Even today, British kids grow up listening to stories about life during the London Blitz and the hardships their parents and grandparents endured during the Second World War. American children, by comparison, would be hard-pressed to tell you what nations fought on which side. It’s one of the many weaknesses…
Ain’t nothing in this world more tedious than highbrow erotica, which works itself into a lather and then wipes off the sweat before anyone notices how awfully and inappropriately worked up it got. Asylum, adapted by Closer’s Patrick Marber and Chrysanthy Balis from the novel by Patrick McGrath, is just…
Matthew Parkhill’s Dot the I is the kind of tricked-up mental exercise that may intrigue the most impressionable film school students and a philosophy major here and there. But anyone who’s gotten through sophomore year without declaring him the next great thinker of the Western Hemisphere is more likely to…
The British indie filmmaker Sally Potter, a former dancer, lyricist and performance artist, clearly has a taste for adventure. In 1992, that led her to Orlando, a screen adaptation of the experimental Virginia Woolf novel about an Elizabethan nobleman who hangs around for 400 years, eventually morphing into a hip…
Surfers, skateboarders and desert racers have all had their moment at the movies recently. Now the motocross crowd gets its turn. Supercross: The Movie, which provides a glimpse at what its makers call “the second-fastest-growing motor sport in the U.S., behind only NASCAR,” is anything but a dramatic masterpiece. But…
“Feel-good lesbian movie” sounds like an oxymoron when you consider that most big “lesbian” movies end with people getting shot (Boys Don’t Cry), dragged off by the Gestapo (Aimée & Jaguar), or watching their businesses burn to the ground (Better Than Chocolate). But Girl Play, which has its Valley première…
A couple of months ago, Matt Brown bashed the heck out of a bunch of old computers to create what he calls “robotic sculpture.” This time around, he and several cohorts are constructing a humongous papier-mâché squid. This is the sort of creative otherness you’ll experience at Brown’s event The…
8/19-9/14The Trunk Space’s new exhibition “Old/New/Traditional/Radical” showcases “artists with classic training and a modern aesthetic,” says the gallery’s JRC. Alan Jones, Susan G. White, and Marc Liao — all from Arizona — take well-trod styles (ceramics, quilts, vessels) and mod ’em up for the new millennium. Jones, well-known for his…
THU 8/18Whether you’re a historic preservationist, a developer with a wrecking ball or somewhere in between, you’ll dig Phoenix: Then and Now. The book is a collaborative effort between two native Phoenicians, Paul Scharbach (a professional photographer) and John H. Akers (a writer/historian), who discuss and sign copies at 7…
SAT 8/20Runs. That’s what bikers do. They hop on their hogs, crotch rockets or whatever slang they use to describe their favorite hunk of motorized steel and go on runs. Sometimes they even do it in a good cause. That’s the case on Saturday, August 20, when the Salt River…
SAT 8/20Last fall, Valley comics Josh Skalniak and Josh McDermitt got the chance to compete at the Las Vegas Comedy Festival, and both felt a little out of place. To the surprise of many — mostly themselves — Skalniak won first place in the Wild Card category and McDermitt took…
“Hector Ruiz: La Realidad (Reality)” at the Heard Museum: Phoenix artist Hector Ruiz fires a shot between the eyes of American values with wood carvings, block prints, and mixed-media assemblages that address racism, border issues and capitalism. A King Kong-size blonde crushes a hapless businessman in her manicured hands in…
THU 18Comedian Alonzo Bodden doesn’t need to worry about planes malfunctioning when he travels. The comic worked as a jet mechanic for Lockheed and McDonnell-Douglas for nine years, and his work included a little project called the Stealth Bomber. But when Bodden discovered he enjoyed entertaining his fellow airplane mechanics…
It’s silly, and a little bit sad, the way that Phoenicians crowd around to watch a summer rainstorm. Packed onto front porches, posted at windows, pulled to the side of the road, we ogle rainy weather as if it were an eighth wonder, a heretofore unseen miracle that may never…
Before I tell you why and how very much I hated Theater League’s The Wonder Bread Years, allow me to explain that this is a show I was born to love. I am the audience for this nostalgic gander at life as a boomer-era kid, one of those poor saps…
If for no other reason, Happy Endings deserves its soft spot in our collective hearts for rescuing Tom Arnold from the why-are-they-now? scrap heap. The former Mr. Roseanne Barr plays Frank, a widower who falls for and sleeps with his son’s conniving would-be girlfriend Jude, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal. And…
The old John Wayne-Dean Martin hayburner The Sons of Katie Elder wasn’t a very good movie the first time around — Dino and a cowboy hat go together about as well as Sinatra and bib overalls — and John Singleton’s jokey, urbanized rehash isn’t likely to snow the Oscar voters,…
The Aristocrats may be the most foul-mouthed movie of the summer, but Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo is the foulest in deed, actually depicting some of the nigh-unspeakable acts that are merely hypothetically talked about in the former film. It’s been a while since we’ve seen a big-time gross-out comedy, and…
The Skeleton Key ranks high on the list of 2005’s funniest films, bested only by the first two-thirds of Wedding Crashers, all of The Aristocrats, and that part in Stealth where the airplane starts sassing Josh Lucas. Doubtful that was the intention of director Iain Softley (K-PAX, an inexplicably well-regarded…
You will be forgiven for believing Brian Herzlinger is something of a creepy guy. Certainly, at first (and 23rd) glance, the man seems to be covered in the icky residue of the stunted, the pathetic and the desperate, which makes him like most hopeful young men who move to Los…
Once you get past its negligible plot, scant dialogue, and almost zero action, Gus Van Sant’s elliptical rendering of the final hours in the troubled life of a grunge musician is rarely boring. That may seem like a backhanded compliment, but, given the absence of such customary cinematic conventions as…
“The most daring rescue mission of our time is a story that has never been told,” boasts the poster for The Great Raid. The credits of the film, however, reveal that it’s based on not one, but two books about the 6th Ranger Battalion, which ventured 30 miles into enemy…
