“That Fred Flintstone–what an actor!” enthuses a morgue attendant in the Ron Howard comedy Night Shift. I’ve never particularly agreed. Although I dutifully watched, as a kid, Hanna-Barbera’s endlessly rerun cartoon series, which turned humankind’s prehistoric past into a 50s-style, suburban tract-house wonderland, I found it unsophisticated even then–my cartoon…
Some musicals beg you to like them. They brandish their sincerity as a weapon–you’re hit over the head, grabbed by the throat and throttled. If you try to resist, well, you’re the kind of dour-hearted drudge who ought to stick to Eugene O’Neill revivals. But even those who have really…
It isn’t often that I show any prescience, but I had a rare burst a couple of years ago, when I reviewed House Party 2, a Kid N Play vehicle. It was a mostly lousy little picture, and I said so, but I mentioned a grinning, rubber-faced kid named Martin…
Almost everyone who’s at all interested in show business knows that Brandon Lee, the star of The Crow, was killed last year in a shooting accident on the set of that film. It’s hard to imagine a movie worth dying for–The Crow certainly isn’t, striking though much of it is–but…
Uma Thurman’s distinctive physical traits–uncommon beauty and gangliness–uniquely suit her to the role of Sissy Hankshaw, the heroine of Gus Van Sant’s new film, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, adapted by Van Sant from Tom Robbins’ enduring late-hippie-era novel of 1976. Sissy’s distinctive physical traits–her beauty and her abnormally long…
Mention the word “graffiti” and most people will go ballistic. What scrolls up on the average man-on-the-street’s mental monitor are visions of once-virgin buildings, fences and even freeway overpass signs scarred by the unsightly spray-can “tagging” of godless vandals. Tucson’s Sixth Congress Gallery’s current show, “Spraycan Art,” gives us a…
After the rigors of his last film, Malcolm X, director Spike Lee apparently decided to try something in a slightly lighter vein. The change suits him. His latest, an easygoing, nostalgic comedy titled Crooklyn, lacks the flashy, daring visual rhetoric that has characterized Lee’s past work. But it also lacks…
After Roman Polanski’s last film as director, a halfhearted, soddenly wistful attempt at a romantic thriller called Frantic, his new film Bitter Moon is most encouraging, because it’s heartless and nasty. Polanski will probably never recapture the innovative subtleties of his early works, like Knife in the Water and Cul-De-Sac…
Everyone in the audience was laughing like crazy. I saw a man on the aisle wipe away tears. The laughter was the from-the-gut kind, and it was for a song called “A Secretary Is Not a Toy.” I laughed as hard as anybody, because the experience had the same effect…
All through Park Your Car in Harvard Yard, I kept wondering if the characters were ever going to stop whining. But these were whining kinds of people. They would whine about anything–the weather, childhood, tourists and every person in the past who could conceivably be blamed for their current state…
“Making a movie is about as close as a man comes to having a baby.” Paul Rodriguez expounds on this thought. “First, you have to sleep with somebody to conceive it. “Then you go through your morning sickness; then, when that puppy’s shot, when it’s born, you go through your…
Given a minimum of competence, there’s virtually no way that a film of Emile Zola’s novel Germinal could be a complete failure. The subject matter is too inherently powerful and Zola’s dramatizing of it too inherently skillful and impassioned. The trouble is, whatever the level of competence, there’s also little…
After a long film-festival drought, the Valley seems to be on the verge of a deluge. Although shaky promotional resources resulted in a disappointing turnout for last fall’s First Annual Equinox film festival at Herberger Theater Center, its producers have gamely promised a second annual effort this fall, at a…
If an art collection is the unconscious manifestation of the collector, then two folk-art shows on display in the Valley underscore the enormous disparity in the visions of different collectors in the same genre–a genre that’s increasingly popular but still jockeying for position in the world of fine art. Scottsdale…
After having made the pilgrimage eastward to the Sullivan Street Playhouse a couple of times during the last few decades to see The Fantasticks, I was curious to know what the experience would be like plucked from the context of Nathan’s hot dogs, screaming Village activists and one more subway…
The prologue of Suture, which also serves as its trailer, is chilling and teasingly elliptical. A man awakens in the middle of the night to hear someone sneaking into the house. He retreats to the bathroom, where he huddles in the tub with a shotgun, waiting for the intruder, who…
Urinating and making love and missing your family, struggling to survive and losing your courage at the crucial moment, eating chickens and trying to read the future in their livers–these things are what writer-director Bill Forsyth’s new movie, appropriately titled Being Human, is about. This ultimately unsuccessful but sometimes thrilling…
Jack, the 15-year-old hero of Andrew Birkin’s The Cement Garden, lives with his brother and two sisters in a bleak little house in an English suburb that gives new meaning to the word “godforsaken.” He rarely bathes or changes clothes, and his most frequent recreational activity is masturbating while looking…
For an exercise in frustration, try explaining the plot of The Winter’s Tale to someone. It can’t be done. You keep trying, but you can’t get away from the feeling you’re not quite getting it right. But that means that The Winter’s Tale also leaves plenty of room for interpretation…
In his last movie, 1990’s Cry-Baby, writer/director/bad-taste maven John Waters seemed to be off his game. There were terrific individual scenes, but the film sorely lacked the unifying personality common to all but one of his previous features (Desperate Living): the late and lamented, absurdly endearing transvestite star Divine (this…
The Robber Bridegroom works hard at telling everyone they’re having a good time. The characters are all eccentrics, the pratfalls continuous, the musical numbers relentless. But all this in-your-face cheeriness can’t really help a show like The Robber Bridegroom, presented by ASU’s Department of Theatre and Lyric Opera Theatre. It…
The title characters of Bad Girls are a quartet of fugitive whores in the Old West. Three of them (Andie MacDowell, Drew Barrymore, Mary Stuart Masterson) daringly rescue the fourth (Madeleine Stowe) from an unjust hanging, and the women take off across country on the lam, planning to settle in…
