Zachary Levy met Stan Pleskun when he was filming a network television show. Stan, whose stage name is Stanless Steel, was performing one of his strongman acts — a variety of bending pennies, lifting cars, and crushing steel rods with his bare hands. Stan’s a professional strongman in a post-carnival…
Last night the Phoenix Film Festival announced that it will screen “Starting at the Finish Line: The Coach Buehler Story” for its Opening Night Gala. The film is produced by Phoenix Suns star Grant Hill, who will be in attendance for the gala, along with the film’s director and Coach…
If Jane Eyre is not the greatest of the Great Books with a permanent position on required-reading lists, it may be the most frequently filmed: At least 10 cinematic versions of the story have been made dating back to the dawn of the silent era — more, if you count…
Who said animation should look real? Robert Zemeckis, for one, though as evidenced by Disney’s recent closing of his ImageMovers Digital studio, he increasingly appears to be alone in that sentiment. Mars Needs Moms stands as the potentially final Zemeckis-produced motion-capture effort, and, like The Polar Express, Beowulf, and A…
Exactly the sort of mysterious and almost holy experience you hope to get from documentaries and rarely do, Jeff Malmberg’s Marwencol is something like a homegrown slice of Herzog oddness, complete with true-crime backfill and juicy meta-fictive upshot. It begins with context: In 2000, Mark Hogancamp, an Upstate New York…
Nothing goes better with a movie than dinner (and perhaps vise versa), which Chow Bella has all figured out.Dinner and a Movie pairs all sorts of films with themed recipes each week. And today, they picked I Am Love, starring Tilda Swinton, who falls in love with a chef through,…
In Bourne Ultimatum screenwriter George Nolfi’s directorial debut (an extremely loose adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1954 short story “Adjustment Team”), Matt Damon plays David Norris, a Brooklyn-born, bar-fight-prone congressman rocketing to the front of a Senate race apparently on the strength of his charisma and the idealism of his…
Ink still wet on his MIT degree, Matt Franklin (Topher Grace) is back in hometown Los Angeles, waiting for his future to clarify itself while he loiters behind the counter at Suncoast Video, hawking VHS copies of Harry and the Hendersons because it’s, like, totally 1988. Inspiration comes when Matt…
There’s a lot of things you can easily do in two days’ time: do your laundry, get the yard work done, or maybe even read that book you’ve been putting off for the past three years. Making a short film in that time however, is pretty challenging if not downright…
Right as Alaina is about to burst into tears, a torrential rainstorm begins outside. It sounds like something out of a movie … and it was on Sunday morning on the set of Paranoia. Paranoia’s a locally filmed and produced feature-length movie about a woman named Alaina who’s undergoing experimental…
In preparation for the 83rd Annual Academy Awards (this Sunday, Feb. 27) and the booze-filled parties, we’ve come up with a few pairings of our own. Yesterday we tackled five film/cocktail duos and today we bring you five more. One cocktail for each best picture — some known, some completely…
Besides going thrift store shopping and drinking excessive amounts of iced coffee, New Times blogger Megan Dobransky and her ninja city employee friend, Martha Falbo, go to the movies. (Actually, this is the first time they’ve ever gone to a movie together.) Megan: So, should we talk about the movie…
Don’t be fooled when you sit down for Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo. You’re not in for a Godzilla-type, ass-kicking, beetle taking over Japan’s famous mega-city; You’re actually in for something much better.Writer-director-producer Jessica Oreck’s debut film opens with a Japanese boy in an insect shop begging his dad fork over…
The Farrellys dutifully fulfill their raunch and goo quotients. Rick and Fred (Owen Wilson and Jason Sudeikis) are two domesticated husbands whose long marriages (to Jenna Fischer and Christina Applegate, respectively) have achieved somnolent routine in suburban Providence, Rhode Island. Yet the wives worry. Rick is a girl watcher; Fred…
Paramount, distributor of David O. Russell’s The Fighter, celebrated the helmer’s Best Director Oscar nomination by placing a “For Your Consideration” ad on the cover of Variety, touting him as “the comeback of the year.” It was an odd choice of phrasing, considering that The Fighter, Russell’s first feature to…
In preparation for the 83rd Annual Academy Awards (this Sunday, Feb. 27) and the booze-filled parties, we’ve come up with a few pairings of our own. One cocktail for each best picture — some known, some completely invented (the cocktails, that is). So sit down and grab some popcorn, or…
Nothing goes better with a movie than dinner (and perhaps vise versa). That’s why we’re so excited about a new series by our foodie sister blog, Chow Bella. Dinner and a Movie pairs all sorts of films with themed recipes each week. And today, they picked A Soldier’s Story, starring…
To age brutishly is Liam Neeson’s apparent career goal — with Taken, Clash of the Titans, The A-Team, and now Unknown, the actor continues to follow the Nicolas Cage path from respected thespian to big-budget ass-kicker. In this tepid thriller from Jaume Collet-Serra (Orphan), Neeson is Dr. Martin Harris, who,…
Fresh from Sundance, Miguel Arteta’s amiable Cedar Rapids is a mild comedy of embarrassment, set in the dark heart of Middle America and starring sitcom secondario Ed Helms (The Office’s obnoxious angry salesman Andy Bernard) as Tim Lippe, a prematurely middle-aged man-child. Taking an airplane for the first time in…
It took William Storey 15 years to tell his wife, Lee, that as a young adult, he was a member of Up With People. And when he sat her down to tell her, he was met with a blank stare. Lee Storey had no idea what he was talking about…
The Eagle, directed by Kevin Macdonald and adapted from Rosemary Sutcliff’s 1954 historical novel, The Eagle of the Ninth, a bestselling tale of second-century Roman legions and youthful derring-do on the far side of Hadrian’s Wall, is a thunderous boys’ adventure of the old-school type — there’s not a female…
In past years, the theatrical release of the Oscar-nominated live-action and animated shorts has provided a fun peek into intriguing bite-size cinema from across the globe. But for the 2011 edition, the series is at last making room for the five nominated documentary shorts as well. Unfortunately, this year’s nonfiction…
