Vh1’s latest reality endeavor, Baseball Wives, is based in (where else?) spring training hotspot Scottsdale. The show features Anna Benson, Erika Monroe Williams, Chantel Kendall, Tanya Grace, Brooke Villone, and Jordana Lenz. The vaguely sporty premise? Six women with romantic ties to pro baseballers pick fights, form catty alliances, throw…
Well-honed powers of observation are an absolute must for any detective. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle knew this, as demonstrated by the sleuthing skills of his greatest creation Sherlock Holmes. Millionaire heiress Frances Glessner Lee also believed criminal investigators should have a similarly keen eye, which is why she helped revolutionize…
Close to Hollywood, with a desert landscape and shining city as adaptable to “New Mexico” as “Saudi Arabia” (just ignore that non-native cactus in the corner), the Phoenix metropolitan area has a rich history of film production. Our time in the spotlight has been bright — from 1960’s Psycho, when Janet…
Director Stephen Daldry has never met a Big Theme he didn’t like: After 2002’s The Hours, a lugubrious women’s-problem picture touching on AIDS and assisted suicide, he went to Auschwitz with 2008’s The Reader. Following two such high-toned literary adaptations with such hefty subject matter, Daldry’s logical next stop is…
There’s a point in Haywire when the film’s protagonist, ex-Marine Mallory Kane (Gina Carano), gone rogue from her job as hired muscle for a private government subcontractor, takes a fall while scaling down a drainpipe and hits the ground with a crunch that knocks the wind out of you. It’s…
Like us, you may be in mourning for the closing of The Royale in Mesa after only six months, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t still a number of local venues for viewing independent and art-house films at decent prices (like, say, free). Sure, you’ll sometimes have to compromise on seating…
It’s 1992 at the start of In the Land of Blood and Honey, and Ajla (Zana Marjanovic) and Danijel (Goran Kostic) are about to hook up at Bosnian nightclub when they’re interrupted by a bomb blast. A few months later, Ajla is one of dozens of women rounded up and…
The Iron Lady: Margaret Thatcher as victimized woman In the first scene of The Iron Lady, which re-teams director Phyllida Lloyd with her Mamma Mia! star Meryl Streep, 80-something Margaret Thatcher is presented as a little old lady unfit for the fast-moving world outside her hermetic London townhouse. The bulk…
A holy hot mess of the sacred and the inane, Joyful Noise, about a small-town Southern gospel choir, lifts from Usher’s “Yeah!” to give us this inspirational lyric: “Now God and I are the best of homies.” The film is Jesus for Gleeks — no surprise, since writer-director Todd Graff’s…
The first 10 minutes of Dee Rees’ funny, moving, nuanced, and impeccably acted first feature, in which coming of age and coming out are inseparable, sharply reveal the conflicts that 17-year-old Alike (Adepero Oduye) faces. At a lesbian club — maybe for the first time — she gapes in awe…
One of the biggest success stories of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival was writer-director Dee Rees’ film Pariah, about 17-year-old black lesbian Alike (pronounced Ah-lee-kay, played by Adepero Oduye) and her struggles to forge an identity from the constricting butch/femme palette. Her best friend Laura (a scene-stealing Pernell Walker) has…
Will there someday be a movie where the “one last job” goes off without a hitch? Not Contraband, anyway, which begins with that time-tested premise, then subjects its protagonist to a feature-length demonstration of Murphy’s Law. Chris Farraday (Mark Wahlberg) is the retiree runner reluctantly reactivated, a legend who once…
Reality shows revolving around the lives of fill-in-the-blank wives are cable mainstays and ratings boons for networks like Bravo and Vh1. While the former pioneered the spousal genre with Real Housewives of Orange County back in 2006, Vh1 has since hopped on the wifey dramas bandwagon with skank/scum-starring dramas like…
Victor Moreno says he remembers checking out Andrea Beesley Brown’s Grindhouse Redux double features and events at the Paper Heart and Chandler Cinemas back when he first moved to Phoenix. The local movie fanatic and artist started programming with Beasley Brown (aka The Midnite Movie Mamacita) when she opened The Royale…
The YouTube trailer for a Scottsdale-based reality television show, un-originally (and uh, well, somewhat inaccurately) titled Hottsdale, has been making its way around the internet. First, a few answers for the guaranteed questions: – Yes, it’s a real concept. – Yes, they’ve successfully lured a cast of actors, er, real life people to act, er,…
Sometimes it’s a one-night deal, and sometimes they stick around for weeks, so when it comes to seeing an independent film at a local theater, planning ahead is crucial.That’s why we’ve wrangled must-see flicks screening in the Valley this month. Prep your bowl of buttery popcorn and check out our…
We know — you’re excited about The Dark Knight Rises. And The Avengers. And The Hunger Games. So are we. We’re also excited about a lot of other movies whose marketing campaigns have not inundated us with white noise (yet). Allow us to suggest a few more films to put…
The past 12 months brought a number of powerful, introspective, big-theme cine-statements, many of them by old masters (see below). Some pondered history — as well as its end. A few upended the old-fashioned movie-house paradigm. In recognition of the medium’s ongoing mutation, my annual list is bookended by two…
Margaret, written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan (You Can Count on Me), starring Anna Paquin with key supporting performances from Matt Damon and Mark Ruffalo, is the best film of 2011. Chances are very, very good that you haven’t seen it — or were even aware that it was something…
We know — you’re excited about The Dark Knight Rises. And The Avengers. And The Hunger Games. So are we. We’re also excited about a lot of other movies whose marketing campaigns have not inundated us with white noise (yet). Allow us to suggest a few more films to put…
Grab your plastic, intergalactic ray gun and your handmade space suit — the worst space crew in the galaxy is coming to FilmBar. Voyage Trekkers, the local sci-fi comedy web series directed by Nathan Blackwell and produced by Squishy Studios and Inside Creative Minds Media, will screen all 10 episodes on Saturday, January 7. …
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is hardly a personal project. Still, David Fincher’s sveltely malevolent remake of the 2009 Swedish blockbuster directed by Niels Arden Oplev from Stieg Larsson’s rambling thriller, a posthumously published international bestseller and Kindle record-holder, is a recognizably Fincherian caper. The movie, which opens with…
