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(09/04/13 1:22am)
Screen/Society collaborates with other Duke departments to present a variety of films in the Triangle area. Hank Okazaki, Exhibitions Programmer for the Arts of the Moving Image, describes the mission of Screen/Society as to show interesting, challenging or great works not normally screened in the area, and to have those screenings be free and open to the public. The programs are also intended to promote film literacy and serve the campus community. Many of the films haven’t been shown in the triangle, and those that have, says Okazaki, “have reason to be shown again.”
(07/02/13 1:56am)
It's been seven years since the last Scary Movie film was released, so maybe Scary Movie 5 only feels tired because we’ve already seen its predecessors run nonstop on Comedy Central. More likely, though, is that the producers know people will watch it no matter how bad it is.
(07/02/13 1:46am)
Now You See Me centers around a group of magicians who are pulled together by an unknown party for an unknown purpose when they each get a mysterious tarot card. The foursome is composed of J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), a cocky street magician, Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher), Atlas’s ex-assistant who has her own death-defying act, Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), a down-on-his-luck mentalist and Jack Wilder (Dave Franco), who uses his knack for misdirection as a pickpocket. After a brief introduction the movie picks up a year later with the illusionists in a single act: The Four Horsemen.
(04/11/13 9:09am)
Duke just accepted the Class of 2017 in its most selective admissions process to date. But Admission dares to ask if we really let in (to both colleges and our hearts) the people who are most deserving. Because no one’s ever asked that before.
Tina Fey plays Portia Nathan, an uptight Princeton admissions officer. She’s obsessed with her work and boring to the core. She wears her hair in a bun. She’s had the same job for sixteen years. She drives a Jetta. John (Paul Rudd), Portia’s former classmate at Dartmouth, is the director of Quest, an alternative school. He’s a free spirit and do-gooder who never stays in one place for too long. It’s funny because they’re total opposites!
(04/04/13 9:19am)
Jessica Yu is a director of documentary film, as well as of narrative film (Ping Pong Playa) and television (Parenthood, Grey’s Anatomy). Her film Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O’Brien won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject in 1997. A retrospective of her work and the world premiere of her newest documentary short, The Guide, will be shown at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival Apr. 4 through 7 in downtown Durham.
Recess writer Megan Rise spoke with Yu about her experience with documentary filmmaking and her personal style.
(03/21/13 9:09am)
The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival was recently named an Oscar-qualifying festival for the Documentary Short Subject category. The short film honored with Full Frame’s Jury Award for Best Short will automatically qualify for an Academy Award nomination. For documentary films that don’t play at a qualifying festival, it must be screened in either New York or Los Angeles and be reviewed by a major publication. This can be a challenge, especially for documentary shorts, classified as under 40 minutes. Full Frame Programming Director Sadie Tillery said, “There’s a lot of wonderful work being made in short film and there aren’t a lot of theatrical outlets for it.” Getting a short film screened at a festival is a challenging process, but not nearly as difficult or expensive as having it shown in New York or Los Angeles. Once a short film gets to Full Frame, a three-person Grand Jury, typically veteran filmmakers or people in the industry, select a winner from the eligible films. According to Ryan Helsel, Full Frame’s Marketing Director, “approximately 20 of the films at the festival this year meet the criteria for [the] short [category].” Selection as a qualifying festival reaffirms Full Frame’s status as a nationally and internationally renowned showcase of documentary film.
(02/28/13 10:53am)
In its 14th year, the Nevermore Film Festival brought short films and full-length features in the horror genre from around the globe. Featuring a variety of films from recent years, plus the oft-requested Dawn of the Dead, Nevermore gives local audiences a chance to see films that aren’t widely known, particularly international films. I had a chance to see two films that were screened at Nevermore this year—The ABCs of Death and John Dies at the End, both horror-comedy romps.
(02/14/13 12:00pm)
It’s often easy to ignore shorts in the Oscar race. When films like The Hobbit and Les Miserables have run times of over two and a half hours, a two and a half-minute animated short can seem irrelevant, but shorts are an art form in their own right.
(02/07/13 10:29am)
A handsome non-human creature falls in vaguely stalker-ish love with a human girl with an overprotective father. On the surface, it sounds a lot like Twilight. But Warm Bodies is actually good, and not just because Nicholas Hoult plays a nearly-speechless zombie with more emotional range than Kristen Stewart was ever able to give Bella.
(01/31/13 11:22am)
The House At Sea is the sophomore album from Amor de Dias, the collaboration between Alasdair MacLean of The Clientele and Lupe Nunez Fernandez of Pipas. Both indie pop bands, The Clientele and Pipas met on tour and formed Amor de Dias to further express their Spanish influences.
