Posted By Ethan de Seife on Sat, Apr 30, 2016 at 9:00 AM

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Universal Pictures / 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks

A man inside the vault in Inside Man

Years ago, after a chance viewing on cable of Spike Lee’s early short film "Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads," I started paying close attention to the career of this important director. Lee’s first eight features — from She’s Gotta Have It (1986) through Do the Right Thing (1989), right up to Clockers in 1995 — constitute a diverse, challenging, visually exciting body of work that should make any filmmaker proud.

Conventional wisdom holds that Lee’s work began a steady decline in quality with his next feature, Girl 6 (1996), though I think that film is underrated. I’m no fan of the broad, sloppy Bamboozled (2000), but several of Lee’s subsequent features — He Got Game (1998), Summer of Sam (1999) and especially the fantastic 25th Hour (2002) — suggest that he was still full of cinematic ideas at the beginning of the 21st century.

Still, around that time, I found myself less and less interested in Lee’s films. Around 2000, he started making more documentaries than fiction films; I think he’s better at the latter. I guess that disinterest carried over, for me, to his features, the last of which I saw in the theater was She Hate Me in 2004. It wasn’t until last week that I finally got around to seeing Inside Man, which makes me an outlier.

Tags: movie , film , what i'm watching , inside man , spike lee , heist , flashforward , narrative , Image , Video , Web Only

Posted By Sadie Williams on Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 7:51 PM

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Courtesy of BTV Crow Collective

Clockwise from top left: Ian Connolly, Dayne Sawtelle, Tim Morris, Tyyler Santor, Abbi Meyers-Orr, Hannah Hamilton, Austin Dickerson, Marissa Ronick, Dana Heffern, Brandi Giroux, Mary Lacy

The walls of Burlington College are covered with artwork, but they didn’t always look like that. “When I got here [three years ago],” says art and design chair Dana Heffern, “there was literally nothing on the walls.”

Now, walking through the small college on North Avenue is like taking a tour of a student art gallery. But all those works are coming down this week. On Friday, April 29, 4:30-8 p.m., new student and alumni works will be revealed at the college’s fifth annual Big Spring Art Party. And the whole community is invited.

A group called the BTV Crow Collective has been driving the public outreach. Born from a class co-taught by Heffern and muralist Mary Lacy, the collective has been mailing postcards, coordinating social media efforts and organizing food and entertainment. They’ve also been working on three large-scale murals of crows in Lacy’s signature geometric style. These, too, will be unveiled on Friday.

Tags: Burlington College , murals , mary lacy , dana heffern , Image , Web Only

Posted By Ken Picard on Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 4:00 AM

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Courtesy of Kingdom County Productions

Courtesy of Kingdom County Productions

Nearly three years after the premiere of The Hungry Heart, a gripping documentary about St. Albans pediatrician Fred Holmes and his efforts to treat patients addicted to opioids, the film continues to attract new audiences and win national acclaim.

Most recently, Kingdom County Productions announced that The Hungry Heart has won the 2016 Media Award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the College on Problems of Drug Dependence. The film will be honored in June at NIDA's national conference in Palm Springs, Calif. It received a similar award in 2015 from the American Society of Addiction Medicine.

Kingdom County's Bess O'Brien, who directed The Hungry Heart, says she still shows the film at least three or four times per month and receives weekly calls from communities and organizations around the country interested in holding screenings. Since its release in September 2013, the film has been shown in more than 100 cities and town in New England alone and at more than a dozen national conferences on addiction, recovery and mental health.

Tags: All Of Me , Bess O'Brien , Dustin Machia , Fred Holmes , heroin , Hungry Heart , Kingdom County Productions , opiate addiction , Opioid Crisis , Image , Web Only

Posted By Rick Kisonak on Mon, Apr 25, 2016 at 5:46 PM

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Rick Kisonak

From left: Lauren Miller, Seth Rogen and Ryan, John and Griffen Fox

Signs of April in the Queen City: The last traces of ice vanish along the waterfront. Hundreds of ice cream lovers line up for Ben & Jerry’s annual Free Cone Day at the company’s shop on the Marketplace. And, dependably as a swallow to Capistrano, the planet’s most famous stoner, the man Forbes ranks as the 26th highest paid actor in the world, comes to town to thank three students at the University of Vermont.

For the past three years, triplets Griffen, John and Ryan Fox have raised more money for HFC U — Hilarity for Charity’s national collegiate competition — than some 100 other student groups across the country. Their prize, as always, is a hang with Seth Rogen, who, along with his wife, Lauren Miller, created the nonprofit in 2012 as “a movement to inspire change and raise awareness of Alzheimer’s disease among the millennial generation.” Affiliated with the Alzheimer’s Association, it’s raised more than $5 million.

Saturday morning at Essex Cinemas, the couple held a press conference to talk about the cause, explain why they got involved, and lavish praise on the three brothers, who lost their grandfather to the illness in January 2014.

