Henry Jaglom’s movies offer everything that Americans hate about French films, but with little of the philosophical depth or visual daring that marks the best French cinema. He also captures the annoying qualities of Woody Allen movies–the self-absorption, the feigned feminism, the pretentiousness–without achieving anything like Allen’s humor and charm…
Slums of Beverly Hills is the first feature by the young writer-director Tamara Jenkins, and it has its mild amusements. One of those movies that gets bonus points for being “personal,” it bops along from episode to episode, as if the filmmaker were discovering her subject as she went along…
The idea of destiny–especially the notion that two people are fated to meet and fall in love–is a load of crap, but a surprising number of people buy into it. Probably for that reason it has proved to be a fairly popular component in movie romances, City of Angels and…
“That is known as the lowest point in my life, because I basically was a human barbell,” says Next Stop Wonderland star Hope Davis of her role in the 1995 remake of Kiss of Death, in which she played Nicolas Cage’s girlfriend. “Big, big hair and really cheesy clothes,” she…
thursday august 27 The soul sisters of the ’70s trio LaBelle–Nona Hendryx, Sarah Dash and Patti LaBelle–looked like they’d just beamed down from the planet Mongo in the “Lady Marmalade” days, but weren’t they great days? Twenty-odd years later, the solo LaBelle (real name: Patricia Holt) still has the pipes–an…
Here’s how you know you’ve made it: You’re on a long-distance call to Vegas, talking with a gorgeous blonde that you’ve seen on late-night cable TV, and it’s not costing you $2.99 a minute. In fact, she called you. Of course, on this occasion, the blonde in question isn’t talking…
For the fourth year, the Chandler Center for the Arts will be quilted in lively color when it presents a quilt show to challenge the eye and the spirit. This year’s exhibition, titled “Background Check,” runs from Friday, August 28, through Friday, October 2. “The goal of this annual show…
Joanne Rapp has always been something of a “low talker”–that Seinfeldian girlfriend of Kramer’s whose inaudible delivery got the politely nodding Jerry to agree inadvertently to wear a “puffy shirt” on national television. But the wares and wearables Rapp promoted in near whispers for 26 years at her Marshall Way…
Based on a French film of 1990 called Force Majeure, the unhelpfully titled Return to Paradise aspires to be a morality play, one of those stories that makes you fret about what you would do in the same situation. It also wants to be a belated coming-of-age story, the drama…
Darren Aronofsky’s debut feature, Pi, won the Dramatic Directing Award at Sundance this year, and it’s easy to imagine why. Whatever its faults, and it has more than a few, it is unquestionably different. It at least takes a stab at interpolating cerebral ideas into the format of a thriller…
thursday august 20 The three one-acts that compose The Silent Accord of Transience: The Aluminum Can Man Trilogy detail the encounters of Al, who makes his living collecting aluminum cans, with three different women. The Unlikely Theater Company presents this work, by Victoria Safriet, in its main-stage venue for the…
Although some highbrow critics have scoffed at them over the years as aesthetic wanna-bes, riding the coattails of artists like Henry James and E.M. Forster to the illusion of stature, the producer-director team of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory has had a long a career in the arthouses. In the…
Bertha has passed on. The air conditioner known by that name, which, for 45 years, has cooled the building that now houses the Arizona Museum for Youth, has gone to Ventilation Valhalla. The installation of a new AC unit has necessitated the shutting down of the museum since late March,…
Jamie Lee Curtis is the most obvious graduate of Slasher U to cross over into big-time stardom–she’s back, in Halloween: H20, for the class reunion. But she’s not alone. Some major, no kidding, Oscar-winning, A-list stars have also matriculated the world of disreputable, low-budget slice-and-dice movies. Here’s a brief compendium:…
The timing couldn’t be better for How Stella Got Her Groove Back. The “dog days” of summer are upon us, and few prospects could be more welcome to asteroid-weary moviegoers than a light romance-comedy that includes a trip to Jamaica as part of the package. Director Kevin Rodney Sullivan may…
The unkillable masked killer in John Carpenter’s slasher-movie prototype Halloween is the most generic of all movie monsters. Even his name–reputedly borrowed from a British film distributor who made an overseas hit out of Carpenter’s early film Assault on Precinct 13–is prosaic: Michael Myers. He’s just a tall, silent stunt…
The Monty Python kid show How to Do It promised, among other things, to teach children how to play the flute. Here, in its entirety, is the instruction for that discipline: “You blow in one end, and move your fingers up and down the outside.” Proof that the Pythons had…
There are three reasons one might want to brave the August heat and go to the Phoenix Zoo this weekend, when the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile pulls in. One is to participate in the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile Talent Search, a national hunt for a new moppet between the ages of 3…
thursday august 13 One of the stories I’ve heard all my life/Is about why a rancher takes a wife/So here’s the facts that everyone knows . . . . If you’re on the edge of your seat to know a) why a rancher takes a wife and b) what rhyme…
The Internet has reduced most of us to chimpanzees in the cockpit of a jumbo jet: clicking this, clicking that, listening, waiting, waiting some more, then reloading and trying it all over again. Gamblers, pornographers and the military seem to have figured out its purpose. But artists are among those…
Vincent Gallo, a left-field character actor whose best work has been in the films of mainstream eccentrics like Emir Kusturica (Arizona Dream), Abel Ferrera (The Funeral) and Alan Taylor (Palookaville), arrives as full-blown auteur with Buffalo 66, the million-dollar art project he directed and co-wrote that made the covers of…
Nicolas Cage has never seemed more dazzling than he does in the new Brian De Palma thriller Snake Eyes. Playing Rick Santoro, a corrupt Atlantic City cop who likes to think he’s “everybody’s friend,” Cage for almost two continuous hours is boogying to his own inner beat. It’s like watching…
