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Watch “Rectify” premiere tonight

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 14:30:00 +0000

The producers of "Breaking Bad" bring you a new series on Sundance Channel. Watch a preview below

Watch “Rectify” premiere this Monday

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 13:00:00 +0000

The producers of "Breaking Bad" bring you a new series on Sundance Channel. Watch a preview below

Must Do’s: What we like this week

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 14:00:00 +0000

BOOKS

Laura Miller, a Yankee, was enlightened by former newspaper reporter Tracy Thompson's deeply personal account of the transformation of Georgia, titled "The New Mind of the South":

Thompson gives "The New Mind of the South" a muscular tension that a merely nostalgic memoir or a self-effacing work of reportage could never achieve. She vividly recalls the embracing evangelical church life of her 1960s youth, when the religion was "otherworldly and apolitical" and therefore a marked contrast to the activist fundamentalism that arose in the 1970s or the show-bizzy extravaganza of a megachurch she visits in suburban Atlanta. Yet the latter, an outpost of the "prosperity gospel," turns out to be more multiracial and feminist than she expected. Such churches can’t provide her with the comfort she once found in the small church where her family used to worship, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t doing some good.

“Top of the Lake”: Like the best crime series, it’s about much more than crime-solving

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 19:55:00 +0000

In ‘Top of the Lake," Jane Campion’s extraordinary new crime series, beginning tonight on the Sundance Channel, Holly Hunter plays GJ, a plainspoken spiritual guru, tending to a flock of lost middle-aged women — among them, a sex addict, a woman reeling from the loss of her beloved chimpanzee — with minimal spiritual mumbo jumbo, maximum hard truths. She wears her hair long and white, her shirts buttoned up to the collar, looking like an impatient Mexican gangster lost in the New Zealand bush (or as Emily Nussbaum points out in her review of the series, something like Jane Campion). I’m going to channel GJ’s particular harsh bluntness here, because “Top of the Lake,” gorgeous and ambiguous and gripping like a hallucination, deserves it: Watch it. Do it now.

Sundance announces winners

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 22:19:00 +0000

A film about young lovers in a long-distance relationship called "Like Crazy" was awarded the grand jury prize for a U.S. drama at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. Its star, Felicity Jones, also received a special jury prize for acting in the movie.

America Ferrera presented the acting award to Jones, who was not in attendance at the Saturday night ceremony, saying "the 2011 Sundance Film Festival will go down as the year of the actress."

Peter D. Richardson's film "How to die in Oregon" won the grand jury U.S. documentary prize. It follows terminally ill patients living in Oregon, the first state to legalize physician-assisted suicide.

Also recognized were Mike Cahill and Brit Marling's sci-fi film "Another Earth," which won a dramatic special jury prize and the Alfred P. Sloan award.

Cahill, who directed and co-wrote the movie, said "this is the greatest week of our lives." The film is about two strangers brought together the night before the discovery of a duplicate planet Earth.

Overpriced antiques for anxious yuppies

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 07:07:00 +0000

Today I received another catalog in the mail, the kind that can send almost anyone into a downward spiral of anxiety over the unbearable perfection of beautiful, imported, ancient, chipping, obnoxiously overpriced things. From the Brazilian handcrafted cowhide rug for $720 (Serena & Lily) to the 19th century Salerno Streetlight Pendant for $2,695 (Restoration Hardware) to the Bewick Cabinet hand-papered with detailed images of birds for $3,998 (Anthropologie), these things are expensive because they're just so real. They look like heirlooms handed down from generation to generation, from ancestors who milked cows on rambling farms in Tuscany or handcrafted wood furniture in Brazil or wove deliriously lovely fabrics in Indonesia. These things trumpet their own authenticity and hint at a connection to the earth and an appreciation for craftsmanship and artistry and the untold charms of the world's foreign peoples -- you know, the ones who squat in mud puddles, sewing embroidered birds onto 350-thread-count Egyptian cotton crib bumpers so that Serena & Lily can include them in their "Wren" Crib Set Collection (Heirloom quality, $969 each).

“Brick City”: Like “The Wire,” but true

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 13:19:00 +0000

Cynicism is a luxury item. You might be able to afford it, but not everyone can. If you're young, you can roll your eyes at the world without paying much of a price. If you're rich, you can shake your head and sigh from the comfort of your climate-controlled, pest-free, meticulously clean square footage.

But if you're poor or black or overweight or old or handicapped or depressed, if the world isn't coming up roses for you unless you fight hard, every day, to make it work, cynicism can mean a slow downward spiral to death. Once you've suffered loss or stumbled and fallen hard, cynicism looks less like harmless fun and more like quicksand.

Of course we all like to pretend that our nice things and our education and our highly professional, dry-cleaned existence means that we're above hope, that we don't have to believe in something like the little guy does, that we don't have to help out or worry or lend our voices to the voiceless. But that's all an elaborate game of make-believe.

You may be able to afford the luxury of cynicism now. But when cynicism becomes a way of life, eventually, you pay the tax with your soul.

Another brick in the wall

Isabella Rossellini gets it on with sea animals

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 10:30:00 +0000

When Isabella Rossellini sees that we have a video camera, she calls for her makeup artist. It's just after lunch and she says, "I ate my lipstick," in her ambiguous but succulent accent, a remnant of her childhood in Italy and France with her cinematically celebrated parents, director Roberto Rossellini and actress Ingrid Bergman. We're used to seeing Rossellini looking flawlessly glamorous in her movies (and as the face of Lancôme cosmetics for 14 years). But, recently, the actress has taken to wearing strange and unconventional disguises: a snail, an earthworm and a spider, among others.

She donned these costumes for "Green Porno," an endearingly oddball series of short, educational films made for the Sundance Channel. The first season, about the sex lives of bugs, premiered last year. Created, written and acted by Rossellini, the two-minute movies were designed to be viewed on computers, cellphones and MP3 players. In each episode, Rossellini dressed up as one of those tiny insects, giving viewers a human-size look at the animal kingdom's hidden sexual dramas. With a commitment to anatomical accuracy and utmost sincerity, Rossellini played opposite giant paper cutouts, which served as inanimate partners for her vigorous copulation. On April 1, the series begins its second season, this time focusing on the sexual habits of marine animals. Rossellini talked to us about her unintentional male-animal fetish and the naughty side of nature.

Accidental tourists

Mon, 31 Mar 2003 21:00:00 +0000

After years of watching news coverage of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East, our concept of the region can narrow to a dystopia of barricades, crumbled buildings and blackened buses, populated by Israeli soldiers carrying machine guns, Palestinian suicide bombers, and grieving families on either side. Rarely do we have the opportunity to gaze out at the landscape, or to meet real human beings whose lives and experiences are inextricably woven into the turmoil of the region.

"The Inner Tour" (premiering Monday, March 31, at 9 p.m. on the Sundance Channel) presents such an opportunity, following a group of West Bank Palestinians on a three-day vacation bus tour of Israel, where many of those on the tour once lived and raised families. The film was made just before the outbreak of the Sept. 2000 intifada, when one of the only ways Palestinians could cross the Green Line (which denotes the post-1967 border) and enter Israel was as tourists. (Such trips are no longer possible.)