Tags: seth rogen , lauren miller , alzheimer's disease , hilarity for charity , uvm , pi kappa alpha , alpha chi omega , Image , Video , Web Only

Posted By Pamela Polston on Mon, Apr 25, 2016 at 4:32 PM

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Courtesy of Vermont Humanities Council

The Bard is beloved worldwide: a production in Mexico City

What will the world do on the 400th anniversary of your death? For most of us, the answer is a big fat nothing. But perhaps there's still time to turn out a zillion plays that actors and audiences will revere four centuries from now.

Meantime, Tuesday brings a pair of back-to-back opportunities to get your Will on. William Shakespeare, that is. Not surprisingly, Vermont Shakespeare Festival executive director John Nagle and the University of Vermont have a hand in both Bard-themed happenings.

Tags: william shakespeare , vermont shakespeare festival , john nagle , ideas on tap , Image , Web Only

Posted By Ethan de Seife on Sat, Apr 23, 2016 at 9:00 AM

Factory 515

One of the many happy, drunk interviewees in "Heavy Metal Parking Lot"

In 1991, at the height of their extended “Celebrity Brat” phase, Guns N’ Roses went on tour in support of their albums Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II. Three or four friends and I caught their show at Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, N.Y., and it turned out to be one of the most memorable concerts I’ve ever seen. Not necessarily for the music (which was excellent, if sloppy) but for the atmosphere, the crowd and various other extra-musical events.

My friends and I made a point of arriving at the stadium a couple of hours early, because we’d heard that the tailgating at the show was a unique experience. We were not disappointed.

Tags: heavy metal parking lot , film , documentary , Jeff Krulik , John Heyn , Image , Video , Web Only

Posted By Rachel Elizabeth Jones on Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 11:17 AM

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Courtesy of Burlington City Arts

Wylie Sofia Garcia

On Friday, Burlington City Arts welcomed new exhibitions at the BCA Center and Vermont Metro Gallery. It also welcomed Burlington artist Wylie Sofia Garcia as 2016's Barbara Smail Award winner.

The award, named for a late local artist and maintained by her family, provides a mid-career Vermont artist with a $1,500 stipend, access to BCA's studios and workspace, and a culminating solo exhibition. As it happens, Garcia is married to the 2015 Smail awardee, Clark Derbes; his solo show just opened on the second floor of the BCA Center.

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Posted By Ethan de Seife on Sat, Apr 16, 2016 at 9:05 AM

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Columbia Pictures

"How High Is Up?": Larry and Moe use tire irons to pry Curly from his sweater.

I have studied and written about film for something like two decades now. I love films of all kinds, from Hollywood rom coms to seven-hour Eastern European art films to spiky avant-garde films that blast the eyeballs and the brain. But when I reflect on the kinds of movies that turned me into a cinephile at a young age, I realize that most of them are decidedly “low-brow.” I grew up watching kaiju movies, martial arts films and, yes, Three Stooges films.

Most of the Three Stooges’ films are perfectly free from topicality, and most have narratives that are barely coherent. For those reasons, the films have an almost unfair historical advantage over many other movies: They barely age at all. The Stooges’ brand of slapstick comedy is exactly as funny as it was 50 or even 70 years ago. (These guys made a lot of films, and they made them for a long time.) Many “low-brow” comedies of today — I’m thinking of Scary Movie and its descendants — have already lost whatever meager relevance they had because they are mishmashes of topical jokes with short shelf-lives. The Stooges, though, are eternal.

Tags: movie , film , what i'm watching , the three stooges , three stooges , comedy , slapstick , highbrow , lowbrow , Image , Video , Web Only

Posted By Dan Bolles on Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 10:31 AM

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Courtesy of the DuPont Brothers

'A Riddle for You,' the DuPont Brothers

Today is local songwriter Zack DuPont's birthday. So, of course, he's giving us a present, in the form a new DuPont Brothers single, "Seven Days." Because that's just the kind of sweet, big-hearted dude he is.

The song — which has nothing to do with a certain local altweekly — is from the DuPonts' forthcoming album, A Riddle for You, recorded with composer/songwriter/producer/generally awesome guy Michael Chorney. Here's what Zack's brother, Sam DuPont, had to say about the tune in a recent email:

Tags: The DuPont Brothers , Zack DuPont , Sam DuPont , Michael Chorney , Audio , Image , Web Only

Posted By Rachel Elizabeth Jones on Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 6:14 PM

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Courtesy of Marc Beaudette

"Oxyvision with escape hatches (thanks to Tomma Abts)," acrylic on hemp by Marc Beaudette

Is there a word for forgetting what an empty space looked like as soon as it's filled? Perhaps in German? Whatever that word may be, it would be appropriate to address a new and very large addition to the Fletcher Free Library: the painting "Oxyvision with escape hatches (thanks to Tomma Abts)" by Reading-based artist Marc Beaudette. 

"I'd long noticed that huge, vacant gray space at the library. It seemed like a great place for a painting," Beaudette said during a phone interview. Last year, the artist applied for a Vermont Arts Council grant to create a work for the expanse of empty wall. "I didn't get it," he said, "so I got another credit card."

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