David Ehrenstein

Terence Davies; Credit: Solon Papadopoulos

Of Time and the City: Terence Davies Goes Home Again

David Ehrenstein
Of Time and the City, Terence Davies’ first film in the eight years since The House of Mirth, is both a return and a departure. It’s about Davies’ native Liverpool, the setting for his celebrated studies of lower-class family life, Distant Voice Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes......

Warrengate: Obama's First Fuckup as President Elect?

David Ehrenstein
Well, that was quick. At least Bill Clinton waited until he was in office before throwing a major group of liberal supporters under the bus. Barack Obama has done so before even being sworn in. By choosing the Rev. Rick Warren — a man who likens same-sex marriage to incest......
Milk man; Credit: Kevin Scanlon

How Acclaimed Indie Director Gus Van Sant Finally Got Milk

David Ehrenstein
Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, 1992 to be exact. Gus Van Sant, the filmmaker who had just thrilled the world with his young-hustlers-in-love classic My Own Private Idaho, was picked to direct The Mayor of Castro Street. Already six years in development, this proposed adaptation......
Saving faces: Don Bachardy; Credit: Kevin Scanlon

Don Bachardy on Christopher Isherwood, the Man He Loved

David Ehrenstein
"Oh, it would never have been for us,” Don Bachardy says. “He wasn’t interested — neither of us were — in being ‘legalized.’ But we’d certainly back up anybody who did want to be.” Kevin Scanlon (Click to enlarge) Saving faces: Don Bachardy “He,” of course, is Christopher Isherwood, the......

Off-White Like Me

David Ehrenstein
On a cross-country trip in the summer of 1957, my family stopped in Oklahoma City. There, my father asked a policeman for directions to the state capitol. The officer began to offer them, when I leaned forward from the back seat. Suddenly the policeman’s demeanor changed. A scowl crossed his......

The Killing of a Gay Oxnard Student

David Ehrenstein
The death of Lawrence King, the 15-year-old high school student from Oxnard, shot in the back of the head by classmate Brandon McInerney on February 12, brought back the memory of a very personal, mercifully nondeadly contretemps that I haven't thought about in years. The world Lawrence King so briefly......

Todd Haynes: Far From Hollywood

David Ehrenstein
Though we first met back in 1991, when the NEA-funded homoeroticism of his first aboveground feature, Poison, was rattling the halls of Congress, Todd Haynes and I “bonded” (as the saying goes) in April of 1995, when we served as jurors for the short-film competition at the USA Film Festival......
Factory worker: Miller as Sedgwick

Skip the Movie, Wait for the Lawsuit

David Ehrenstein
“There is no period so remote as the recent past,” says Irwin, the slick revisionist schoolteacher in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys. And Factory Girl is a perfect example of that. Directed by the conspicuously semicompetent George Hickenlooper (The Big Brass Ring, The Man From Elysian Fields) from a script......
Theyve come a long way

The U.K. in L.A.

David Ehrenstein
The ocean appears suddenly. You turn another hairpin bend and the land falls away and there is a long high view down Santa Monica Canyon to the pale Pacific waters. A clear day is not often. Sky and air are hazed now, diffusing the sun and dredging the ocean of......