Tony Bui sounds like what he is: an American. The soft-spoken 26-year-old filmmaker grew up in the Silicon Valley–specifically, Sunnyvale–and went to school at Loyola Marymount. But for his debut feature, Three Seasons (see review on this page), Bui returned to the country he left when he was 2 years…
Fans call it “that Star Wars feeling,” the raw emotional high achieved by watching, or even just thinking about, the films of George Lucas. It’s a sort of gut-swirling, swooning sensation, the effect of tripping on a fantasy world, a wonderland, a place unlike Earth or even the movies. And…
We all judge books by their covers, and each of us has that one story that tells us why we shouldn’t. I first saw Chico Chism about 10 years ago, drumming away at Warsaw Wally’s, maybe with Big Pete Pearson’s band–I’m not sure. What stood out was Chico, a diminutive…
thursday may 20 Sometimes referred to as “The Freddy Krueger of Comedy,” the comedian-magician better known as The Amazing Jonathan plays the Valley this weekend. The performer, veteran of Letterman, Arsenio and such NBC specials as World’s Wildest Magicians and World’s Greatest Magic II, favors gruesome shock illusions, like chewing…
Like marching bands, the Ice Capades, the Rockettes, and Oz’s Munchkins, Riverdance has stolen the hearts of Americans. Perhaps the canny Irish feel the pulse of American taste. They know we prefer fake food and paintings by numbers, and when we win the lottery, we’re heading not for the Holy…
Compared with its recent exhibitions of paintings on copper and works from ancient Egypt, the Phoenix Art Museum’s “Great Design: 100 Masterpieces From the Vitra Design Museum” is a welcomed dive back to the commonplace. Instead of rarities and treasures, it features objects familiar to just about everyone’s backside. It…
In Adolph Frietag’s house, Jewish customs have long been buried. Although he and his family–sister, sister-in-law, and two nieces–are themselves Jewish, they decorate a Christmas tree every December and don’t associate with Russian Jews, whom they refer to as “the other kind.” Enter Joe Farkas, a handsome young Eastern Parkway…
The Castle is a modest little comedy from Australia and director Rob Sitch that falls into the subgenre of Capraesque idealism, in the little-guy-triumphs-over-evil-powers-that-be division. The story revolves around the unpretentious Kerrigan clan. Darryl (Michael Caton), the father, has his own little towing business. Sal (Anne Tenney), the mother, is…
In 1932, when director Karl Freund wanted to scare the socks off the brave movie patrons who had come to see the original Universal Pictures production of The Mummy, he didn’t have the miracle of state-of-the-art computer imagery to create his bogeyman. All he had was gauze–a lot of gauze…
A Midsummer Night’s Dream came early in Shakespeare’s career. He had written it by at least 1598, in roughly the same period as another lyric-romantic masterpiece, Romeo and Juliet. Despite Samuel Pepys’ famous dismissal of Dream as “the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life,” it…
“See? You thought I was the only crazy one.” A young man was saying this to his girlfriend or wife as, dumbstruck, she surveyed the long line that stretched from the front door of the Toys “R” Us at Metrocenter, around the corner and down the south side of the…
From now on, when Robert Schimmel sits down to swap war stories with other comics, he’ll have one that’s hard to top. Could there be a much tougher room to play than a comedy club in Denver, barely a week after the Littleton shootings? To make that audience laugh takes…
thursday may 13 Athens, Georgia-based instrumental-surf-rockabilly-pop-punk blend The Woggles, touring in support of their Telstar Records CD Wailin’ With the Woggles, hit the Valley on Thursday, May 13, at Mustang Sally’s, 1212 East Apache in Tempe. Doors open at 9 p.m.; the 21-and-over show starts at 10. Erector Set, and…
The latest release from Paramount Pictures’ bouncing baby, MTV Films, is set in a high school and has been inoculated with the usual doses of teenage angst, teenage wit, and teenage lust. Here’s the surprise: It declines to get down on hands and knees to woo Generation Y to the…
The most surprising thing about the new teensploitation horror film Idle Hands is the lack of masturbation jokes. It is a movie about a 17-year-old boy who loses control of his right hand to an evil demon, yet there’s only one such obvious crack. As the gloriously lazy hero Anton…
The “SLC” in SLC Punk! stands for Salt Lake City, but it might as well stand for Some Lucky Chump. The filmmaker, James Merendino, has stated that this tale of two punk buddies trying to spread anarchy through the Utah capital in 1985 reflects his own rebellious teenage years there…
My eldest sister–though she is herself the wonderful mother of two devoted daughters, and the devoted daughter of a wonderful mother–once told me that she had no special attachment to the idea of Mother’s Day. Her reasoning: “If your kids are nice to you all year round, then you don’t…
Early in this century, Russia’s western borders rippled like a ribbon in the wind. Talk about waking up on the wrong side of the bed–you could wake up on the wrong side of the border! Young men who found themselves on the Russian side were conscripted into the Army, only…
thursday may 6 Veteran comic Jackie Mason–namesake of Oxford’s postgraduate Jackie Mason Lectureship in Contemporary Judaism–brings his show “Much Ado About Everything” to the Valley at 8 p.m. Thursday, May 6; the same time Friday, May 7; and Saturday, May 8; and 2 p.m. Sunday, May 9, at the Orpheum…
There’s something unsettling about the overwrought lunatics created by playwright Richard Dresser. It isn’t their crabby personalities or their limitless capacity for self-pity. It’s not even their incessant whining about their tormented lives. And, in the current Actors Theatre of Phoenix production of Dresser’s Gun-Shy, it certainly isn’t the way…
Who says Phoenix isn’t a theater town? For the past five years, a real live Broadway legend has walked among us–not that most people here probably care. In Phoenix, you’re more likely to be handed celebrity status for shooting a cop than for copping a Tony nomination or winning an…
Based on the first Julian Barnes novel, Metroland is essentially a dramatization of the Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime”: “You may find yourself/In a beautiful house/With a beautiful wife/You may ask yourself/Well, how did I get here?” The hero of Metroland spends the movie asking himself that question,…
