In an early scene in Instinct, released by Disney’s Buena Vista Films, we’re told that a brilliant primatologist named Ethan Powell (played by Anthony Hopkins) is being brought back to the United States from Rwanda, where for several years he has been engaged in a close study of mountain gorillas…
Bernardo Bertolucci’s Besieged is a movie of enthralling visual poetry. Set almost entirely inside a ravishing Roman villa, it is a love story played out in furtive glances and stolen looks by characters on opposite sides of the ethnic divide. Culturally, Mr. Kinsky (David Thewlis) and Shandurai (Thandie Newton) couldn’t…
A fine line divides inspired silliness from out-and-out witlessness; it’s a short leap from grin to groan. In 1997’s Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Mike Myers took a thin premise–spoof the ’60s by transplanting a horny Matt Helm-like secret agent into the ’90s–and danced an unsteady watusi along that…
thursday june 10 “I used to think that if you did an hour on TV, you couldn’t go and do that same hour live. But I’ve learned the opposite is true. That’s precisely the hour audiences want you to do. There’s this feeling that if you did it on TV,…
Looking at Vicki Schimmel today, a vibrant woman bouncing her baby son in her lap as she talks enthusiastically over lunch about her upcoming project, it’s hard to imagine her not being functional, much less suffering a nervous breakdown. But her life ground to a halt in just that way…
When grown-ups talk about their childhood summers, however fondly they speak of baseball games or camping or trips to amusement parks, no nostalgia of this sort usually seems able to compete with their memories of moviegoing. Not much beats hanging out in a movie theater during the hot months, getting…
Remember Andy Robinson, the busy, reliable character actor who played, among many, many other roles, the psycho killer in the original Dirty Harry, and Liberace in an ’80s TV movie? Turns out he has an active fan club, on the strength of his connection to–guess what?–Star Trek. Robinson plays the…
There’s an unfortunate trend in musical theater, a genre of live performance that can hardly afford another deadfall these days. Book musicals, once based on literature (A Connecticut Yankee) or original stories (Showboat), are today more likely to be adapted from cheesy Hollywood musical films. Recent Broadway audiences have had…
Deja vu is usually a sign of love at first sight. Says who? Says the heroine of The Thirteenth Floor to the hero that she’s on the verge of kissing. Though they’ve just met a scene or two earlier, they both feel they’ve seen each other before. That maxim about…
The peerless Ethiopian distance runner Haile Gebrselassie is a tiny man–5-foot-3 and barely 115 pounds–but in his native country, his heroism looms large. Since 1994 he has set 15 world records at five different distances, and at the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, he outdueled a trio of favored…
David Mamet, famous for his in-your-face characters, brutal and frequently raunchy dialogue and deliberate, staccato prose, would seem an unlikely choice to write and direct a screen adaptation of British playwright Terence Rattigan’s genteel drama about injustice. But the Pulitzer Prize-winning Mamet (for Glengarry Glen Ross), whose body of work…
Asked if the emotional pain that suffuses so many of her songs comes from real pain in her life, Jill Cohn offers a common-sense answer: “Oh, sure. It would seem strange to me, actually, to sing about someone else’s pain.” Having made the interviewer feel like a fool–without meaning to–the…
thursday june 3 Bona fide show-biz legend Mickey Rooney plays the title role in The Wizard of Oz when a touring stage version of the L. Frank Baum tale comes to the Valley. Jo Anne Worley, the wild woman of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, plays that embodiment of Midwestern evil,…
There’s a reason why A Thousand Clowns is a perennial favorite with theater companies across the country. Herb Gardner’s dark comedy is a wonderful piece of writing, with lively characters and a perfect blend of good-time yuks and hard-knock commentary. Arizona Jewish Theatre Company is closing its season–which honored Jewish…
The Love Letter has the dubious distinction of being the other studio film to open this past week. In a week when all the other majors have run for cover, DreamWorks has taken a gamble with a classic bit of counterprogramming–in nearly every way, this sweet romance/romantic comedy is the…
Maybe it’s the damned blinking thing, because it’s not simply the foppish hair and boyish face–or, for that matter, even the vaguely befuddled reticence and wry, self-abasing demeanor we Americans prefer to see in our Brits. It’s got to be the blinking. That’s what he does, almost all he does,…
If your poodle is decked out in the complete Captain Kirk uniform, you’ve taken Klingon language classes, or you once mailed DeForest Kelley a joint taped to a piece of cardboard just “to return the favor,” the 86-minute documentary called Trekkies is must viewing–love it or loathe it. In the…
Every two years, optimists and noncynics of various races and backgrounds get together and hold a National Conference on Peacemaking and Conflict Resolution. In what some might find a rich social and political irony, the Valley has been chosen as the site of the biennial event this time around–it runs…
Well, that time is upon us once again–the time of season finales, the time when dedicated sofa tubers harvest the big dramatic payoffs and revelations and cliffhangers we’ve earned with a season of gazing rapt at the TV screen. By the time you read this, Ally McBeal will have whined…
Thursday May 27 To Jeff Dunham’s usual repertory company–fuzzy “Woozle” Peanut, crotchety old-timer Walter and pepper-on-a-stick Jose Jalapeno–the comedian and ventriloquist has added two new characters: Larry, who’s all a-jitter over the Y2K problem, and Bubba, a bucktoothed, freckle-faced rustic type. The lot of them takes the stage at 8…
Given the choice of watching a really terrible play in a freezing-cold theater or having all my molars yanked without the aid of Novocaine, I would–after recently enduring the former–have to opt for the latter. The play, Lisa Loomer’s tedious The Waiting Room, left me weary with boredom. And the…
Nearly a quarter of a century after the fall of Saigon, only a small film industry has managed to grow on Vietnam’s war-scarred soil. And what has emerged is rarely seen outside of local cinemas. If ever there was a country that needed to seize back control of its cinematic…
