Ernest Hardy

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So Much Things To Say

Ernest Hardy
The first sound out of Lauryn Hill’s mouth on her new, live Unplugged CD is laughter. She laughs often throughout the concert, riffing on rumors about her insanity and playfully needling a familiar face in the crowd. This is the album recently dubbed Unglued by one critic and roundly bashed......

Unplanned Obsolescence

Ernest Hardy
Around the time that Outfest was celebrating its 10th anniversary (give or take a year), gay-and-lesbian cinema was briefly, powerfully re-configured into New Queer Cinema. The phrase, coined by lesbian-feminist culture critic B. Ruby Rich, mapped the crossroad where experimentation with form, representation and desire coalesced into a movement that......
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Back in the Day

Ernest Hardy
Masters at Work have a droll sense of humor. The title of their new CD is Our Time Is Coming, when the music contained within is so very much of the past. This is a pure disco record, old-school, no irony or winks. And they‘ll be slammed hard for it......

Fogtown and Ze Boys

Ernest Hardy
THE SOUND FALTERED, THE PROJECTOR SPUTTERED, and the first trailer ran upside down -- all for an overflow crowd who would eventually wait more than 45 minutes past the scheduled start time for the Japanese coming-of-age drama All About Lily Chou-Chou to actually begin. As technical difficulties mounted, writer-director Shunji......
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Love in the Abstract

Ernest Hardy
Don‘t call it a mea culpa. On Amplified, his 1999 solo debut, Q-Tip wrapped himself in furs, video ho’s and the ill-gotten booty of a thousand South African diamond mines, just like 90 percent of the nouveau-minstrel Negroes currently Hollywood-shuffling through hip-hop and R&B. White boys in Tijuana pullovers and......
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All in the Family

Ernest Hardy
Mohsem Makhmalbaf’s Kandahar, released late last year, would have been a stirring and illuminating film had September 11 never happened. The events of that day, however, threw the part-documentarypart-fiction film into intense relief, imbuing its examination of the horrors of Taliban rule in Afghanistan with a pressing relevance to American......

Turntablin’

Ernest Hardy
The hip-hop DJ who truly knows his shit is an endangered species, a victim of his medium‘s success. Your dot-com done got gone? Grab a crate of records and become a DJ. Downsized out of a job? Had your novel rejected for the millionth time? Been told by your club-crawling......

Here and Now

Ernest Hardy
Last year, when writer-director Robert Guediguian‘s film The Town Is Quiet (La Ville Est Tranquille) played as part of the “City of Lights, City of Angels” French film festival, it seemed prescient. Now it’s eerily timely. Set in modern-day Marseilles, a warily multiethnic city whose once-bustling harbor economy has given......

Selling the Sun

Ernest Hardy
That clashes of tradition, religion and global economic policies weigh so heavily as subject matter in the films of this year’s Pan African Film & Arts Festival should come as no surprise. To some extent, those have always been the dominant issues in this 10-year-old festival’s movie fare. And although......

Small Place, Big Hurt

Ernest Hardy
Jamaica is so staggeringly beautiful that in Life and Debt, Stephanie Black‘s cool-headed but blistering indictment of globalization and the racist international economic policies that have shoved that country into crushing poverty, the place and its people circumvent despair to dazzle you. A fiery orange sunset looks like a painting......