After alien invasions and Samuel L. Jackson appearances, time travel is the next best plot device Hollywood can inject into a film to maximize audience attendance.The latest example: Men In Black 3 (released next week — in 3D!), in which Will Smith goes back to the 1960’s to meet a…
Nightowls, film fiends, and underagers alike can celebrate additions and changes in the works at Downtown’s FilmBar. Kelly Aubey, who owns the independent theater/bar at 815 North Second Street announced this week that next month, FilmBar will be screening midnight movies from Thursday through Saturday, sell tickets online, and lower…
There’s a lot wrong with French star Julie Delpy’s new indie flick, 2 Days in New York, but there’s one thing that’s very, very right: Chris Rock. As Mingus, Rock is the saving grace of an often disjointed mess of a film, a screwball comedy that tries to force quirkiness…
Bobcat Goldthwait is moving farther and farther away from Hollywood — the industry that paid him to star in three Police Academy movies and the geographical area of Los Angeles. Last week, he presented his new directorial effort, God Bless America, at a radio-station promo gig in Omaha and, a…
Much of Tim Burton’s output over the past decade has been concerned with slipping the “Burton treatment” to susceptible texts: Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — and now, Dark Shadows. A supernaturally themed daily daytime soap, Dark Shadows…
Frank (Joel Murray) is an outcast. We first meet this divorced, 50-ish, glumly alcoholic white-collar worker — the protagonist of Bobcat Goldthwait’s God Bless America — on one of his sleepless nights, entertaining homicidal fantasies about the couple next door. “They’re incapable of comprehending that their actions affect other people,”…
Sometimes a movie screens for one night only, and sometimes it shows for weeks or months. That’s why when it comes to moviegoing, planning ahead is crucial. Planners that we are, we’ve selected five must-see flicks screening in the Valley this month. Stock up on your preferred salty, sweet snacks…
At the start of Joss Whedon’s long-awaited Marvel superhero supergroup flick, The Avengers, the Tesseract — a powerful, potentially dangerous glowing cube that fell to the ocean floor after Captain America (Chris Evans) liberated it from the Nazis in his movie last summer — is in the hands of NASA…
Nathan Blackwell can remember being a kid and shooting one of his first films about aliens and rayguns. Decades later, after starting a production company, Squishy Studios, and buying a few more cameras, he’s back in space. This week, Blackwell’s kicking off production of the second season of Voyage Trekkers,…
Welcome to the Morning Buzz, a catch-up on interesting happenings around the city and country and a quick guide to what (and who) to keep your eyes on. We’ll be here, first thing every weekday, to get you going. Here’s what’s buzzing this morning: When the local chapter of design…
“It was a great, great shame,” says Peter Lord of the 2005 fire at the Aardman Animations studio storage facility. “Hundreds of chickens went up in smoke.” Of course, Lord isn’t talking about live chickens; he’s referring to the hundreds of clay model chickens produced for the Golden-Globe-nominated Chicken Run…
With The Deep Blue Sea, the great British director Terence Davies returns to the post-war period — though in a sense, he has never left. The cinema of Davies (born in 1945) is defined by a mixed pity and fondness for the world of yesterday, a past he seemingly finds…
The Deep Blue Sea, the first fiction feature in a dozen years from visionary British director Terence Davies, is a film about love that in no way reassures that love conquers all. Plumbing disquieting depth, Deep Blue Sea investigates the insoluble dilemma of romantic love: the expectation, contrary to experience,…
Lee Storey has a brand new reason to smile ’til it hurts. A Phoenix-based water rights attorney with Ballard Spahr LLP, Storey earned a spot as one of our 2011 Big Brain Finalists for her debut feature documentary, Smile ‘Til It Hurts: The Up With People Story. The film tells the…
Without working ourselves into too much of a premature lather let’s note: 30 Rock is a few episodes away from its season six finale, which airs May 17, and NBC has yet to renew the Thursday night standby for another season. And it sure seems possible that the premise of…
Whit Stillman made a name for himself making semiautobiographical, deadpan, highly literate comedies about the night lives of idle heirs (his 1990 Oscar-nominated debut Metropolitan), privileged Americans abroad (Barcelona, 1994), and resilient yuppies in decadent early ’80s Manhattan (The Last Days of Disco, 1998). But for more than a decade,…
It’s Nicholas Sparks’ world; we just live in it. Sparks, in case you haven’t scanned the paperback racks lately, is the former pharmaceutical salesman who’s written 16 bestsellers since 1995, when The Notebook was plucked from the slush pile by a wily publisher. The 2004 movie version of The Notebook…
Back with his first film in 14 years, Whit Stillman still operates in a world of his own. It’s true both in respect to the singularity of his deadpan dialogic style, as well as to his hermetic milieu. With Damsels in Distress, Stillman’s follow-up to 1998’s The Last Days of…
I spotted a bottle of something called Marley’s Mellow Mood, “a new line of 100 percent natural relaxation beverages,” in my neighborhood deli just a few hours after seeing Kevin Macdonald’s documentary on the reggae and Rasta emissary — a reminder of just how crassly the Jamaican legend, who died…
When mob heiress Karen Gravano was in her late teens, her father Salvatore “Sammy The Bull” Gravano, who was second in command in the Gambino crime family, became an FBI informant and fed juicy bits of mafia info to hungry agents that eventually took down boss John Gotti. And apart…
You have to hand it to the marketing team behind The Cabin in the Woods.No movie has had such a successful hush-hush campaign since 1992’s The Crying Game, when critics went so far as to eschew protocol in taking out all gender-specific pronouns (and leaving us to discover on our…
At the end of The Cabin in the Woods, theworld is destroyed by an apocalyptic hand of fate — an actual hand, mind you — yet that is not a spoiler, not really. The real spoilers in the film are in the tricky mechanics crafted by writers Joss Whedon and…
