Photo by Cyndi CoonWith the ongoing popularity of Antiques Road Show, Pawn Stars and American Pickers, we knew the next guilty pleasure, trash-or-treasure show to come was a reality TV auction show. TLC knew too. The cable channel has a new show, Auctioneer$, in their line up this fall. But…
Jack Goes Boating is Philip Seymour Hoffman’s movie — it’s his directorial debut; he stars as its namesake sad sack; he wears his hair in those terrible dreadlocks that he covered with a big woolen hat at the Oscars last spring — but let’s talk about John Ortiz instead. Yes,…
It was the best of TIFFs, it was the worst of TIFFs. While the trade pubs breathlessly trumpeted the flurry of deals that took place at the Toronto International Film Festival, an epidemic of grumbling had spread through press and industry screenings. Key complaints concerned the quality of the lineup…
Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps doesn’t have the clean, fable-like arc of its predecessor, the tale of the Fox and the Gekko (Charlie Sheen’s upstart broker Bud, Michael Douglas’ Wall Street player Gordon). Only the buccaneer charisma of Douglas’ signature role obscured the “Clean business, clean soul” moral…
What is Catfish? That question is an implicit part of the film’s marketing campaign, which, with the tagline, “Don’t let anyone tell you what it is,” teases a big reveal. The answer depends on whom you ask. Shot on-the-fly by Ariel “Rel” Schulman and Henry Joost, the film chronicles an…
Someone planning film screenings around the Valley has a sense of humor.In the next couple of weeks, audiences can expect one of the scariest movies of all time, a sing-along, animated Disney classic, and a musical documentary about the Jewish culture of Poland to hit local theaters.”Beauty and the Beast”…
Recording a three-day competition in Lyon, France, in which sugar is heated, stretched, and blown into delicate, rococo shapes, Kings of Pastry has none of the shame-and-humiliation rituals of reality TV cook-offs like Top Chef, no dishy Padma Lakshmi to coolly eliminate hopefuls. Though Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s food-fetishizing…
Directing himself as a verifiable big-movie lead after some time in supporting-actor Triple A ball, director-star Ben Affleck models a full line of warm-up suits to play Doug MacRay, a second-generation blue-collar stickup man, brains of his four-man bank crew. The setting is Charlestown, the square-mile majority-Irish Boston neighborhood that…
Jared Leto got some love at the VMAs Sunday night with his band 30 Seconds to Mars, but a decade ago he was portraying a drug addict spinning out of control alongside Jennifer Connelly and Marlon Wayans in an artsy (and crazy-depressing) flick called Requiem for a Dream. Thursday night,…
One week, five minutes. Those are the rules in a nutshell for the Campus MovieFest, where ASU students are invited to borrow free equipment for one week courtesy of the fest, churn out a five minute film, then submit their mini-vision for a chance to win a slice of $400,000…
Wikimedia CommonsOld people may look harmless, but beware…Although elderly people in films are usually portrayed as benign and lovable, sometimes an old character comes along that’s way too creepy, like the Reverend Henry Kane in Poltergeist II, the decaying lady in the bath tub from The Shining, and the terrible…
Amazing fashion, sexy celebrities, hard partying, drugs, a downward spiral — fashion designer, Halston’s life was filled with the elements good stories are made of.This weekend, the Phoenix Art Museum’s Arizona Costume Institute Nouveau Division is presenting a one-time showing of the documentary of Halston’s life, Ultrasuede: In Search of…
I’m Still Here — “that Joaquin Phoenix movie” — capitalizes on an anxiety that’s very of-the-moment, uniting pop cultural phenomena as seemingly disparate as the too-stupid/good-to-be-true Jersey Shore characters, James Franco’s baffling side careers as a professional student and soap opera stud, and pretty much every thing having to do…
Lebanon, written and directed by Samuel Maoz, is not just the year’s most impressive first feature but also the strongest new movie of any kind I’ve seen in 2010. Actually, Lebanon — which won the Golden Lion at Venice, after being rejected by Berlin and Cannes — hardly seems like…
Steve Weiss, head honcho of No Festival Required, has been named film programmer of the soon-to-be-launched FilmBar. Weiss brings some pretty good microcinema experience to the indie venue that plans to screen new, classic, and international flicks when it opens in late November. In 2002, after Jeff Cochran pulled the…
Rebuilding Hope, a documentary that follows three men who fled civil war-torn Sudan and into the United States as children, then return to their homeland as adults, is available for purchase online following a local screening in Phoenix. Gabriel Bol Deng, Koor Garang and Garang Mayuol, the subjects of the…
The Tillman Story, director Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary about Pat Tillman’s family’s search for the truth about his death, opens in theaters nationwide today. We recently caught up with Bar-Lev to ask a few questions about the film. What compelled you to make The Tillman Story? [Tillman’s death] was a story…
Independent filmmaker Tommy Wiseau is as enigmatic as his movies. Several times during our 20-minute phone interview, he says, “I don’t like to talk about myself.” But one thing Wiseau will discuss at length is his movie The Room, which screens at MADCAP Theaters Friday and Saturday, September 3 and…
Back before Ghost Rider and Knowing, Nicolas Cage actually stumbled into a few good movies. Really, we checked. One such film was Raising Arizona (given, that was also in 1987), and it’s having a homecoming. The film’s studio, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, is celebrating its 75th anniversary and is…
“You’re going back to animation after this, right?” a voice asks over the hammering coming from behind a whimsical house facade on the second floor of the ASU Art Museum.A small neighborhood of white houses lines the three walls of the room; In the center is a darker, more elaborate…
Pat Tillman, the Arizona Cardinals safety who enlisted in the Army Rangers eight months after September 11, read Emerson, Chomsky, and, though an atheist, the Bible. Resembling a beefier Seann William Scott, he shunned cell phones, cars, and professional-athlete megalomania. A fiercely private (and principled) person, his death in Afghanistan…
Sometimes you feel bad for movie marketers, tasked with connecting any given film to as large an audience as possible. Take, for example, The American. Judging by the film’s trailers and advertisements, it’s a fast-paced Euro-stylish thriller starring George Clooney as a dashing, conflicted hero. Yet it quickly becomes apparent,…
