It used to be that going to see a B-movie in a theater was nearly a 4-D experience, with the decrepitude of the cinema matching the scuzz on screen. Multiplexes and boutique art houses have basically done away with those kind of lively rat holes, making baby noise and excessive texters the primary terror to [...]
When the Spring Breakers trailer hit, with its lewd rendering of youth culture run amok, one guess was that film director Harmony Korine was going through a midlife crisis. One forgets that Korine’s life is crisis, partly indebted to his youth (any shades of Larry Clark a callback to Kids). For instance, remember Gummo? That [...]
The Gatekeepers is unprecedented in the open confessionals it gathers from the formerly mute heads of the Israeli security agency Shin Bet. Incisive comparisons between the Israeli occupation and the German occupations of Poland and Czechoslovakia, references to the Hannah Arendt-coined term the “banality of evil,” acknowledgement that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom [...]
The beginning of Miami-based director Brad Bernstein’s film, Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story, features images of the titular figure’s home in Ireland, displayed in a dreamy, pastoral slideshow. Then the music goes quiet and Ungerer appears in his studio, his smile too knowing to be mischievous, too impish to intimidate. He [...]
A mysterious prisoner died in Israeli custody! There’s a Palestinian hunger strike! Ethiopian women are given forced sterilization! It’s been a few weeks since the Israeli elections have passed, and the country’s looking as good as it ever has, for better or worse (for worse, obvs). The bid between Bibi Netanyahu, the war criminal in [...]
Advertised as “A Tale of Sluts and Bolts,” in which a man rebuilds his dead fiancée with the body parts of prostitutes, Frank Henenlotter’s Frankenhooker (playing Sunday as part of the monthly “Splatter-Rama” at Cinema Paradiso) on the surface reads like it could just as well be called Fratboystein. The film’s original selling point, a [...]
“Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip that started from this tropic port, aboard this tiny ship…” — theme from Gilligan’s Island Last Saturday, the Miami-based arts group SPRING BREAK (headed by Patti Hernandez and Domingo Castillo) realized an idea of artist Carlos Rigau’s in collaboration with [...]
The Foreign nominations in the Oscars has always been a bit weird. Essentially, it’s one category for the rest of the world, but somehow Britain always makes the cut on Best Picture, giving the sectioning a neo-colonial bent. Last year, the Academy awarded A Separation with an Oscar. It was the second Iranian film to [...]
Last week, Django Unchained received some Oscar nominations. Not even waiting until Seth McFarlane’s Oscar night for the usual offenses — Billy Crystal in blackface, showing the KFC clip from precious before panning to every black actor in the room — the Academy gave none of the black cast any nominations, only Christoph Waltz, who already received an Oscar when [...]
You already know this: while earning your college degree was informative and pleasant enough, plenty of us head in a different direction. Or maybe the experience wasn’t so awesome or helpful, but we’re sticking, steadfast and stubborn, to what we set out for in the first place. Joshua Miller, the executive director and founder of [...]
Venezuela has been in the media lately: following the death of Hugo Chávez, his chosen successor, Nicolas Maduro, beat challenger Henrique Capriles in the current election for presidency. It was a miniscule margin of a win—about 50.7%–and as of this write-up, a contested verdict. But if you’re the average United Statesian, you are less aware [...]
