Wigstock: The Movie is a filmed record of the New York City drag/lip-synch festival founded about a decade ago by a convivial drag diva known as the Lady Bunny. The film includes footage from both the 1993 and 1994 Labor Day weekend observances of the event, the former at Tompkins…
The most subversive approach a progressive artist can take very well might be to present his or her beliefs in a mainstream form. No matter how alarming to the status quo your ideas are, if you can make a solid social drama–like, say, Priest–out of them, you’re on your way…
Species is a sci-fi horror picture that’s good for a few laughs because, first of all, it’s atrocious, and, secondly, because it has an unbecomingly obvious psychological subtext. This movie made by men is about, to put it crudely, bitches in heat. A la the three Alien films, the monster’s…
Without seeing First Knight again–which I’m in no rush to–I can’t be sure, but I thought I heard King Arthur say, “Nope.” Somebody asks a question of Arthur, played by Sean Connery, and he responds in the negative by saying “nope.” If I heard wrong, then my apologies to Connery,…
“It’s like a Hollywood B-movie,” mutters the main character of A Pure Formality of his situation. Well, it is and it isn’t. Hollywood B-pictures rarely–occasionally, but rarely–have the visual beauty or atmosphere of this Italian production, and very few pictures have actors of the caliber of this film’s leads, Girard…
The extent to which real life has surpassed the science fiction that many of us read as kids can be quite disorienting. Director Ron Howard’s new film Apollo 13 is an epic true-life space odyssey, and it’s also a period piece. The central character, Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks), is one…
In Search and Destroy, Griffin Dunne plays Martin, a wormy little bush-league promoter in Boca Raton, Florida. The town’s name translates as “Mouth of the Rat,” and Martin does seem like something that crawled out of such a place. He owes thousands in back taxes, he’s on the outs with…
Smoke is set in a cigar shop, and the title also makes reference to that which many of the characters blow for much of the film. Written by novelist Paul Auster and directed by Wayne Wang, the film interweaves several story lines around a linking device, as in Twenty Bucks…
One of the production entities claiming responsibility in the opening titles for writer-director Hal Hartley’s film Amateur calls itself “True Fiction Pictures.” Probably this is meant as a slap at the current rage for Pulp Fiction. Indeed, if Quentin Tarantino’s film is the movie equivalent of the hard-boiled crime books,…
When I asked a friend of mine, a devoted Disney-head, if he wanted to join me for a screening of Pocahontas, to my surprise, he declined, muttering, “I don’t know about that movie. It looks a little PC for my taste.” For several reasons, his being one, I think that…
The third of Warner Bros.’ Wagnerian Batman films has arrived–it could have been titled Die Fledermaus, Part III. Batman Forever has a new director and a new star in the title role, and before we launch into a debate about their comparative merits, we would probably do well to remember…
“Herkermer Homolka; hi, hello.” So says Tim Curry’s character in Congo, introducing himself with admirable alliteration. Herkermer is a Rumanian fortune hunter obsessed with finding the mines of King Solomon, and his eyes gleam as he makes assertions like, “Thees korilla has seen de Lost Ceety of Zeenj!” Wrapping words…
The Valley Art Third Annual Gay and Lesbian Film Festival starts this week in Tempe. In the first two selections, the themes of homosexuality and lesbianism, while important, are not the main subject. One is a stark feminist passion play about the religious oppression of women, and the other is…
In 1918, the orphaned teenager Riyo leaves Japan for Hawaii and an arranged marriage. She knows her new husband Matsuji only from a letter, in which he calls himself a sugar-cane farmer and addresses a romantic haiku to her, and from his photograph–the grinning, good-looking face of a 20-year-old. When…
There are movie columns that come free from the neon-lighted glare of the multiplex lobby, from the sweet smell of a thousand spilled kernels of stale popcorn. This is one of them. In June of 1995, I’m at my desk, looking at the blinking cursor on the computer screen before…
As Hollywood satire, Swimming With Sharks is nothing particularly new. It’s The Player mixed with David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow and a perverse pinch of Reservoir Dogs–Tinseltown bile and a drop or two of blood. This small film is worth seeing, though, for the cleanly written, bitchy dialogue by George Huang, and…
Two Thursdays ago, I had the honor to be a judge for the third annual Valley Art Cinematic Society Student Film Festival. In the company of fellow judges Jana Bommersbach, former New Times editor turned TV personality, and Steven Brain, new head of Fox Animation, I watched 43 short films…
Groups of movies on the same subject often arrive too close together to be accounted for only by imitation; it may be one of the more unsubtle workings of the collective unconscious. In 1984, three films were released about the struggle to save a family farm, all of them–Country, The…
“Billy Crystal? I crap bigger than that.” So remarked the ever-gracious Jack Palance while accepting an Oscar for City Slickers, a film Crystal had written and produced. The thing is, Palance was right–but at least in City Slickers, the disparity between the two men had made some comic sense. In…
If Rocco DeVilliers hadn’t been speeding through Missouri a few years ago, he probably wouldn’t be screening his film Pure Race for the European film market at Cannes. The 25-year-old Tempe resident co-scripted, produced, directed and edited the low-budget indie, played a small role in it and did “probably 90…
The title The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill, but Came Down a Mountain suggests all sorts of possibilities, starting with a documentary about Sir Edmund Hillary. The movie that hides behind the title, however, is a charming, tall-tale comedy spun with sly, cheeky ease and flashes of visual grace…
With the possible exception of the Empire State Building in King Kong, it’s doubtful there could be a stronger phallic symbol anywhere in movies than the submarine: an oblong shape that dives into the depths, is loaded with scurrying seamen and is eager to discharge itself. Small wonder that the…
