Coming closer even than Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers to resembling the Chinese cover art for an Iron Butterfly album, Chen Kaige’s The Promise is psychedelia extremis. Hardly a minute of it passes without a concentrated dose of digital frou-frou and lavish cartoon-poetic imagery: floating ocean goddesses, flying swordsmen,…
The most important thing to know about the new movie Hoot, adapted from the children’s book by Carl Hiaasen, is that it’s co-produced by Jimmy Buffett, who also appears in a small role and provides new music for the soundtrack. Middle-aged drunks and boat owners might possibly rejoice at the…
Despite what you may have heard, The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? is not a play about bestiality. The subject hovers over the story, but goat-fucking is more an allegory than a theme. Playwright Edward Albee is concerned here with the boundaries for “decent” human behavior; about how we decide…
The biggest innovation videogaming saw in the past decade or so was the invention of the “sandbox”: Programmers create settings and consequences, but give you, the user, free license to do with them what you want. Grand Theft Auto is certainly the best-known of these games. The carjackings, the hookers,…
Tennessee Williams Film Collection (Warner Bros.) All that’s missing from this boxed set — six movies, one doc, eight discs — is a jar of sweat; even Williams is here, in a 1973 documentary. Then there’s Brando, Beatty, Newman, Taylor, Burton, Gardner, Leigh, Malden, Huston, Kazan — the last of…
¡Odelay! Cinco de Mayo is right around the corner, so you’d better dust off your sombrero and bust out your rusty knowledge of Spanglish, because there are plenty of phat fetes going down in P-town from Thursday, May 4, through Sunday, May 7. Wanna celebrate Latino culture? You’re in the…
Epic Proportions: This comedy by playwrights Larry Coen and David Crane came about after the pair noticed an extra in a biblical epic they were watching on television being crushed by a falling column. Coen and Crane (who’s best known as co-creator and executive producer of TV’s Friends) began to…
BTK Killer (Lions Gate) Chubby Hubby Workout (On Air Video) Dinosaurs: The Complete First and Second Seasons (Disney) The Family Stone (Fox) Flight 93: The Movie (UAV) Jargo (Picture This!) King of Thieves (Picture This!) Last Holiday (Paramount) Lie With Me (Lance) Life in the Undergrowth (BBC) Misaki Chronicles: Volume…
United 93 — which uses the hijacking of one plane on September 11, 2001, to tell the story of what happened to all four aircraft seized that morning — may be the most wrenching, profound, and perfectly made movie nobody wants to see. There is no reason to think that…
The Darwinian theory that schlocksploitation must tighten its twist of the nuts with each new release will be tested strenuously for years — or at least several weeks — by Hard Candy. A pointedly s(l)ick cross between Oleanna and I Spit on Your Grave, thrown like raw meat to Lions…
Criticizing an action movie for being empty-headed is like calling out Brokeback Mountain for its lack of car chases. Likewise, when a teen gymnastics movie is derided as formulaic and dumb, one might logically wonder compared to what? Very well: Stick It sucks it compared to the modestly charming Kirsten…
Every year, when ESPN broadcasts the Scripps National Spelling Bee, a tiny flutter of hope rises in anyone who cherishes the life of the mind. Spelling is a sport? Sweet Jesus! For the duration of the competition, the brainy kid who gets his glasses stomped by knuckle-draggers on the playground…
If you’re a regular moviegoer with a gift for remembering unusual names, chances are you’ve started paying attention to Chiwetel Ejiofor, the black English actor with a chameleon’s talent for disappearing into a role. You may not have caught his breakthrough performance in Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things, but you…
When Hillary Carlip refers to herself as a “multi-mediaist,” she’s not spinning dross. The award-winning author of Girl Power: Young Women Speak Out appears to be leading seven lives at once, all of them artful. Carlip is the creator of the acclaimed literary Web site Fresh Yarn: The Online Salon…
I suppose I arrived at Phoenix Theatre last weekend with expectations too high. But considering the talented cast that director D. Scott Withers — no slouch himself — assembled for the company’s update of Clare Boothe Luce’s famously funny The Women, I couldn’t have guessed at the mess I’d find…
Bob Adams, 45, hasn’t stopped making art. True, Adams — who made a name for himself more than a decade ago with thoughtful pen-and-ink drawings, paintings, and portrait silhouettes — hasn’t mounted a gallery show in a while. But he hasn’t given up on art, either; he’s lately been teaching…
Boys are oiling their mitts, men have started playing hooky, and Dick Cheney just one-hopped it like a pussy. Yes, baseball season is in full swing, and our dip-juice cup runneth over. Normally, this is cause for heavy titillation — perhaps a strong lather or a well-intentioned fistfight. But 2006…
Aeon Flux (Paramount) Many things about this surreal sci-fi flick defy explanation, but nothing more so than the mystery of how it got made in the first place. On paper, it’s an archetypal setup for a bomb: a mostly forgotten cartoon, notable for its visual style and incomprehensibility, revived as…
Vast legions embrace the thing as gospel. Skeptics dismiss it as ecstatic nonsense. In any event, James Redfield’s peculiar novel The Celestine Prophecy has been a bulwark of New Age metaphysics since it first hit the best-seller lists back in 1993. By recent estimates, there are 14 million copies in…
¡Odelay! Cinco de Mayo is right around the corner, so you’d better dust off your sombrero and bust out your rusty knowledge of Spanglish, because there are plenty of phat fetes going down in P-town from Wednesday, May 3, through Sunday, May 7. Wanna celebrate Latino culture? You’re in the…
My friend Neil e-mailed me the other day. “I can’t take another day of this,” he wrote. “If I hear about one more ‘Junior’ production being staged in Phoenix, I’m going to throw myself under the wheels of a bus.” Like me, Neil is a theater critic who’s troubled by…
Epic Proportions: This comedy by playwrights Larry Coen and David Crane came about after the pair noticed an extra in a biblical epic they were watching on television being crushed by a falling column. Coen and Crane (who’s best known as co-creator and executive producer of TV’s Friends) began to…
