The Aristocrats (Lions Gate) The single joke around which Paul Provenza’s documentary revolves has a standard beginning and ending, like pieces of bread that make a sandwich stuffed with excrement, incest, and whatever other foulness the teller can come up with. Provenza and Penn Jillette recorded more than 100 comedians…
Underneath the Lintel: Try though they might, neither actor Christopher Haines, who appears in Glen Berger’s one-man one-act, nor Charles St. Clair, its director, can save this sinking ship of a show. Lintel is an exploration of faith that comments on man’s place in the universe; one that’s couched in…
“Lingerie: Secrets of Elegance” at Phoenix Art Museum: Yep, you read that right. Bras, baby doll nighties, and a sunburst display of girdles are just a gallery over from the paintings of dead white guys in powdered wigs. This fascinating fashion exhibition traces lingerie’s evolution (or maybe devolution) from corsets…
Address Unknown (Tartan) Anyone Can Dance: Nightclub Freestyle (Delta) National Lampoon’s Barely Legal (MGM) Dallas: The Complete Fourth Season (Warner Bros.) Educating Rita (Sony) Flightplan (Touchstone) The Fog (2005) (Sony) God Save the Queen: A Punk Rock Anthology (Music Video Dist.) Hooked (Eclectic) Ludacris: Southern Smoke (Music Video Dist.) My…
Four-time Emmy Award-winning director Charles St. Clair must be exhausted. In between classes at ASU West (where he’s a professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Performance), the co-founder of both the Fairmount Theater of the Deaf and Phoenix’s Black Theatre Troupe is directing Theater Works’ Underneath the Lintel; is shopping for…
America — and, by extension, Hollywood — has an obsession with innocence and the loss thereof. Every generation has that Moment When Everything Changed, from Pearl Harbor to JFK’s assassination to 9/11. The impact takes a while to settle in, then people forget again, and future generations are similarly traumatized…
The critical consensus has Match Point as Woody Allen’s finest film since . . . oh, let’s see . . . Bullets Over Broadway, is it? Or perhaps Deconstructing Harry? Or maybe Sweet and Lowdown? One forgets where the good stuff left off, because there’s been so much bad stuff…
Albert Brooks, the once-funny comic turned filmmaker, plays a once-funny comic turned filmmaker named Albert Brooks in Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, which he also wrote and directed. It’s the second time Brooks has played himself, more or less; the first was in 1979, when he made Real…
We popcorn-chomping hitchhikers never know who will pick us up on the roadside. In Flirting With Disaster, it was a neurotic Manhattan adoptee on a nationwide search for his biological parents. The desert-parched heroines of Thelma & Louise brought us along as they raised hell en route to their doom…
After years of sucking the wind from famous people’s sails, New York journalist Jeannette Walls has achieved some fame of her own. Her best-selling childhood memoir, The Glass Castle (the title refers to a solar-powered house that Walls’ father dreamed of one day building in the Arizona desert), has gathered…
Try though they might, neither actor Christopher Haines, who appears in Glen Berger’s one-man, one-act Underneath the Lintel, nor Charles St. Clair, its director, can save this sinking ship of a show. Lintel is an exploration of faith that comments on man’s place in the universe — one that’s couched…
Movie-based videogames have a well-deserved reputation for sucking. Ever since Atari’s E.T. — a game so ill-conceived that thousands of unsold cartridges were dumped en masse in the desert, creating the crappiest buried treasure of all time — Hollywood tie-ins have bombed big-time. Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game…
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Magnolia) The best two hours you’ll ever spend learning about accounting, Enron is one part civics lesson, one part Greek tragedy, and one part political cartoon. Director Alex Gibney makes no pretense of objectivity; he wants you to hiss and boo at Ken…
At first you don’t even notice it. What’s to see? Funny how the ground level on either side of your feet remains unchanged, or barely changed, for so long. Then, okay, a slight rise, but not so high that you couldn’t jump over it. Not that you do. But you…
I am what is known in polite circles as a collector. I own 16 children’s phonographs, 213 Old Maid card games, 47 LPs by Jerry Vale. Although many people see my endless hunting and gathering of useless ephemera — century-old bars of still-wrapped soap, 1970s breakfast-cereal premiums, thrift-store paintings of…
I always envy those people who glide into January resolving to lose weight, quit smoking, or kick their eBay habits. These are self-inflicted vices, ones that might possibly be solved by the person suffering from them. My problem is completely beyond my control, and certainly beyond the reach of your…
There is no good explanation for the coat that hangs in my closet. Not that it’s ugly. Far from it. Heathery brown tweed, with a nipped waist and shoulders that sit just so, it’s cut beautifully enough to make even Janet Napolitano look lanky. In fact, if I stood up…
When Katrina struck, he borrowed a truck from the U-Haul dealership where he worked his second job. Instead of loading up his worldly possessions before fleeing the path of the storm, he loaded up relatives and neighbors; they squeezed into the holding cell of the borrowed truck for a dark,…
It’s like clockwork. As each and every night out rolls around, you swear it’ll be filled with excitement, rather than the regular routine of dinner and a movie. But alas, creature of habit, when your head hits the pillow, you’ve somehow wasted your evening filling your face with the usual…
Adventures of Superman: The Complete Second Season (Warner Bros.) Asylum (Paramount) Casino (MCA) Celebrity Mix (TLA) Final Destination: Scared 2 Death Pack (New Line) Gendernauts (First Run) Ghost in the Machine (Anchor Bay) Industrial Strength Keaton (Mackinac Media) Jamie Foxx Presents Laffapalooza! 6 (Image) Junebug (Sony) Lois & Clark: The…
Sometimes the rut you’re in is bigger than all that. Sometimes it’s deeper and wider than just Whoa, I wear too much orange or So there are other channels besides the Spice Channel? Sometimes that rut you’re in is so huge that getting out of it entails not just a…
One of the hottest trends going in the art world is for artists or groups of artists to work under a pseudonym. The phony name is a protest against commercialism in art, and it’s also a heck of a good gimmick. Enter COAX, the nom de brush of a Phoenix…
