John Grisham’s The Rainmaker lulls you into the mindset you get while reading a best seller at the beach. What a sad thing to say about a Francis Ford Coppola movie! Rather than heighten your awareness the way The Conversation or The Godfather did, The Rainmaker makes you feel lazy…
thursday november 20 The Food Chain: Though Nicky Silver is one of America’s more promising comic playwrights, his writing sometimes straddles the line that divides standup patter from subtler characterization; there’s surely no little connection between that and men having an en masse attraction to Silver’s humor that mostly eludes…
Put brutally, the marvelous The Wings of the Dove is the story of a romantic frame-up that backfires. Thankfully, nothing is put brutally in this smart, lyrical movie. Director Iain Softley and screenwriter Hossein Amini cut to the thick of Henry James’ masterpiece about amorous extortion and moral purification. Helena…
Fast, Cheap & Out of Control sounds like an old exploitation title, but it belongs to the latest of the idiosyncratic documentaries of Errol Morris. This one interweaves interviews with four men of peculiar occupation, linked only by their study of animal form and function. Dave Hoover trains big cats…
thursday november 13 The Food Chain: Though Nicky Silver (Pterodactyls; Free Will and Wanton Lust) is one of America’s more promising comic playwrights, his writing sometimes straddles the line that divides standup patter from subtler characterization; there’s surely no little connection between that and men having an en masse attraction…
From his office in Los Angeles, Michael Greene, head of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS)–the Grammy people–is waxing passionate about the similarities between playing musical instruments and playing baseball. “The concentration, the focus, the losing of oneself in what you’re doing,” he says quickly in a…
Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee has carved out a niche as our leading director of comedies of manners. His first three films–Pushing Hands (1992), The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994)–combined humor with pathos to shed light on modern Chinese and Chinese-American family conflicts. The news that he…
Family films are often pitched for “the child in us all,” but Bean doesn’t have an ounce of “inner child” in it. It’s been worked out to appeal to, at best, 8-to-10-year-olds; there’s not much to delight even precocious preteens, let alone adults. This really is too bad, since Rowan…
In Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, based on the late Robert Heinlein’s 1959 sci-fi opus, the killer arachnids upstage the humans. Not that it’s much of a contest, since the humans are all raging dullards. We’ve seen these young men and women with their square jaws and pert noses emoting their…
Mad City, a descendant of Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, may irritate orthodox movie buffs. In the Wilder classic, Kirk Douglas’ supremely cynical newspaper reporter turns the rescue of a cave-in victim into “the big carnival” (the film’s alternate title). The protagonist of Mad City, a TV reporter (Dustin…
thursday november 6 The Food Chain: Though Nicky Silver (Pterodactyls; Free Will and Wanton Lust) is one of America’s more promising comic playwrights, his writing sometimes straddles the line that divides standup patter from subtler characterization; there’s surely no little connection between that and men having an en masse attraction…
It is a few minutes before midnight on a recent Saturday and I am about to relive my childhood in a dark, smelly moviehouse in Tempe. Now surrounded by people half my age who are excited just to be awake at this hour, I required an afternoon nap just to…
Three Halloweens ago, Tempe’s Valley Art Theatre hosted a screening of Universal’s 1925 horror classic The Phantom of the Opera, with live-organ accompaniment. On the night before Halloween this year, the admirable experiment is being repeated on a grander scale. Organist Rob Richards, who played the Valley Art show on…
Despite Red Corner’s muckraking pretensions, it is a rickety throwback to escapist adventures that featured beautiful foreign idealists spouting high-flown hooey to fighting Americans. The heroine, a scrappy Beijing defense lawyer, ends up whispering a whole succession of sweet somethings to the hero, a framed Yank. The banalities include (I…
Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights opens with a sinuous, breathlessly extended tracking shot that swoops us into a San Fernando Valley disco and then does a curlicue around a succession of faces. Popping out like jack-o’-lanterns in the discotheque’s low light, they have the look of trashy royalty–exalted and…
thursday october 30 Three Semi-Automatics Just for Fun: The genesis of this black-comic, multimedia piece–produced by Arizona State University’s Institute for Studies in the Arts and billed as “June Cleaver wearing pearls and a pistol”–was a visit to an Albuquerque bookstore by one of the work’s principals, American actress Leslie…
The family values Arizonans seem to know best are the ones that say: Slash social-service budgets and smash programs that provide aid to kids and battered women. This being Domestic Violence Awareness Month, several Arizona choreographer/performers apparently decided to score a few defensive whacks for the family with some chillingly…
All through Shakespeare’s great, self-questioning war whoop Henry V, the Chorus keeps coming on, apologizing to the audience for the theater’s limitations in presenting grand scenes like battles or troop movements. It’s false modesty, of course–Shakespeare, the “bending author” through whose “rough and all-unable pen” (fishing for compliments, are we,…
The true-life story of the Cottingley Fairies is so full of possibilities, so thought-provoking and hilarious at once, that it’s amazing it’s never been filmed before. Making up for lost time, the incident has suddenly appeared (on its 80th anniversary) as the basis for two films simultaneously. Photographing Fairies, with…
In The Myth of Fingerprints, middle-class white people gather at their parents’ home for Thanksgiving, lovers in tow, to snipe at one another and bellyache about how horrible home life used to be. This description would also cover Home for the Holidays of two years ago. Myth’s people are a…
Stylishness without substance can become wearying real fast. Twenty minutes into A Life Less Ordinary, the new movie from the producing-directing-writing team of Trainspotting and Shallow Grave, I was already into overload. It’s not that director Danny Boyle doesn’t have imagination. It’s just that sometimes imagination is all he has…
thursday october 23 UK/AZ You Like It: Romeo et Juliette, Hamlet on Trial and More Stuff From Beyond the Pond: The UK/AZ Festival celebrates the–rather tenuous–connection(s) between England and Arizona. So what have France and Italy got to do with it? Well, Arizona Opera opens its season with French composer…
