John Waldron never got high telling jokes. “Back when I was doing stand-up comedy,” Waldron recalls, “the other comics would come off stage and they’d just be high as kites from the laughs they’d given the audience. They couldn’t sleep for hours. I never had that.” But when Waldron heard…
The Chicano labor leader César Chávez now can join Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela in the pantheon of heroes whose world-altering achievements are dutifully recounted in timid, lifeless films any substitute teacher can pop into the school DVD player when the regular history teacher is out with the flu. With…
As Bob Zmuda tells it, screenwriter Norman Wexler used to tote a briefcase full of thousands of dollars to pay off the many people that he pissed off each day. Zmuda — the comedian, writer, tall-tale dispenser, and longtime wrangler of Andy Kaufman — dished his best Wexler story on…
As Bob Zmuda tells it, screenwriter Norman Wexler used to tote a briefcase full of thousands of dollars to pay off the many people that he pissed off each day. Zmuda — the comedian, writer, tall-tale dispenser, and longtime wrangler of Andy Kaufman — dished his best Wexler story on…
To hear Darren Aronofsky tell it, in the interviews he’s given recently to the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker, there was no way in hell he’d let his special effects extravaganza Noah, years in the planning, be your run-of-the-mill, candy-ass Biblical epic. The ark built by Russell…
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name is only about one-seventh the font size of the title on the poster of Sabotage, formerly Breacher, formerly Ten, his third attempt — after the full-auto Western The Last Stand and the goofy Stallone-co-headlined prison-break joint Escape Plan — in 14 months at a post-gubernatorial comeback. A…
Last year, Phoenix Film Festival knocked our socks off with great independent films made by both local and national talent, earning it a Best of Phoenix award. This year, we’re preparing to dig into more shorts, documentaries, features, and Q&As at the fest, but making the call on what to…
Let’s start with the ending, the closing credits disclaimer that insists that none of the lead actors in Lars von Trier’s two-part erotic epic Nymphomaniac filmed penetrative sex. If there is real sex in the movie — and it sure looks like there is — it must have been the…
If you count forward from Jim Henson’s mid-1960s TV appearances with a fringy pup named Rowlf and the lizard, made from an old winter coat, who would later become Kermit the Frog, the Muppets have outlived most of their early puppet peers by more than two generations: You don’t see…
Dystopian movies don’t have to make sense. As the audience, we’re obligated to sit down with our popcorn and soda and pretend that yes, of course, in the future monkeys rule the Earth, women can’t bear children, and Arnold Schwarzenegger is an everyday construction worker. It’s a mutual contract of…
Think back to the worst thing you did in high school. Shoplifting? Busted with a joint? Trespassing, all lit up on Boone’s Farm? Now, imagine you pulled your rite-of-passage nogoodnik routine in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in the early 2000s. You get busted, the cops get involved, you get hauled to the…
The big news out of the Berlin Film Festival was that Shia LaBeouf, here to promote Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac: Volume 1, behaved like an ass on the red carpet at the movie’s premiere. He showed up in a proper tuxedo, but also with a paper bag over his head…
Chelsea Handler just released her fourth book Uganda Be Kidding Me — fifth, if you count the book she edited that was written by her friends about her, called Lies that Chelsea Handler Told Me. Lucky for us, she’s stopping in Phoenix on her tour to promote the book, which…
If you’re a fan of the Twilight Zone, thriller anthologies, and films produced right out of Arizona, then there’s a good chance you’ll be buying a ticket this spring to see Locker 13, a film from Mesa-based production company, Brothers’ Ink…
Arizona PBS series Books & Co. is about to begin its 17th season of delving into a world filled with imagination, fantasy, and history, as told through the eyes of both well-known and up-and-coming authors. Hosted by Arizona’s inaugural poet laureate, Alberto Rios, an ASU Regents’ Professor of English, each…
“A long time ago, we used to be friends.” So goes The Dandy Warhols’ “We Used to Be Friends,” the theme song to the canceled teen neo-noir drama Veronica Mars. For fans of the TV show, Friday, March 14’s release of the film continuation of the story is something of…
Leave it to Wes Anderson to make a film about World War II without mentioning Germany. In The Grand Budapest Hotel, a wundercabinet set in the fictitious Eastern European Republic of Zubrowka circa 1932, Anderson captures the collapse of a kingdom and rise of a reich without so much as…
Think adapting War and Peace is hard? Try adapting the race car video game Need for Speed. Tolstoy’s 1,225-page behemoth has nothing on the Electronic Arts franchise’s irreconcilably complicated 20-year, 20-installment history: Sometimes cars are subject to physics; sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes they’re invulnerable; sometimes they break. Maybe you’re in…
A wise man — or, more precisely, a wiseass trucker named Jack Burton — once opined that “it’s all in the reflexes.” Few actors have had better ones than Kurt Russell, who makes a welcome return to theaters this weekend in The Art of the Steal. Having been largely MIA…
If you were to survey people who pay attention to movies — to go door-to-door with a clipboard, a sharpened No. 2 pencil, and a sheaf of forms with the word SURVEY printed in clean block letters across the top, later to be tabulated on a vintage Underwood adding machine…
According to lore, Liberace used to greet the tourists who’d come by bus to gawk at his bejeweled home with the line, “I hope you like it. After all, you paid for it!” Not everyone has to like Rob Thomas’ Veronica Mars, the feature-length incarnation of his much-loved television series,…
As of this writing, the Netflix Instant catalog boasts more than 10,000 titles available for online streaming — a number that, as per the official Netflix rhetoric, seems colossal. But the landscape of this digital paradise may not be quite so idyllic. As classic film enthusiast Jaime Christley reminds us,…
