Kick a boy enough times, and he’ll become a man. The question is: A man of what sort? In his long-awaited feature portrait of the comic-book hero Spider-Man, director Sam Raimi brings forth a kaleidoscopic answer full of hope and verve. Flashy enough for kids yet insightful enough to engage…
Like Vulgar and Chelsea Walls, Deuces Wild is yet another new release now inexplicably being distributed theatrically — rather than slinking away to the video/cable market — after having explicably sat on the shelf for upward of a year. The film’s age is immediately evident, both in how young Frankie…
Ten years after The Scandal — and its negative effect on the size of his audiences, power and independence — Woody Allen broke his longtime avoidance of the Oscar telecast with his pro-New York standup shtick at this year’s ceremony. The positive audience response suggested that all is forgiven …
Spring is quickly melting into summer in the Valley, and armchair sports fans are settling in, sticking their sweaty thighs to leather La-Z-Boys for the NBA and NHL playoffs and the return of the D-Backs. In contrast, the climb to hellish temperatures bodes ill for participatory sports enthusiasts, who look…
In most parts of the country, the fifth of May is a barely understood holiday spent downing cervezas and donning sombreros, like some sort of south-of-the-border St. Patrick’s Day. But fortunately for Phoenicians, a strong Hispanic heritage brings soul to Cinco de Mayo, providing substance and an atmosphere fit for…
Peter Bogdanovich, maybe the last man alive who wears a neckerchief without irony, holds a copy of a newspaper article in which his old friend Larry McMurtry is saying nice, or not nice, things about him–Bogdanovich can’t tell which. “He’s kind of risen from the dead,” McMurtry was quoted as…
Although I spent two and a half hours looking at it the other night, I’m not entirely sure what Ramona is meant to be. I can tell you what it isn’t: It’s not at all entertaining. Although Ramona is parenthetically a historical play, contains a love story and occasionally goes…
The most compelling element of Dogtown and Z-Boys, Stacy Peralta’s valentine to a crew of footloose Southern California teenagers who set a radical new style in skateboarding in the 1970s, is the documentarian’s heartfelt belief in the lasting importance of the enterprise. As a member of the tribe and an…
Poor William Randolph Hearst. The snapping dogs of Hollywood just won’t leave the guy alone. It’s been barely 60 years since a little epic called Citizen Kane portrayed the great newspaper tycoon as a ruthless dictator who degenerated into an emotional basket case, and already there’s more bad publicity in…
On a stark set dressed only with a nondescript console and a couple of chairs, three actors read verbatim transcripts from cockpit voice recorders of six real-life airline accidents. The drama of Charlie Victor Romeo comes from two places: from what’s happening in this ersatz cockpit, and from our own…
An evil clown. An eccentric French painter. A philandering husband. A fledgling drag queen. Man of a thousand faces, John Leguizamo has played an impressive variety of characters in his career. But in his current project, the one-man show Sexaholix . . . A Love Story, he performs some of…
I suppose I’ll eventually recover from having seen Ensemble Theatre’s production of Durang/ Durang. In the meantime, I’ll continue to lie here with a cold compress on my head, trying like mad to shake the memory of this unfortunate attempt at live entertainment. When it isn’t being bludgeoned by amateurs,…
Say this about World Wrestling Federation Entertainment head honcho Vince McMahon: He knows what his fans want. Few movies have ever been as specifically tailored to an existing audience as The Scorpion King, in which McMahon’s prize champion, The Rock, portrays The Rock wearing a loincloth and going by the…
Sometimes genius draws nigh, mollifying the gnashing critic with the promise of wild narrative fusion, perhaps even rollicking wit. Alas, sometimes genius then languidly squirms aside, like a loathsome strumpet, leaving one’s hopeful wantonness piqued but unfulfilled. Both cases apply to the boldly peculiar Scotland, PA., which sweeps up Shakespeare’s…
This Saturday evening, the dramatic architecture of the Arizona State University Art Museum serves as the backdrop for an outdoor showcase of inventive filmmaking — the sixth annual Short Film and Video Festival. But rather than the glamour and gloss of Hollywood, expect low production values and some shaky camerawork…
Janeane Garofalo has appeared in nearly 40 movies, but she’s hardly seen any of them. Compliment her for her affecting, little-seen work as a bipolar loner in the film Sweethearts (which she sardonically calls “The Straight-to-Video Sweethearts”), and she’ll be appreciative, but she’ll also sound like she has no opinion…
On a good day, Mark Cuban might respond to a journalist’s query with a terse, unpunctuated e-mail that reads like something dashed off by a hostage while his captors are in the can. It’s understandable: The man’s running the Dallas Mavericks, investing in movie distribution and exhibition companies, sticking it…
There are rich rewards in even the most routine presentation of Tennessee Williams’ 1944 classic The Glass Menagerie. Phoenix Theatre’s production of Williams’ autobiographical drama is proof that almost nothing can dim this story’s enduring appeal. Williams’ timeless people — the Southern belles and gentleman callers of the playwright’s own…
Wending through the summaries of this year’s forthcoming blockbusters — dudes fight evil; chicks keep yanking up their trendy hip-huggers while fighting evil — it’s immediately refreshing to note a movie about furry freaks and saucy geeks whose primary goal is just to, you know, do it. In Human Nature,…
Call it the art-house, or thinking person’s, Ocean’s Eleven. If you’re in the mood for an all-star ensemble but prefer conversation and reminiscence to thievery, try Last Orders, a Fred Schepisi film that features the strongest lineup of English talent this side of Robert Altman’s mega-cast in Gosford Park: Michael…
Just weeks before the September 11 attacks on America, performance artist Jeff McMahon relocated to Tempe. “I had lived just below 14th Street in lower Manhattan for 22 years,” he says, “and I’d been living here for what seemed like a few days when the attacks came. So creating a…
Glass is an unforgiving medium. Whether it’s a sculpture or a functional object in daily life, glass is fundamentally cold, hard and brittle. To work with glass requires deft, meticulous attention to temperature and timing. And it’s so fragile that to merely say it “cracks” when damaged doesn’t have the…
