George Lucas is the L. Ron Hubbard of Hollywood. Both men were sci-fi dreamers turned mega-millionaires who spun their pulp adventures into a religion. Tap the power within yourself, they urged. The faithful forked over their dollars. Then both Lucas and Hubbard mucked up their simple premise with add-ons like…
When The Mindy Project debuted in 2012, one of its two main inspirations, the big-screen romantic comedy, was already dead. Kate Hudson’s last studio rom-com (Something Borrowed) was released the year before, Katherine Heigl’s (Life as We Know It) the year before that. With their Harry/Sally-esque slant-rhyming names, The Mindy…
In addition to stocking stuffers this holiday season, Phoenicians will have a chance to catch their favorite drag stars — stuffed in their own stockings — as they take over Orpheum Theatre. The cream of RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant crop arrive in Phoenix on Sunday, December 27, with a slew of…
Comedian Gregg Turkington sits at an airport bar in Van Nuys, orders a spiced whiskey sour — the joint’s too-sweet specialty cocktail — and stares out the window at the tiny commuter jets he hates. “I’m terrified of flying, like seriously freaked out,” he says. “But I fly more than…
Justin Kurzel’s is a Macbeth stripped of lit-class ponderousness, stage-bound declaiming, Ren Fest cosplay, and prestige-film pomposity. It is the essence of this cruelest of plays, the blade unsheathed — and, as a blade would be after hacking through all these Scottish wars, its edge is blunt, rough, a thing…
They could have called it Hitchcock/Truffaut/Scorsese/Fincher. Less an adaptation of one of the great books about film than a feature-length recommendation, Kent Jones’ documentary take on François Truffaut’s exhaustive career-survey 1966 interview with Alfred Hitchcock is an arresting précis, sharply edited and generous with its film clips — it’s a…
There’s terrific comic potential in the idea at the heart of Don Verdean, the latest shrug of a film from Jared and Jerusha Hess, the husband-wife writer-director team behind Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre, and one that for good reason you haven’t seen, Gentlemen Broncos. That idea: A fraud of a…
Years after Moby-Dick was a flop, Herman Melville visited an old ship’s captain named George Pollard. Both men had seen better days. In their youth, both had sailed the seas with some success. Melville had written novels about his adventures with island girls, and Pollard had once helmed one of…
Like grad school or that cave in The Empire Strikes Back, what you get out of Rick Alverson’s bold and desolate Entertainment depends on what you put into it. It’s less a film you watch than a breakdown episode you try to get through, a bottomed-out desert lulu that manages…
One day in 1964, while 5-year-old Neil Logan was home alone watching The Wallace and Ladmo Show, Ladmo held up a drawing Logan had done. “They used to ask kids to send in drawings all the time,” recalls the 66-year-old artist, known today for his bronze figurative sculptures. “This time,…
Yes, knowledge is power. But gaining that knowledge can get pretty expensive. This week we’ve gathered some workshops, storytelling events, film screenings and more that will help you hone in on some new skills and keep some of that hard-earned cash in your wallet, where it belongs. And we also…
Oh Zeus, hear my lament that I was not present when Spike Lee imagined updating Lysistrata to present-day Chicago. I bet he burst himself cackling. Aristophanes’ 411 B.C. comedy, written during the three-decade Peloponnesian War, concocts a crazy scheme: Women refuse sex until their blue-balled men give in and declare…
Bees are such tiny, seemingly inconsequential creatures, yet milligram for milligram, they affect the landscape in profound ways. You could say the same about small, delicate movies like Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher’s 2014 Cannes Grand Prix winner The Wonders, which tells the story of a hippie beekeeper family in the…
Yes, Janis Joplin made a hell of a record out of Rodgers & Hart’s “Little Girl Blue,” but you’re right if you winced to learn that Amy Berg’s new documentary feature about Joplin takes that song as its title — and as its dismal argument and organizing principle. “I want…
Though movie-goers have known for a while that Harkins Camelview 5 is closing, the art house theater’s days are officially numbered. As of this writing, the much-loved 1973 movie house known for being a hub of indie cinema in the Valley has just over a week before its final films…
In a 2001 interview, producer Lee Mendelson recalled the reaction of a CBS executive who attended a screening of A Charlie Brown Christmas shortly before it was scheduled to premiere, on December 9, 1965: “Well, it’s in the TV Guide logs — we gotta put it on the air. Nice…
Maybe Cars and the Hot Wheels-ification of Pixar has been a good thing. Now that the storied studio has, like its rivals, puked onto our screens indifferent kid-distracting junk, its new movies come un-freighted from expectations of genius. Miserable as it was, Planes: Fire and Rescue (from corporate parent Disney…
The big breakthrough in Legend, the latest well-crafted studio throwback from writer-director Brian Helgeland (Payback, A Knight’s Tale, 42)? At long last, here’s one movie with two often incomprehensible Tom Hardy characters, sometimes muttering their Cockney swears at each other inside the same scene. Hardy plays twins, real-life gangsters who…
The heads of the City Dionysia, the Grecian playwriting competition that pitted Aeschylus against Sophocles and can be considered the original Oscars, had a rule: no original characters. Instead, the best creative minds of a generation — or really, a millennium — exhausted themselves finding new spins on, say, Medea…
The Nazis lost World War II, but they’ve conquered the American imagination. Seventy years after his suicide, Hitler is still everywhere: in the movies, on YouTube, in political headlines and on the History Channel. The latest manifestation of our Third Reich fixation is The Man in the High Castle, Amazon’s…
Marvel’s Jessica Jones is smart, surprising, and occasionally terrifying, a human tale of trauma and healing in a superhero vein. Its first episodes have more (unexploitative) sex scenes than battles, more shrugs and eye rolls than mighty kapows. But it’s not the shock or novelty that gives it resonance. Jessica…
How funny, really, are dick pics? Millions of them must be snapped and shared each year, as inducement or harassment, celebration or shaming. Perhaps Harper’s Index could tell us the tonnage of coal mined each year to power the transmission of American crotches. So when a dick pic turns up…
