select theaters In Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, Anne Hathaway plays Kym, a self-involved recovering junkie who comes home for her sister Rachel’s wedding. Kym blames her insecurities on her family, even as she tries to make amends with Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt, whose performance is near perfect). While Demme’s […]
Nathan Gelgud
Bio: N.C. State graduate Nathan Gelgud lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., and writes about film. He also does film-inspired illustrations.Twitter: http://twitter.com/gelgud
Posted inFilm & Television
Bush gets stoned in W.
W. is now playing throughout the Triangle It’s hard to tell what Oliver Stone is aiming at with W. As a political missive, it’s an incredibly banal sermon to the choir. As a raucous raspberry, it’s just not stylistically batty enough to register. As a comedy, it’s never much nuttier than a Saturday Night Live […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Charlie Chaplin’s serial killer gets his money the old-fashioned way
Monsieur Verdoux opens Friday at the Galaxy Cinema When Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux was first released in 1947, critic James Ageewriting for The Nationcalled it “one of the best movies ever made” and devoted three consecutive weekly columns to it. I won’t trouble the editors of the Independent to give me such space to discuss […]
Posted inArt
Sophomore Jinx
One of the most exciting aspects of the first Loom show last December was the prospect of a new space serving as breeding ground for a new community of artists. Loom 2 further develops that promise, with a few qualifications. The old Chatham Label Mill in Pittsboro is a space awesome in both its size […]
Posted inGuides
True Crimes
The DoubleTake Career Award this year could not fall into more deserving hands than those of the 71-year-old Frederick Wiseman. In 30 years of documentary filmmaking, averaging a movie a year, Wiseman has assembled as impressive a body of work as any filmmaker–documentary or fiction. Wiseman shuns the documentary conventions of narration and interview, and […]
Posted inArt
Time Passages
In much of his work, California-based video artist Bill Viola has used slow motion to amplify and examine visceral expressions of emotion. By simply slowing down his videos, he illuminates our emotions’ temporal elasticity. “The more you magnify [emotions],” he said in a 1999 symposium at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, the more “they […]
Posted inNews
Pro-L
You have to own For Free, the debut album from Raleigh’s Pro-L, for three reasons. For one, it is white boy hip-hop audacity personified. The second is that the instrumentation (featuring trained sitar player Viswas Chitnis) and production by the beatgeek and 006 are uncompromisingly original. Thirdly, while it is for sale in local stores, […]
Posted inArt
Life on the Farm
Raising Consciousness: A Path, the interesting new installation by veteran area artist Renee Montague, is currently on display at the Raleigh Contemporary Gallery. Montague, an Artspace associate since 1996, moved from downtown Raleigh in 1999 to a family farm in Holly Springs, then to her own farm in Goldsboro in February of last year, and […]
Posted inArt
Polar Opposites
Crude drawings cover the walls of Raleigh’s LUMP gallery right now, comprising an exhibition of 40 artists called Bad Touch. According to an explanatory leaflet handed out at the Dec. 7 opening, “There are two types of drawing, a traditional academic style and everything else.” Judging from Bad Touch, “everything else” can mean anything from […]
Posted inArt
Loom in Essence
The UNC-Chapel Hill art students and faculty who put together Loom are really on to something, which they demonstrated at the opening reception of their show in Pittsboro last Saturday. Works by over 25 participating artists were exhibited at the unlikely location of the old Chatham Label Mill, which is undergoing renovation. Isolated on a […]