Here’s the first thing that’s audacious about What the Bleep!?: Down the Rabbit Hole, the second installment in what has become a franchise of oversimplified science, outlandish speculation, and woo-woo spirituality: It’s not a sequel. It’s a revision. Shamelessly, Rabbit Hole uses extensive footage from the first film, including the…
A Good Woman, Mike Barker’s adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play Lady Windermere’s Fan, has been gathering dust for some time. It played the Toronto Film Festival in the fall of 2004 before opening in 2005 in every country in the world except this one. Such dawdling doesn’t bode well…
January has earned its reputation as the month in which studios unload all their cheapie horror flicks, but February is the month when we invariably get yet another middle-of-the-road black-urban-professional romantic comedy. (It’s both Black History and Valentine’s month, hence the logic.) In that regard, Something New is anything but…
Every fighting game needs a hook to stand out: Mortal Kombat has gore, Soul Calibur has weapons, Def Jam has hip-hop stars. And Dead or Alive? It has boobies. The DOA series — developed by Tecmo — made its name with a cast of fighters who look like pinups and…
Dune: Extended Edition (Universal) On paper it sounds insane: A mammoth sci-fi epic directed by David Lynch, based on an intensely weird Frank Herbert novel about ecology and giant worms. What resulted was a flop that has yet to be remedied by multiple edits through the years. This disc includes…
“Lingerie: Secrets of Elegance” at Phoenix Art Museum: Yep, you read that right. Bras, baby doll nighties, and a sunburst display of girdles are just a gallery over from the paintings of dead white guys in powdered wigs. This fascinating fashion exhibition traces lingerie’s evolution (or maybe devolution) from corsets…
Kiss of the Spider Woman: Richard Trujillo gives a thrilling performance as Valentin, a puffed-up political prisoner trapped in the tenets of Marxism who, at the start of Manuel Puig’s dreamily claustrophobic play, is harshly intolerant of his cellmate, Molina, whom he sees as less of a man because he…
Benny Hill: Complete and Unadulterated — The Hill’s Angels Years, Set Four (A&E) Billy Graham Presents: Gift Set (Fox) Bubble (Magnolia) Captains Courageous (1937) (Warner Bros.) Drake & Josh Go Hollywood (Paramount) Extreme Comedy Collection (Team America: World Police, Beavis and Butt-head Do America, and Jackass: The Movie) (Paramount) Four…
There is evidently no limit to the sacrifices actors will make for their art. If you thought beautiful Charlize Theron went the distance by transforming herself into a bloated, scowling murderess for Monster, just wait ’til you and the kids get a load of Emma Thompson in the darkly amusing…
No one has ever mistaken Rocky Balboa for an officer and a gentleman, but that’s just about what we get in the numbingly predictable and none-too-stirring Annapolis, an underdog-makes-good boxing movie stuffed inside what amounts to a U.S. Navy recruiting pitch, with a dash of Good Will Hunting tossed in…
With the release of The White Countess, the much-honored Merchant Ivory canon is complete. The Bombay-born producer Ismail Merchant died in May 2005 at age 68, and whatever direction his longtime collaborator and life companion, director James Ivory, now chooses, the working partnership that gave us a dozen elegantly furnished…
Richard Trujillo may one day give a more thrilling performance than the one I witnessed on opening night of Actors Theatre’s production of Kiss of the Spider Woman. If he does, I hope I’m present to see it. I usually find Trujillo’s performances stamped too strongly with his own personality,…
Pop-culture pundits generally fall into two camps: those who think entertainment encourages a nation of knuckle-draggers, and those who say it’s actually making us smarter. In the case of Atari’s The Matrix: Path of Neo, both sides have a point. Like the movie trilogy that inspired it, Path of Neo…
The Aristocrats (Lions Gate) The single joke around which Paul Provenza’s documentary revolves has a standard beginning and ending, like pieces of bread that make a sandwich stuffed with excrement, incest, and whatever other foulness the teller can come up with. Provenza and Penn Jillette recorded more than 100 comedians…
Underneath the Lintel: Try though they might, neither actor Christopher Haines, who appears in Glen Berger’s one-man one-act, nor Charles St. Clair, its director, can save this sinking ship of a show. Lintel is an exploration of faith that comments on man’s place in the universe; one that’s couched in…
“Lingerie: Secrets of Elegance” at Phoenix Art Museum: Yep, you read that right. Bras, baby doll nighties, and a sunburst display of girdles are just a gallery over from the paintings of dead white guys in powdered wigs. This fascinating fashion exhibition traces lingerie’s evolution (or maybe devolution) from corsets…
Address Unknown (Tartan) Anyone Can Dance: Nightclub Freestyle (Delta) National Lampoon’s Barely Legal (MGM) Dallas: The Complete Fourth Season (Warner Bros.) Educating Rita (Sony) Flightplan (Touchstone) The Fog (2005) (Sony) God Save the Queen: A Punk Rock Anthology (Music Video Dist.) Hooked (Eclectic) Ludacris: Southern Smoke (Music Video Dist.) My…
Four-time Emmy Award-winning director Charles St. Clair must be exhausted. In between classes at ASU West (where he’s a professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Performance), the co-founder of both the Fairmount Theater of the Deaf and Phoenix’s Black Theatre Troupe is directing Theater Works’ Underneath the Lintel; is shopping for…
America — and, by extension, Hollywood — has an obsession with innocence and the loss thereof. Every generation has that Moment When Everything Changed, from Pearl Harbor to JFK’s assassination to 9/11. The impact takes a while to settle in, then people forget again, and future generations are similarly traumatized…
The critical consensus has Match Point as Woody Allen’s finest film since . . . oh, let’s see . . . Bullets Over Broadway, is it? Or perhaps Deconstructing Harry? Or maybe Sweet and Lowdown? One forgets where the good stuff left off, because there’s been so much bad stuff…
Albert Brooks, the once-funny comic turned filmmaker, plays a once-funny comic turned filmmaker named Albert Brooks in Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, which he also wrote and directed. It’s the second time Brooks has played himself, more or less; the first was in 1979, when he made Real…
We popcorn-chomping hitchhikers never know who will pick us up on the roadside. In Flirting With Disaster, it was a neurotic Manhattan adoptee on a nationwide search for his biological parents. The desert-parched heroines of Thelma & Louise brought us along as they raised hell en route to their doom…
