Weddings make such bitchin’ film scenarios because the stakes are believably high: If anything goes wrong, social opprobrium, the loss of your beloved, or both can ensue, right in front of your disdainful parents, the clergy, and probably Vince Vaughn or somebody. Directors have placed every obvious symbol of holy…
The story goes that while filming in Tunisia in the summer of 1980, Steven Spielberg avoided the dysentery that afflicted most of the cast and crew of Raiders of the Lost Ark by holing up in his hotel room with a suitcase full of SpaghettiOs. Like most studio-approved behind-the-scenes errata,…
The big movie event of September will be the anticipated latest from a certain filmmaker who signs his films with the surname Anderson and a pair of initials, a prodigious talent who burst onto the scene with a stylish entry in the mid-’90s crime-thriller wave and never left. The master…
“I’ve made six movies, and I feel like I’m only just finally figuring out how this business fucking works,” Paul Thomas Anderson says on an August afternoon in Queens, New York, where later that night he will preview his latest film. The movie is The Master, Anderson’s first in the…
If you’ve seen the 2010 musical film featuring a double dose of diva – Cher and Christina Aguilera – then you might think you know about the sultry, theatrical and sometimes humorous world of burlesque. Local filmmaker Douglas Proce wants to shed a different light on the scene through his…
Screening the history of bootlegging in urban America led to the invention of a genre — the gangster film — but moviegoers have seen little of the hills and hollers whence the syndicates’ potent spirits were shipped. Offhand, I can only think of Robert Mitchum’s homegrown 1958 vehicle Thunder Road…
It’s Pollyanna-ish to complain when companies that are in the business of making money on movies make certain movies solely to make money. And yet, it seems to be widely acceptable to be cynical about big-budget movies that are made, marketed, and released in order to sate an appetite that…
See also: David Cronenberg’s Vision of the Cosmopolis See also: The Lurid Pleasure of Killer Joe While Hispanic Heritage Month officially won’t start until Saturday, September 15, Phoenix Art Museum’s film festival Cine Latino will get a jump start on celebrating. Thanks to a grant from the Academy of Motion…
About two-thirds of the way through “Premium Rush,” the latest entry into cycling’s cinematic cannon, the film’s hero Wilee (as in Coyote, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) says one of the great truisms about our two-wheeled, human powered machines. “Bikes want to go fast.” And so does “Premium Rush” — especially…
According to the University of Maryland Medical Center one in every 200,000 live twin births worldwide are conjoined, though 40 to 60 percent are stillborn and 35 percent of those who survive only live for a day. Conjoined Twins (less commonly referred to as Siamese Twins following the birth of…
At one point in Killer Joe, a hideously funny tabloid noir set on the outskirts of Dallas County, Chris Smith (Emile Hirsch) is let into the family double-wide by a relation whose face has just been pummeled into a Rorschach blot of dried gore. He doesn’t stop to ask what…
Boyishly lean, with a brooding angularity that suggests both high maintenance and nefarious vacancy, Robert Pattinson has managed to fill the role of a grade-A male sex symbol without ever evincing anything like carnal energy, to top the Hollywood A list as a representative of the undead. Pattinson’s casting in…
The transformation might be complete: The crap-and-gore, genre-mincing Tasmanian devil of Asian pulp psychosis Takashi Miike we’ve come to know and, well, kinda semi-love since 1999’s Audition seems now to have finished evolving into a tasteful, even resonant art house master. It has only taken him 50 movies or so…
Hit & Run, a new action comedy engineered by faintly Muppety co-director/writer/star Dax Shepard, is as much about running mouths as running motors and injects estrogen into the few remaining enclaves of American testosterone, muscle cars, and FM cock rock. Shepard plays Charlie Bronson, a 35-year-old in Nowheresville whose life,…
“I’ll just tell you straight out, Killer Joe is the most disturbing film I’ve ever made,” William Friedkin says. This is really something, coming from a filmmaker who has spent much of an eclectic career testing audience limits. The Exorcist riled Catholics and had theaters stocking barf bags in 1973;…
Remember how action movies used to be? The good old-fashioned American (but often European-accented) ones from the ’80s and ’90s, the type paid tribute to (but not necessarily re-created) in the Expendables movies? No offense to your Iron Men and your Jason Bournes, but I miss movies like Die Hard,…
One of the most interesting things about Cosmopolis, writer/director David Cronenberg’s extraordinary adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel by the same name, is that it’s based on the first script Cronenberg has both written and shot since 1999’s eXistenZ. Additionally, Cronenberg’s adaptation of Cosmopolis marks the first time he has adapted…
David Koepp writes, and now directs, superior B-movies. This is an admirable and tough-to-master skill given how few major movie studios are willing to take chances on films with lower budgets that don’t employ a found-footage gimmick or generally look like they were made on an aglet-less shoestring budget. So…
The movie of choice this week for people who hold the beliefs that A) America is the strongest, best-est country that God ever virgin-birthed and B) that that nation somehow just isn’t strong enough to survive eight years of centrist Democratic leadership, Dinesh D’Souza’s 2016: Obama’s America actually does not…
See also: Scottsdale 6 Drive-in Theater Closes; is Featured in Upcoming Exhibition by William LeGoullon The drive-in movie is a quickly dwindling pastime in Arizona. Since the early 40’s, Arizona has seen the openings and closings of nearly 50 outdoor theaters, including the Rodeo Drive-In and the DeAnza Drive-In. Today,…
If you’ve ever sought out spiritual enlightenment or been dragged to a hot yoga studio where some guy in his underwear is chanting what sounds to be the Eastern version of Do-Re-Mi, then you’ve probably asked yourself some of the same questions as New York-based filmmaker, Vikram Gandhi. Vikram Gandhi’s…
In Celeste and Jesse Forever, the titular, newly separated female protagonist’s un-flamboyant queer co-worker (Elijah Wood) tells her “it’s time get your fuck on,” and then apologizes: “Sorry, I was trying to be your saucy gay friend.” Co-written by and starring Parks and Rec’s Rashida Jones, Forever is a notably…
