Cinema

7th F-M LGBT Film Festival

September 10th, 2015

By Brittney Goodman

The Fargo-Moorhead LGBT Film Festival, now in its seventh year, will be showing a variety of LGBT-themed films this weekend, Friday-Saturday, Sept. 11 and 12 at the Fargo Theatre.

Raymond Rea, film studies professor at Minnesota State University Moorhead, has been leading the festival since its inception in 2009. The festival brings people together from all aspects of the Fargo-Moorhead community. According to Rea, the festival seeks "to celebrate lesbian, gay,…

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Jenkins gets “Fresh Dressed”

September 10th, 2015

Veteran journalist and hip-hop historian Sacha Jenkins delivers his first feature-length documentary with “Fresh Dressed,” a chronological overview of urban fashion that closely parallels the music scene that rocketed from the New York underground to a global phenomenon packaged by mainstream media conglomerates.

Blending a dizzying array of rappers, players and tastemakers with vibrant archival footage and photographs of evolving trends, “Fresh Dressed” struggles to cover too…

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“Golden Year” part five – legendary epic rounds out Blu-ray set

September 10th, 2015

The fifth and final movie in Warner’s Blu-ray box set “The Golden Year: 1939” is arguably the most famous, even among those who have never seen it.

For decades “Gone With the Wind” ranked as the all-time box office champion as well as the winner of the most Oscars, eight in competitive categories plus two honorary awards, including Picture, Director and Screenplay. It was surpassed in number of Academy Awards by “Ben-Hur” in 1959, but with ticket sales adjusted for…

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The End of the Tour

September 3rd, 2015

Filmmaker James Ponsoldt follows the success of “The Spectacular Now” with “The End of the Tour,” a fictionalized rendering of David Lipsky’s memoir “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself,” an account of Lipsky’s experiences traveling with writer David Foster Wallace over five days while the latter was promoting “Infinite Jest.”

The conversational transcripts of Lipsky’s interactions with Wallace offer a dangerously tempting format for translation…

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Classic ‘Hunchback’ retains sociopolitical relevance

September 3rd, 2015


Yet another of the memorable major releases of 1939 in this summer’s “The Golden Year” Blu-ray collection from Warner Home Video is the RKO remake of Universal’s classic 1923 production, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” The two films were adapted and heavily altered in various ways from Victor Hugo’s famous novel. Now both are on Blu-ray in separate editions and it’s both fascinating and instructive to watch them back to back, making their differences much more obvious,…

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​Gods and Monsters

August 26th, 2015


Lovers of bad cinema will marvel at Blue Underground co-founder and veteran “making of” and bonus feature producer David Gregory’s anatomy of a train wreck “Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau.” Sharing war stories of the 1996 Marlon Brando/Val Kilmer debacle ultimately directed by John Frankenheimer, Gregory’s documentary is akin to more effective brethren like “Jodorowsky’s Dune,” “Lost in La Mancha” and “Hearts of…

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​Legendary satiric rom-com restoration on Blu-ray

August 26th, 2015

Another in the canon of popular 1939 film classics released on Blu-ray this June, and a frequent staple of the Turner Classic Movies channel, was a contender in four of the major Academy Award categories for that year.

The MGM production “Ninotchka” is an endearing (and enduring) blend of bright romantic comedy and somewhat darker political satire that is now available in Warner Home Video’s “The Golden Year: 1939” box set as well as individually.

The plot device of a stuffy,…

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​Don’t Drink the Orange Juice: Woody Allen’s “Irrational Man”

August 19th, 2015

Predictably, the critical reception of Woody Allen’s “Irrational Man” ranges across the spectrum, from haters like Lou Lumenick and Jessica Kiang to admirers including Richard Brody, David Rooney and Amy Nicholson. The director’s films, even more polarizing in the grim aftermath of the highly publicized February 2014 open letter by Dylan Farrow that revisited allegations of sexual abuse, continue to appear with clockwork regularity at the rate of one feature per year. While the…

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​‘Golden Year’ on Blu-ray, part two: Bette Davis favorite

August 19th, 2015

The year 1939 is often remembered for its unusually high percentage of enduringly popular classic films (about 20 of which are currently available on Blu-ray in nice restorations), as well as many other things, from the September outbreak of the second World War in Europe, to the New York World’s Fair showcasing hopes for a peaceful and prosperous technology-based future, to the introduction of regular if limited broadcast television for the American public.

Released to Blu-ray this…

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​Another Brick in the Wall: Lego doc could use a rebuild

August 12th, 2015

Is it possible to make a feature-length documentary chronicling the commercial success, historical context and popular appeal of Lego (stylized as LEGO) building toys without coming across as a corporate shill? Maybe, but the question remains unanswered by Kief Davidson and Daniel Junge in “A Lego Brickumentary,” a geeky, gushing love letter that often feels like an extended television advertisement.

Junge, who recently helmed the much better “Being Evel,” and Davidson have…

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