Like a celluloid black sheep in a world of fluffy white feature films, the unsung short film tends to flirt with disaster — taking more risks, breaking more rules, and often deliberately throwing viewers off guard in ways that features rarely do. With so much to prove in five minutes…
I figured I wouldn’t like Nova Gyna. I confess to being creeped out by the whole he/she thing, which Nova Gyna (pronounced “no vagina,” and Latin for “new woman”) writes about in her new book, The Occasional Woman. I expected to find a scary drag queen, maybe even one of…
I’ve begun to wonder how it would be to see a mediocre production of Angels in America. Somehow, I’ve only seen resplendent, near-perfect stagings of this new American classic, most recently Actors Theatre’s current production of both halves of the eight-hour play. Angels in America, for the uninitiated, is two…
Brad Silberling’s instincts are right about half the time, which means that, depending upon your point of view, his films are either half-empty or half-full. His last picture, 1998’s City of Angels, an American remake of Wim Wender’s poetic Wings of Desire, tried to marry European art house cinema with…
Ordinarily, it would seem pretty odious to put so fine a point on this, but what the hey: Gather up your gay friends, because here’s a movie they’re going to dig, dig, dig. Probably, anyway. That general demographic seems to be the target audience of the radical, whimsical French import…
I might as well just come out and say it: Spirited Away is the best movie I’ve seen all year. Though it would be a masterpiece in any language, Hayao Miyazaki’s animated spectacular (and Japan’s highest-grossing film ever) is being released by Disney simultaneously in two versions — one in…
Blackalicious is a hip-hop group for people who don’t necessarily like hip-hop, as well as for people who do. Their new CD, Blazing Arrow, is, among other things, melodic, funny, clever, creative and spirited, with nary a hint of the puffed-up rancor that plagues so much of the genre. It…
At a time when skateboarding godfather Tony Hawk is as much a celebrity as pro baseball player Tony Womack, all things “extreme” seem to be taking over 21st-century sports, and the once narrow definition of “athlete” is being expanded to include anyone willing to go faster, higher and harder, with…
After 21 years in the business of printing art, Joe Segura has moved his inventory and his presses from Tempe, where they occupied a small, relatively isolated cinder-block building, into an airy, surprisingly quiet space along Mesa’s Main Street. Sandwiched between Shanghai Express on one side and the temporary home…
In a dark bar, two men are conversing. One of them, a politician, is telling the other, his campaign manager, about a recent rendezvous with a third man, a sexy but unscrupulous fellow with whom the politician is smitten. Suddenly, the politician says to his companion, “Let me show you…
I dreamed I was in a nude cabaret with a married couple I didn’t know. They wanted to tell me about a new book they’d written, but it was hard to communicate because the music was loud and we were distracted by the naked lady who was rubbing her crotch…
Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is released from a mental institution the day of her older sister’s wedding. One afternoon with her dysfunctional family and she’s ready for rehab again. No such luck, however, so instead, Lee turns — or returns — to her favorite pastime: self-mutilation. Based on a short…
So there’s no confusion, the star of Sweet Home Alabama is Reese Witherspoon, who graces the film’s poster in full-body pout and appears on the press kit in close-up mug-shot smirk; any closer, and we’d shoot up her nostrils and exit through her pores. Of course, there’s a great deal…
Although his name sounds like an inventory notebook for candy bars, Heath Ledger is presently overcoming this confusion — as well as the plight of the pretty boy — to become one of contemporary cinema’s more vital actors. In The Four Feathers — as in The Patriot, A Knight’s Tale…
As a rule in Arizona, club nights — those wittily monikered weekly or monthly dance events (or non-events) — have the staying power and life span of a box of Krispy Kremes at an AA meeting. That’s what makes the longevity of Kind, the up-with-people-themed Friday-night DJ extravaganza at Freedom…
Thanks to sponsor Comedy Central, comedian Jim Breuer is hitting the road to perform his uncontrollably funny standup at clubs across the country. But maybe “The Lighten Up Tour,” which comes to the Tempe Improv this weekend, should really be called the “Lightin’ Up Tour” — either the ultra-talented Breuer…
Jim Campbell’s advantage as an artist is that he wasn’t trained as one. Hatched as an electrical engineer, he made the leap from pragmatism to poetry on his own, bringing with him a wariness about the limitations of digital media. This caution has served him well. As the art world…
No theatergoer should be made to stare at an ugly set for three hours. If one must, however, one should do so at Phoenix Theatre’s new production of Into the Woods. Its dreary gray forest, designed by usually dependable scenic designer Gregory Jaye, is hung limply with unsightly rope and…
It’s September 11, 2002, but Richard J. Botto isn’t at home watching the relentless CNN coverage of last year’s terrorist attacks. Instead, the native New Yorker has agreed to meet me for drinks at Sapporo to talk about Razor, the national men’s magazine he launched two years ago. Botto is…
Among the more preposterous rumors spread by Harry Knowles, whose Ain’t It Cool News movie-biz gossip Web site garners undue attention from studios too craven to do their own thinking, was one from this year’s beginning: Terrence Malick, Knowles “reported,” was working on an adaptation of The Catcher in the…
In The Banger Sisters, Goldie Hawn plays Suzette, an aging groupie too stuck in a gloriously seedy past to move into the future. It’s 2002, yet she acts as though it’s 1969 and nothing’s changed — not the Sunset Strip’s Whisky A Go-Go, where she still tends bar behind sunglasses…
Movie buffs are about to get the silent treatment — and it’s all the buzz among Valley cinephiles. The Silent Sundays film series returns for its fourth season this Sunday, September 22, with a screening of The Phantom of the Opera, the 1925 classic starring Lon Chaney and Mary Philbin…
