Arts & Entertainment
An Interview with Delroy Donstantien-Simms
Consistency in the Midst of Change
The Green Mountain Film Festival
The Green Mountain Film Festival
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Benjamin Smoke
Jem Cohen and Peter Sillen’s forceful documentary poetically captures the life of an extraordinary artist, speed-freak and occasional drag queen known simply as “Benjamin.”
A legend in the underground music scene of Cabbagetown (an industrial Atlanta neighborhood,) Benjamin’s work with the bands Opal Foxx Quartet and Smoke served as inspiration for Patti Smith and REM’s Michael Stipe.
Benjamin Smoke is a candid depiction of the South, a profound meditation on art and rebellion, and a story about a man who decides to follow his own path in life.
The City Hall Arts Center, March 25 and 28 at 8:30 pm.
I’m the One that I Want
“Several times while watching the movie I laughed until the tears were running down my face,” said New York Times critic Stephen Holden of I’m the One that I Want, the filmed one-woman comedy act of Margaret Cho.
Cho’s subject is her own life, from the pressures on women to conform to a slim body image, to the mating habits of lesbians, gays, and heterosexuals, to the ways in which the media continues to stereotype Asian Americans.
The Savoy, March 23 at 8:45 pm and March 24 at 2 pm.
Live Nude Girls Unite!
At once racy and earnest, Julia Query and Vicki Funari’s Live Nude Girls Unite! is as provocative as its title.
Silver-tongued stripper/comic Query takes the audience into the midst of a group of San Francisco strippers who create the first union of exotic dancers in the United States. A moving sub-plot involves Query’s decision to tell her mother, an activist doctor who works closely with prostitutes and drug addicts, about her new profession. Query’s humor and commitment makes the film one of those rare subversive documentaries that manages to be comical, political, enlightening, and entertaining at the same time.
The City Hall Arts Center, March 23 at 8:30 pm, March 24 at 2 pm, and March 29 at 6:30 pm.
Paragraph 175
More than 100,000 men were arrested in the Nazis’ purge of homosexuals in Germany; of the eight known survivors, six appear in Paragraph 175 to fill a crucial gap in the historical record. The New York Times says: “To the growing body of invaluable cinematic literature documenting the hideous barbarity of Nazism must now be added Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s moving film. At once admirable and deeply unsettling, the film draws upon the testimony of little more than a handful of the all-but-vanished ranks of survivors to relate the horror of their experiences and the after effects that scar and roil these men to the present day.” Friedman and Epstein also directed The Times of Harvey Milk and Common Threads.
The City Hall Arts Center, March 25 at 6:30 pm, and March 29 at 8:30 pm.
For a complete schedule, call 802-229-0598
or email savoydv@together.net.