Remember this joke? Question: Want to know how you can lose 10 pounds of ugly fat? Answer: Cut off your head. Well, according to the press kit for 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag, the average human head–dead and drained of blood–weighs 4.4 pounds. I can’t imagine the heads of…
Das Boot, the 1981 German nautical spectacular, is now being rereleased as an extended three-and-a-half-hour director’s cut. With an hour of new footage drawn from a six-hour German-TV version, the movie now plays more gracefully and clearly. If 60 more minutes of underwater rocking and rolling from depth charges and…
thursday april 17 Arizona Science Center: Check out the grand new facility at 600 East Washington–a construction that soars on wings of concrete–in its first full week of business. The programs “Arizona Skies,” “PlanetQuest” and “Sun, Earth, Stars” are featured in the center’s planetarium through Friday, May 30. The Oscar-nominated…
“That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, it’s everything you’ve never wanted in a circus and much, much less–like a lip-smackin’, finger-poppin’, high-steppin’, limboin’, bimboin’ barrel full of drunken monkeys! Fun, fun, fun, c’mon down. Hankering for a cantankerous, prankerous, panky-hankerous spank? Freaks, geeks and butt cheeks! Practiced pandemonium! Concentrated idiocy, just…
It’s tough, even in a town with a large theatrical talent pool, to cast an all-singing, all-dancing musical revue. In Phoenix, it’s next to impossible. And when you’re talking about a show that relies on the talents of six African-American hoofers with big voices, the casting choices are even more…
Watching Phoenix Theatre’s production of Lizard is like listening to a bad joke told by a beautiful person. Dennis Covington’s meandering morality tale has been superbly mounted and is acted by one of the most impressive local casts in recent memory. But beneath the glitzy facade and despite all the…
Kevin Smith is an impassioned jokester. The young writer-director double-whammies the audience by filling in his stick figures with thick brush strokes. His first film, Clerks, was a no-budget goof featuring an entire miniature universe of slacker goons, but its main protagonist was a sweetly jerky, lovelorn convenience-store employee who…
A parked sports car with steamed-up windows rocks from side to side. There’s a lot of sex in That Old Feeling, but that’s about as graphic as it gets–the film is rated PG-13. That was okay with me–I wasn’t panting for a close-up of Dennis Farina and Bette Midler getting…
The Australian film Angel Baby is about the love affair between a young man and a young woman, both attractive and intelligent, and both afflicted with fairly severe mental illness–when they meet, they compare slash scars on their wrists. The sweet-souled, exuberant Harry (John Lynch) sees Kate (Jacqueline McKenzie) in…
thursday april 10 The Descendents: This relic of punk’s original wave had an inordinate impact on today’s punk-pop scene. Basically the band All (the Descendents’ descendant) augmented by original vocalist Milo Aukerman, the revivified act returned to doing what it does best–and did first–on its latest release, Everything Sucks: speed-saw…
Before there was Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Angels in America, there was the playwright’s adaptation of Pierre Corneille’s L’Illusion Comique, written by the French lawyer and dramatist in 1635. Like Kushner, Corneille is better known for a later drama: His 1637 neoclassic tragedy Le Cid enjoyed enormous critical success. Today,…
Film actors are generally said to have good chemistry or no chemistry. But bad chemistry in movies does exist, and a sleep-inducer called Inventing the Abbotts is a case in point. In ascending order of age, Liv Tyler, Jennifer Connelly and Joanna Going play Pamela, Eleanor and Alice Abbott, well-off…
When Val Kilmer walked away from the Batman franchise, it was only a matter of time before he offered up his own competing brand. The Saint isn’t just his answer to Batman–it’s a full-length commercial for all the Saint movies to come. There’s a breezy effrontery in the ploy; Kilmer…
Over the past five years, action star Jean-Claude Van Damme has become one of America’s leading importers of foreign talent. In 1993, he hired Hong Kong action ace John Woo to direct Hard Target. For last year’s Maximum Risk, he brought over Ringo Lam. And now he has used a…
thursday april 3 “It’s Only Rock and Roll: Rock and Roll Currents in Contemporary Art”: David Rubin, Phoenix Art Museum’s curator of 20th-century art, organized this exhibit, billed as an exploration of “rock as a social force in [contemporary] art” and including pieces by Annie Leibovitz, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe,…
Beyond sex, drugs, Top 10 marketing and the self-indulgences of youth, it’s hard to name many lasting cultural associations with rock ‘n’ roll. Politics, maybe, but only from time to time. Satan, I suppose, if embarrassment doesn’t keep you from saying so. Yet one rarely thinks of fine art. With…
There’s one stand that every film about the quagmire in Northern Ireland is willing to take: that there’s been enough killing. Sometimes, like in A Prayer for the Dying, it’s said out loud–“Thur’s bin enoof killin’.” Sometimes, as in The Crying Game, In the Name of the Father, Some Mother’s…
Lars von Trier is, perhaps consciously and defiantly, one of the least-commercial, brilliant directors in the world. His best-known movie, the 1992 Zentropa, and his earlier The Element of Crime both open with hypnotic voice-overs, seemingly daring us to succumb to sleep before the credits are even over. Nonetheless, if…
Norman Mailer begins The Fight, his great book on the Muhammad Ali/George Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle,” by writing of Ali: “There is always the shock in seeing him again. Not live as in television but standing before you, looking his best. Then the World’s Greatest Athlete is in danger…
thursday march 27 “It’s Only Rock and Roll: Rock and Roll Currents in Contemporary Art”: David Rubin, Phoenix Art Museum’s curator of 20th-century art, organized this exhibit, billed as an exploration of “rock as a social force in [contemporary] art” and including pieces by Annie Leibovitz, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe,…
In an early draft of Phoenix playwright Carol DuVal Whiteman’s Katsina, the story ends with a stage full of extras dressed as elaborate approximations of Hopi kachinas. But Whiteman spiked the scene when her Hopi friends objected to public representations of their deified ancestral spirits. Would that some benevolent organization…
So the Academy has once again shut you out of the Best Director category on the technicality that you haven’t actually made a movie? Hollywood philistinism, of course, but there’s always a chance at next year: This weekend, Arizona Film Society is once again presenting the Hollywood Film Institute’s two-day…
