The Twilight Saga: New Moon
The boys are pumped but the sensuous undercurrent of the saga is lost
Catherine Hardwicke’s feeling for teen angst and female anxiety gave Twilight (the first film of the series based on Stephenie Meyer’s novels) immense potential. But Chris Weitz’s sequel New Moon is full of lost potential. Harwicke’s visual elegance via cinematographer Elliott Davis emphasized the wooded Northwest territory as a natural wonderland where the heroine Bella’s (Kristen Stewa...
Keep Moving
Michael Jackson may not have been a film star, but ARMOND WHITE explains his music videos as art
Liz Taylor was right in her now famous Tweet about Michael Jackson’s This Is It. My Lincoln center program about MJ’s music videos (Keep Moving: Michael Jackson’s Video Art at the Walter Reade Theater, Nov. 22) was planned before This Is It, but it ought to confirm Dame Liz’s enthusiasm. It’s designed to show film enthusiasts who wonder: “What happened to the movie musical?” ...
Black Hole Son
Attention all those who worship at the altar of twiggy, big-eyed, scraggly antiheroes: Tim Burton has come to town. Plus, four other misfit artists who mine their psyches for creepy material.
OFTEN GHETTOIZED INTO the cobwebbed recesses of haunted houses, Tim Burton’s triumphant oddities and alluring grotesqueries are now anointed by one of the world’s elite cultural circles. Halloween’s pumpkin glow may have barely drained from New York’s autumnal complexion, but all things diabolical and dark will be resurrected beginning Nov. 22, as the auteur unveils over 700 never-before-seen ...
Do the 'Doo'
Pixies hit town on ‘Doolittle’ anniversary tour
KIM DEAL HAS spent more time in New York lately than some people who actually live here.While she calls Dayton, Ohio, home, Deal has been in town with The Breeders, for her role in The Long Count at BAM and now shes around for a threenight series of shows from the band that made her famous, Pixies.The group, made up of Charles Thompson (AKA Black Francis or Frank Black)
Springer Awakening
'Dare' star Ashley Springer on Churchill, high school and poolside fellatio
ASHLEY SPRINGER IS rapidly becoming the go-to guy for movies that require sexually explicit high school scenes. After losing his dick in 2008’s Teeth (a fantastic, underappreciated black comedy about a teenager with vagina dentata), Springer is back on screen in director Adam Salky’s Dare (based on Salky’s 2005 short, also written by David Brind), helping Emmy Rossum shed her good girl image as onet...
Gut Instinct: Brief Encounters
JOSH BERNSTEIN will eat (and drink) without pants if he wants
THE HALOGEN-BRIGHT morning sun beat down on my crusted eyelids. Opening them felt like I was prying the top of an ancient jar of mustard. To my right, my girlfriend’s carcass was comatose, immune to meddlesome light. I stood and stretched. My back snapped and crackled like bubble wrap, my muscles sore and flu-achy. Perhaps it was the tub of Buffalo Trace bourbon I consumed the previous eve, but it took several...
Flavor of the Week: Electric Teenage Lust
A pale, pubescent JAMES GREENE, JR. plugs it in at a power station
I WANT TO have sex,” she announced politely but firmly, like a little girl demanding a new doll. “Where can we go to do that?” Not anywhere around here, I thought as I looked around the barren park where we were lunching. There was a devastating lack of shrubbery; surely we would be spotted fornicating like the wild dogs we were from every conceivable spot in this obstruction-free landscape.
