Fully Committed is a play about conversations: Truncated, maddening, sometimes amusing conversations — the kind we all have every day with total strangers we’d probably rather not be talking to in the first place. The difference here is that the conversations are all held by one person, an actor in…
On September 10, Barry Sonnenfeld’s Big Trouble, a slight comic caper drenched in the sweltering muck of Miami, was a nagging chore to be tended to by film critics — one more mediocre multimillion-dollar all-star fiasco in which you can almost hear the filmmakers giggling behind the cameras. On September…
The two slacker antiheroes of Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También (And Your Mother, Too) come saddled with all the usual glitches of late adolescence — raging hormones, impatient wanderlust, contempt for their elders, and a jones for dope and beer. In fact, Julio (Gael García Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego…
It’s no secret that the Valley is a prime stomping ground for motorcycle lovers. Just listen to the roar of open drag pipes echoing down the streets of your neighborhood, especially on a beautiful Saturday evening. Get used to that sound. Learn to love it, even. Because Arizona Bike Week,…
Ten-plus years of filmmaking has been a great experience for Chris LaMont. His knowledge was useful in film festival-making last year, when he discovered that he could organize the fledgling Phoenix Film Festival in the same way he makes movies. Working out of a small space provided by the City…
There’s a note in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot in which the character Vladimir “uses his intelligence.” In spite of all his efforts to obey the author’s parenthetical instruction, Vladimir admits a moment later, “I remain in the dark.” In an e-mail interview with Neal Pollack, author of The…
It’s readily apparent that Danny DeVito’s Death to Smoochy deals with a thoroughly debauched children’s television host (Robin Williams) who plots, amid much dark zaniness, to destroy his squeaky-clean successor (Edward Norton). It’s also quite easy to proclaim it the greatest movie ever made . . . about a singing…
It would be easy, and tempting, to hail Kandahar as a masterpiece without even seeing it: It’s a foreign film, it takes on social issues, it’s directed by Iranian master Mohsen Makhmalbaf, it speaks to the causes of our war on terror and it first hit U.S. shores right as…
There’s a special rush that strikes you when you’re standing in Times Square after the sun goes down. Throngs of hurried people stream down the sidewalks, taxis zoom by with horns honking, the air is filled with throbbing energy and random strains of music. Out of the commotion, shooting into…
At a time when it feels like there are video news crawlers inching across the base of your brain, and so many images you’re subjected to take their meaning from war and austerity, there’s something to be said for seeing things at a standstill. Deborah Beresford is here to remind…
It’s little wonder that Nearly Naked Theatre’s Damon Dering has wanted to produce The King of Infinite Space for more than a decade. Andrew Ordover’s obscure morality play is a satisfying, compelling piece of writing with more dramatic turns than a week’s worth of made-for-TV movies. In the director’s notes,…
Before he died of congestive heart failure in March 1992, Richard Brooks, director of The Blackboard Jungle and In Cold Blood, used to tell this story. It takes place sometime in the late 1940s, when Brooks was ascending royalty in Hollywood; after all, he’d written John Huston’s Key Largo, starring…
It’s Tuesday, and I’m standing outside City Hall, lying to strangers. “I’m going to the Lunch Time Theater program at the Herberger,” I tell a dozen different people. “But I don’t know where the Herberger is.” I’m trying to determine whether people who work in downtown Phoenix know that they…
When asked if we could view a screening of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial: The 20th Anniversary in time for publication, PR handlers at Universal Studios said, quite simply, no. This is particularly strange given that — in terms of this movie’s box-office returns — even a scathing critical pan would amount…
Cell phones and silk saris, dot-coms and arranged marriages — Monsoon Wedding, the latest film from Indian-born director Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala), captures the heady mix of old and new, rich and poor, traditional and modern that defines contemporary India. A sort of Father of the Bride set…
Traditional sounds define the up-and-coming Los Angeles-based septet Flogging Molly, but in a way that’s sure to upset musical purists. Devotees of old-fashioned Irish folk music might be dismayed by the band’s upbeat rock ‘n’ roll drumming and adrenaline-fueled electric guitar, but fans of punk are packing into sweaty, beer-soaked…
“The flames of hell are licking at our feet.” This declaration is just a sample of the biting dialogue in ElectroPuss, the latest Trista Baldwin-penned masterwork brought to life onstage. Set in the fictional town of SkyFire, USA, the play presents a sinister take on corporate culture, where the upper…
One day, years ago, Gregory Mcdonald was playing tennis with a man he’d known since they were both 12 years old. It was hot, the middle of summer, and Mcdonald was playing a good game–doing that tricky shit, making with the kind of moves that get under an opponent’s skin…
In the original Resident Evil video game — named Biohazard in its Japanese incarnation — a brash young American infiltrates a large manor house in the country, only to find it inhabited by terrifying, soulless zombies. But since Gosford Park already came out, the makers of the Resident Evil movie…
Here we have an intuitive, polyrhythmic art form bridging cultures and titillating the young at heart. This definition could easily apply to babymaking or gang-banging, but in Doug Pray’s trenchant documentary Scratch, it’s “turntablism” distracting the passionate kids from reproducing and/or mowing each other down. Immersing us in the endlessly…
Professional bull rider Ty Murray is at the top of his sport. And in many ways, it really is his sport. In 1992, Murray was one of 20 high-ranking bull-riding athletes who founded Professional Bull Riders (PBR), an organization now made up of more than 800 members who compete for…
A monk lies on a bed of nails. A second monk lies on top of him on a bed of swords, and a third is at the top of the pile with a large rock on his stomach. Then a fourth swings a large hammer and breaks the rock. How…
