Screwed
OK, so exploitation is business as usual in the big bad world, but watching certain forms of it turns the stomach. The “sex industry,” examined so forcefully in films like Showgirls and Boogie Nights, goes back under the microscope in Screwed, an oblique portrait of the Nero of porn, Al Goldstein, publisher of Screw magazine,…
Flubber
For the Walt Disney Co., nostalgia is a valuable commodity, and it expertly maintains and regularly recycles its tried-and-true stable of films, television shows and popular cartoon characters. But instead of just releasing its older films on video, Disney raids its vault for material to rework. It recently did a remake of That Darn Cat!…
Obscure by Default
Outrageous Cherry bucks trends by staying the exception to someone else’s rules.
Roots, rock, dancehall
Buju Banton may be a rasta now, but he has hardly left the dancehall behind.
Views with some room
An enigmatic photography show looks at the spaces of human activity….
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
John Berendt’s nonfiction best seller Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil portrays Savannah, Ga., as a lovely, gracious and self-absorbed town with a dual personality: a rigidly traditional, ritual-oriented high society; and a cloaked subculture of hustlers, cross-dressers and voodoo practitioners. Their common bond is a love of parties, fueled by massive amounts…
Project Grizzly
Has Don Quixote been reincarnated as a Canadian? The National Film Board of Canada seems to think so. In the past year alone, it has produced two films about gentlemen from northern Ontario engaged in expensive, inexplicably dangerous hobbies that speak as much of their devotion to a dream as their strength of character to…
Jerusalem
Swedish director Bille August’s Jerusalem is a rather lumpish, epic soap opera adapted from a turn-of-the-century novel by Nobel Prize-winner Selma Lagerlöf, which was inspired by the true story of a group of rural Swedes who broke from their mainstream Protestantism to join an American cult in the Holy Land. It’s a heady mix of…
