David Ehrenstein

Mercouri and Perkins set off sparks in Phaedra (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)

Phaidra Film Series

David Ehrenstein
Gregory Markopoulos declared his avant-garde classic Twice a Man (1964) to have been inspired by the Greek legend of Hippolytus, son of Theseus, who spurned the advances of his stepmother, Phaedra. In revenge, Phaedra wrote Theseus a letter claiming that Hippolytus raped her. She then killed herself. Believing her, Theseus......

Horsefeathers

David Ehrenstein
The last straw broke two weeks ago when my friend (and fellow journalist) Bob Hofler tried to make plans to go to an afternoon showing with someone who informed him, “Oh, no — I’m going to be there for the very first one at 10 a.m.” It was, Bob told......

Horsefeathers!

David Ehrenstein
Photo by Kimberly FrenchThe last straw broke two weeks ago when my friend (and fellow journalist) Bob Hofler tried to make plans to go to an afternoon showing with someone who informed him, “Oh, no — I’m going to be there for the very first one at 10 a.m.” It......

Foreign Affairs

David Ehrenstein
Illustration by Max Cornell“Our longest-running foreign film was A Man and a Woman,” Laemmle Theatres president Robert Laemmle sighs nostalgically. “We played it exclusively at the Royal for two years. You can’t do that anymore. Now distributors are in a rush to get to the next revenue stream.” And these......

Trusting Gregg

David Ehrenstein
Photo by Lacey TerrellJoseph Gordon-Levitt gained fame in the hit comedy series Third Rock From the Sun, as a 1,000-year-old interstellar life form that had assumed the shape of a wisecracking teenager. Now in Mysterious Skin, New Queer Cinema “bad boy” Gregg Araki’s adaptation of Scott Heim’s novel about the......

David Ehrenstein, Meet David Ehrenstein

David Ehrenstein
It all began simply enough, as extraordinary things often do. About three years ago a friend suggested I Google myself to see which of my articles on film and politics came up. I was delighted to discover that that there were quite a few. But I also found reference to......

Cue the Fat Lady

David Ehrenstein
Marry me a little Love me just enough Cry but not too often Play but not too rough Keep a tender distance So we’ll both be free That’s the way it ought to be I’m ready I’m ready So wrote Stephen Sondheim back in 1971 in a song famously cut......

Directing With Bifocals

David Ehrenstein
Photo by David Ehrenstein"It's like a fairy tale," says Fatih Akin. "He's asleep, and she wakes him up. ‘Sleeping Beauty,' with the sexes reversed." Few moviegoers, however, are likely to find anything storybook-like about the She and He in the Turkish-extracted, German-born writer-director's dark comedy-drama Head-On. It centers, after all,......
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The Isherwood Equation

David Ehrenstein
Photo by Humphrey Spender "Honestly, I don’t know what to say," says a distressed Don Bachardy. "Chris’ centenary was in August, and the other two volumes of the Diaries were supposed to have been published by then. I don’t know when they’re coming out, and now we have this biography!"......
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Breathing While Black

David Ehrenstein
It looks like it’s all over between The New York Times and Cornel West. In a recent Sunday book review, “the newspaper of record” complained that while the noted African-American scholar “combined the style of a radical intellectual with a message that was middle-of-the-road” in his previous book, Race Matters,......