(01/17/13 11:15am)
Hyde Park on Hudson masquerades as a presidential biopic, but really it’s just a film about a naive spinster. Bored of caring for her aging mother, Daisy (Laura Linney) is thrilled and terrified by the prospect of visiting the president, a fifth cousin—of which she continually reminds us—when his mother invites her to call on him at their estate, Hyde Park. Soon after, however, the two become romantically entangled, and Daisy is pulled into a life she isn’t sure she can manage.
(12/06/12 10:52am)
In its 16th year, the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival has become much more than just four days of documentaries. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) recently recognized the 2013 festival, run by Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies, with a $20,000 grant. 832 non-profit organizations around the country received an NEA Art Works Grant from a pool of 1,509 applications; these grants total $22.3 million.
(11/08/12 9:47am)
Easy Money, released in Sweden in 2010, stars Joel Kinnaman (best known for the TV series The Killing) as JW, a business student with blue-collar roots working as a cab driver in Stockholm, Sweden. When his two unsavory bosses offer him an outrageous sum to pick up Jorge (Matias Padin Varela), a Chilean drug dealer and escaped convict, JW gets wrapped up in a scheme to intercept a shipment of cocaine intended for the Serbian mob. JW’s story is intertwined with that of Jorge and Mrado Slovovic (Drogomir Mrsic), a Serbian thug, sent to find and kill Jorge.
(11/01/12 6:12am)
The latest adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic novel Wuthering Heights is over two hours of bleak moors and longing looks, and not much else. For those who haven’t read the book or seen any of the other film versions, the story follows Heathcliff, portrayed by Solomon Glave (young Heathcliff) and James Howson (adult Heathcliff). He is abandoned as a boy and taken in by a family as something between a child and a servant. He develops an unbreakable bond with Cathy, the daughter of the house portrayed by Shannon Beer (young Cathy) and Kaya Scodelario (adult Cathy). But their relationship is doomed to fail. The only striking change in director Andrea Arnolds’s version is that Heathcliff is black (the character is usually described as a Gypsy), which is intended to make it even clearer to the audience that he and Cathy cannot be together. In actuality, it makes little difference to the plot, except to change the specific slurs that are hurled at him by Cathy’s brother.
(10/25/12 8:26am)
V/H/S is a showcase of horror shorts masquerading as a feature-length film. Five found-footage style shorts are crudely tied together by a less compelling found-footage frame story (think “found-ception”). The idea seems innovative, but with six different directors, six different writers and six different casts, all constrained by limited time and only first-person shots, it doesn’t manage to give the genre new life.
(10/11/12 8:20am)
In The Eye of the Storm, the ailing matriarch of an Australian family, Elizabeth Hunter (Charlotte Rampling), has decided it’s time to die—which she believes is the right of the rich. She calls on her two children, Basil and Dorothy (Geoffrey Rush and Judy Davis), to come see her before she passes on. The title recalls the storm of grown children dealing with the death of a parent, the storm clouding Elizabeth’s mind and a literal decades-old storm that marked a rift in the family. Once Basil and Dorothy arrive, the two worry they will be written out of Elizabeth’s will and replaced by her staff of servants and nurses, kept as pets to entertain her.
(10/04/12 8:25am)
Pandit Birju Maharaj is an undisputed master of Indian classical dance, and he is among the many talented international performers coming to Duke for the first time through Duke Performances this season. Maharaj, who comes from a long and celebrated lineage of Kathak dancers, is world-renowned not only for his accomplishments in the dance form, but as a singer and percussionist as well. At 75, he is the foremost living figure in Kathak dance, performing and teaching the classical dance around the world.
(09/27/12 8:19am)
Trouble with the Curve plays like Moneyball in reverse. In an age when baseball is ruled by statistics, formulas and new-fangled computers, elderly baseball scout Gus Lobel (Clint Eastwood) eschews all forms of modern technology (aside from his precious flat-screen TV). He instead uses his gut to make decisions about which players have “got it.” Still, younger, brasher scouts with their noses glued to their laptop screens are trying to edge him out, though his cohorts tell us over and over again that Gus is amazing. His boss, Pete (John Goodman), assures us that “Gus could spot talent from an airplane.” Well, apparently not, considering he’s losing his sight and refuses to get medical attention because he’s too committed to finishing out the scouting season.
(09/20/12 7:13am)
It’s not often that a university can bring in an established group like The Bad Plus to work with its graduate students. But, that’s exactly what Duke, helped by a grant from the Council for the Arts, was able to do. The Bad Plus, composed of bassist Reid Anderson, pianist Ethan Iverson and drummer Dave King, are known widely for their mix of jazz, pop-music covers and experimental music. Unlike most residencies, The Bad Plus’, which started in fall 2010, included sessions where they performed and recorded music written by Duke graduate students in Music Composition. The Bad Plus also used their residency to premiere ‘On Sacred Ground: Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring,’ a work that Duke Performances commissioned and developed.
(09/13/12 7:50am)
Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy? Few movies spell out their themes as explicitly as Celeste and Jesse Forever, but even fewer are able to capture as much genuine emotion or realistic friendship.
