In each of the shows that opened here last weekend, there’s a scene in which the tormented lead demands that his male lover tell him “I love you.” The replies are as different as the productions; one of them a comedy, the other a drama. Both plays deal with issues…
Digital video is poised to become a major factor in commercial filmmaking, and Time Code, the new feature from Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas), could be used as a commercial for the process, which is its greatest point of interest. The movie is not so much an intriguing story as…
Given that most film studios have multimillion-dollar marketing budgets with which to target 18- to 25-year-olds, it’s astonishing how little they seem to know about the everyday life of those they’re supposed to be studying. Drew Barrymore has never been kissed? Please. Rachel Leigh Cook undatable until Freddie Prinze Jr…
When asked to name the most erotic sequence they have ever seen in a film, people tend to pick moments like the love scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in Don’t Look Now or that indelible image of Kathleen Turner in Body Heat, standing just inside her house, silently…
This was to be a column extolling the daring and inventiveness of a very groovy Sci Fi Network television show called good vs. evil, in which two dead men, a fro-sporting, cool-spouting brutha and his pale-faced partner, try to save the souls of those who have made Faustian deals with…
It’s often said that women turn into their mothers as they grow up, and in the case of writer-performer Nancy Wolter, that’s proved particularly true. Wolter’s 70-minute performance piece In Her Own Voice: Stories of My Mother is a tribute in which the author assumes the role of her own…
The first time I talked to Mad Coyote Joe, I asked him how he got started as a TV chef.”To tell you the truth, here’s what I think happened. I think they just said, “You know that fat motherfucker who’s desperate to be on TV? Let’s give him a chance.'”…
Peter Becker is the most important man in the movie business, even though you have no idea who he is. Becker himself would not cop to such a description; he, like few else in the business called show, does not put himself before the work. To describe what he does…
On the last night it played Tucson, The First Hundred Years by Arizona Theatre Company drew more than an appreciative crowd. As the audience filed out, local paramedics filed in, reportedly to remove an ailing patron who’d collapsed during the evening’s performance. He certainly hadn’t laughed himself sick. This one-act…
There is a killing late in Gladiator, Ridley Scott’s new heroic epic, and it is one of those wonderfully cathartic extinguishings that make a wide-eyed audience rise and cheer. After several brutal battles, after much bloodshed, after considerable suffering both needless and entertaining, a blade finds its mark, and a…
The word “International” has been added to its title, but this year’s edition of the Saguaro Film Festival has become the fest without a country. After debuting at Harkins Camelview 5 seven years ago, Arizona Film Society’s shindig for indies has knocked around the Valley, landing, in one year or…
It is difficult to reconcile American perceptions of Iran, a rigidly authoritarian Islamic fundamentalist society, with the captivating and compassionate films that emanate from the country. Most of these pictures, including the 1995 Cannes Film Festival Camera d’Or winner The White Balloon and the 1998 Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar nominee…
Boys Don’t Cry hasn’t garnered the kind of box-office returns you’d expect from an Oscar winner. That’s understandable. No matter its brilliance, the film’s pallor of rural white trash dysfunction was probably too unsettling for that cash-cow megaplex demographic. After all, it was, as the Sunday Herald in Scotland recently…
The Asian-American community has never been well served by our mass media or popular culture. Japanese and Chinese images are pretty much limited to servants, “inscrutable” stereotypes, squinty-eyed evildoers or outright racist portrayals by clueless Occidental actors. The Cartwright boys had loyal ol’ Hop Sing to clean up after them…
The death last month of psilocybin-mushroom philosopher and rave culture Svengali Terrence McKenna generated a performance-art void that London-based spoken-word sensation Ian Winn is primed to replenish. One man with a microphone, a multimedia screen and a mind on hyper-drive, Winn has a repertoire that is a mix of satirical…
As I swing open the heavy, carved wooden door to the West Valley Art Museum in Surprise, the odd juxtaposition of the serene paintings of Phoenix’s own 92-year-old Philip Curtis with the in-your-face artwork of 78-year-old Leonard Baskin throws me completely off guard. I’ve come to see “Leonard Baskin: The…
Before the fall of the Soviet Union, you wouldn’t have measured a woman’s commitment to capitalism by the number of Communist posters she hung on her walls. But in these post-Cold War days, the West’s reply to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s early 1960s boast “We will bury you” has evolved…
The voice-mail message begins with the caller identifying himself in a clear, sharp tone: “Hey, this is Chris Thompson, executive producer of Action and Ladies Man, and I hear you’re trying to get a hold of me…” Long pause. “For some ungodly reason.” Then, in a split second, the voice…
Although its themes are about as revelatory as those of the average Cathy comic strip (clothes don’t fit, job too busy, male not clairvoyant, AACK!), there’s something irrefutably charming about Philippa “Pip” Karmel’s debut feature, Me Myself I. The editor of Academy darling Shine has scripted a laundry list of…
Why aren’t there more submarine movies? It seems like a no-brainer formula for success: claustrophobic setting, invisible enemy whose approach must be estimated, inherent threat of both drowning and depth pressure, and from a budgetary standpoint, one key set is really all that’s needed. There’s even a solid track record…
Love & Basketball is divided into four quarters; thank God there’s no overtime. The directorial debut from writer Gina Prince-Bythewood, who once penned scripts for A Different World and Felicity, is a film built upon transitions so weak and obvious it’s astonishing the entire thing doesn’t collapse on itself. You…
Improbably, given the geography and the general cultural malaise of the Valley, a grand finale of world-class quality closes National Dance Week here. Since the week began on April 21, presenters from Tempe to central Phoenix offered audiences dance by leading American choreographers — Sean Curran, Moses Pendleton and Kevin…
