September 16th, 2015
Heller, best known as an actor but now making a supremely confident debut as writer-director, knows this material: she previously collaborated on a successful stage version of…
September 10th, 2015
By Kari Lugo
“Madd Frank Presents Madd Frank,” directed by Mike Bredon, screened at the Fargo Theatre to a near double-sellout crowd, which seemed to genuinely love local legend Delray Dvoracek aka Madd Frank.
He is loved maybe even more now than when his show was in production back in the mid-1980s and ’90s. Myself, I can remember watching Madd Frank as a kid growing up in Fargo and being mesmerized by him and his zany cast of characters. I always thought it was a strange show…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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,…
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…