Irish charm and British eccentricity are hot properties on this side of the pond — especially among U.S. moviegoers. Witness the phenomenal success here of The Secret of Roan Inish, in which a 10-year-old Irish girl finds her lost brother living among seals off her country’s rugged western coast, or…
Despite a subtly scintillating cast of characters played with pitch-perfect verve, London — in this case, working-class, unpretentious South London — is the main character of Michael Winterbottom’s gritty yet kindly Wonderland. Navigating the labyrinthine streets and suburbs charted in Laurence Coriat’s debut screenplay (which evolved under the title Snarl…
Can you hear me, Major Tom?We all know that Major Tom didn’t need years of intensive training and a doctorate in astrophysics to float around on a tin can far above the world. If it’s true that the song is some sort of drug-use metaphor, he didn’t even have to…
It’s one of those great movie moments: Andy Hardy (Mickey Rooney) turns to Betsy Booth (Judy Garland) and says, “I know, let’s put on a show.” They use old Mr. Smith’s barn for their elaborate musical revue. The show is such a hit that the kids raise all the money…
How did a nice, quiet girl from a small town in upstate New York find herself learning to speak fluent Mandarin Chinese, traipsing all over China and other parts of Asia like Indiana Jones and eventually landing in Phoenix, Arizona?Janet Baker, new curator of Asian art at Phoenix Art Museum,…
John Sankovich hasn’t once raised his voice, yet it booms above the clank and roar of the crowded restaurant where he’s dining. He’s discussing the 30-plus years he’s spent pacing local stages and — after a long hiatus — his return as the lead for In Mixed Company’s controversial Quills.Above…
There’s no explicable reason for the existence of The Replacements, which is to the football-film genre what Major League was to the baseball movie: sports rendered as sitcom (or Police Academy sequel). The Replacements, which takes as its cue the 1987 National Football League players’ strike, is stocked with every…
It would be the easiest thing in the world to write off But I’m a Cheerleader, the story of a teenager discovering her sexual identity through a program designed to repress it, as a Saturday Night Live sketch somewhat awkwardly inflated to feature length. But when you start looking deeper…
Okay, so there are these beautiful ladies in tight clothes, right? And — get this — they serve alcohol while dancing suggestively! Sound cool? How about we make a movie about them? The premise oughta be enough to draw in the guys, and we’ll call it “female empowerment” or something…
Not since the Bay of Pigs Invasion blew over without nuclear fireworks, perhaps, has America breathed such a collective sigh of relief over the outcome of a crisis on an island as we did at news, two Wednesdays past, that Gervase would not be the sole Survivor. Now we can…
In the ancient Greek tradition, Eros, a.k.a. Cupid, was the son of Chaos. This ancestry might make more sense to Phoenix’s own Jill Reger, creator of the online comic Dipuc.com, than the one which later Roman mythological tradition gave to the God of Love — that the spiteful little bastard…
“Please hold for Tammy Faye.” The few seconds between those words and those that follow, uttered by the woman who once haunted pay-to-pray TV like a mascara-ed harlequin, are interminable. Until a month ago, the notion of talking to Tammy Faye Bakker-Messner, once the most adored and reviled figure in…
“This kid’s gonna be the biggest superstar DJ to ever come out of this place,” says DJ Fact, pointing to his partner, Megadef. The two turntablists are sitting at a quiet Tempe restaurant, and the younger Mega, glasses magnifying a baby face, mutters a bashful “We’ll see . . .”…
I am Vlad the Impaler, Joe Eszterhas’ penis. You know Joe, right? Bigfoot-looking son of a bitch, like Jerry Garcia after he swallowed Brian Wilson on an Acapulco Gold high? The guy who wrote Basic Instinct and Showgirls and Flashdance and a whole lotta crap for which he was paid…
The bewildering penchant of recent American movies for glorifying the lovable naïf, the perpetual adolescent and the village idiot takes a strange new turn in Miguel Arteta’s dark comedy Chuck & Buck. Arteta’s hero, Buck O’Brien (Mike White), is a 27-year-old manchild who eats lollipops all day long, takes refuge…
It’s a pleasure to say that Clint Eastwood reverses his recent downward slide — A Perfect World (1993), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Absolute Power (1997), and True Crime (1999), each of which has seemed less satisfying than its predecessor — with Space Cowboys, his latest. It isn’t an…
So who are these celebrated Coen brothers anyway, and what’s their point? These days, it’s pretty easy to switch over to critical autopilot, to gush about funny-looking friends shoved into wood chippers or Hula-Hoops being designed, you know, for the kids. But where does the slender path of the Coen…
There are many, many productive paths a bright, ambitious young fellow can pursue in America. He can, for instance, start a mediocre rock band and try to make music for beer commercials. He can also design a Web site to advertise Web sites about Web sites. Or there’s always the…
Usually, no matter how much things slow to a crawl here in the Valley under the punishment of the summer heat, there’s always an out — you can go to the movies. But this summer’s crop of movies has been, by and large, so dull that even that’s not a…
Technically speaking, they’re supporting characters — in the dramatic scheme of the play, they don’t really advance the plot, they just provide a comic-relief subplot from the far duller story of the troubled courtship of Claudio and Hero. Yet their comical romance is what has made the play immortal. In…
It’s tempting to think there’s something twisted about her tale. After all, she was a mere 18 the first time she had sex in front of a camera–for money, small change that would soon enough blossom into a pile of cash–and did so only at the insistence of her boyfriend,…
Only in the movies could a kid who looks and acts like Jason Biggs be called a loser. Let’s see: charming conversationalist, big smile, washboard abs? Oh yeah, those’ll make a guy unpopular, for sure. About the only thing that’s surprising about Biggs’ character in Loser is that the filmmakers…
