Why aren’t there more submarine movies? It seems like a no-brainer formula for success: claustrophobic setting, invisible enemy whose approach must be estimated, inherent threat of both drowning and depth pressure, and from a budgetary standpoint, one key set is really all that’s needed. There’s even a solid track record…
Love & Basketball is divided into four quarters; thank God there’s no overtime. The directorial debut from writer Gina Prince-Bythewood, who once penned scripts for A Different World and Felicity, is a film built upon transitions so weak and obvious it’s astonishing the entire thing doesn’t collapse on itself. You…
Improbably, given the geography and the general cultural malaise of the Valley, a grand finale of world-class quality closes National Dance Week here. Since the week began on April 21, presenters from Tempe to central Phoenix offered audiences dance by leading American choreographers — Sean Curran, Moses Pendleton and Kevin…
“Know what I mean, know what I mean, nudge nudge? Say no more, say no more.” No more need be said. Eric Idle, the creator of these immortal lines and many of the other most beloved routines to come out of the one-of-a-kind British TV comedy Monty Python’s Flying Circus…
A mildly retarded man who works in a grocery store believes he is Batman, the Dark Knight on a mission to free Gotham City from the clutches of The Joker. An actress playing the role of Wonder Woman becomes a spokeswoman, then scapegoat, for the Commie witch-hunters working for the…
Phoenix video artist Sloane McFarland is the first to admit that he’s not quite sure exactly what “PHACAEANS,” his laptop video installation at ASU Art Museum’s Experimental Gallery at Matthews Center, is about. A part of the extensive citywide programming for “Sites Around the City,” the museum’s current art exhibition…
Despite the lack of a single compelling reason to create — or to witness — a remount of Hair, the version now playing at Planet Earth Theatre is as good a production as you’re likely to see. This Hair — which really ought to be retitled Hairpiece, given the number…
What is it with filmmakers and mental retardation? It seems as though use of the differently abled as a central theme ranks second only to troubled childhood when it comes time to make a “personal” film. The connection between the two is fairly obvious: the artist as gentle innocent besieged…
“You don’t come up to people’s doors!” yells a woman to a pair of Mormon missionaries, before slamming her door in their faces. The scene, near the beginning of the film God’s Army, is intended to illustrate the difficulties of Mormon missionary work, which I suppose it does. But my…
In the rich mythology of the New Yorker, a periodical renowned for the quality of its writing and the quirks of its writers, no legend carries more weight than that of Joseph Mitchell. On the occasion of the magazine’s 75th anniversary, it is currently great sport among the literati to…
“I am preparing to go to a meeting at a studio called Big Ticket — a potential deal for a sitcom,” says Richard Jeni. “I’m thinking of calling it Everybody Loves Raymond, because that seems to work. Why reinvent the wheel?” Though he’s a two-decade veteran of the comedy-club scene…
Glendale’s cool, intriguing, underrated downtown is, sadly, about to get a little less cool, intriguing and underrated. One of the antique mecca’s wittiest shops, Saints & Sinners, is about to close its doors in favor of the more cost-efficient online market. Asked to define S&S’s stock-in-trade, co-proprietor Shad Kvetko’s initial…
To hear Jeff Nolan tell it, murdering Scott Sullivan was an unfortunate accident. According to Pastor Tim, it was an indiscretion. And to David, the teenager who planned Scott’s death, it was a delight. The story of Scott’s grisly murder leaks out of Lummox, Texas, playwright/actor John Haubner’s fictional Southern…
It’s quite possible that American Psycho is a brilliant movie. It’s also quite possible that it’s a dreary, obvious chop-’em-up dressed in Alan Flusser suits and Ralph Lauren boxers, drenched in Pour Hommes after-shave, all to disguise it as bracing satire on the greed-is-good ’80s. The option audiences choose to…
La crème de la coiffure! A mock documentary about, of all things, a Scottish hairdresser who travels to America to compete in an international hairstyling tournament, The Big Tease is a mildly amusing romp that benefits enormously from an ingratiating performance by Scottish actor Craig Ferguson, who also co-wrote the…
What’s your pick for the most ridiculous movie ever made? The Conqueror, starring John Wayne as Mongol emperor Genghis Khan? How about The Manitou, in which the grizzled head of an Indian medicine man sprouts from Susan Strasberg’s neck? The musical remake of Lost Horizon surely deserves a couple of…
If you have a full wallet and an empty stomach, you can empty the former and stuff the latter silly at this year’s Scottsdale Culinary Festival, which runs through Sunday, April 16, at various venues around Scottsdale. You’ve already missed the Culinary Student Competition Awards Dinner on Wednesday, April 12,…
The 25th annual edition of the Maricopa County Fair — regarded by many as a cozier, countrier, cooler, marginally less hucksterish version of the Arizona State Fair — continues through Sunday, April 16, at the fairgrounds, 19th Avenue and McDowell. Along with the inevitable carnival rides and games on the…
The art market has done a fairly good job in the past 30 years of neutering terms like “revolutionary” and “avant-garde.” Yet the radicalism in “Painting Revolution: Kandinsky, Malevich and the Russian Avant Garde” at Phoenix Art Museum reminds us what those words meant in art before they became sales…
You know the joke about the actor who misses his entrance cue, leaving his fellow players to improvise like mad until he shows up? I have finally — after a decade of writing about theater — witnessed this horror firsthand. At the opening-night performance of Black Theatre Troupe’s Joe Turner’s…
It’s hard to escape the potent magic of pop music. Some consumers never do, hovering forever in thrall to three-minute sermons of neurotic idiocy blasting from the commercially conjoined pulpits of R&B, rock and country. (To keep this point sharp, let’s credit “alternative” music with expanding the illusion of choice,…
Not so long ago, The Skulls would have starred Tom Cruise — but in which role? He could have been either lead; the one he didn’t choose could have landed in the lap of James Spader or Rob Lowe. One can easily imagine Cruise as Luke McNamara, the beefy, rough-and-tumble…
