This Saturday evening, the dramatic architecture of the Arizona State University Art Museum serves as the backdrop for an outdoor showcase of inventive filmmaking — the sixth annual Short Film and Video Festival. But rather than the glamour and gloss of Hollywood, expect low production values and some shaky camerawork…
Janeane Garofalo has appeared in nearly 40 movies, but she’s hardly seen any of them. Compliment her for her affecting, little-seen work as a bipolar loner in the film Sweethearts (which she sardonically calls “The Straight-to-Video Sweethearts”), and she’ll be appreciative, but she’ll also sound like she has no opinion…
On a good day, Mark Cuban might respond to a journalist’s query with a terse, unpunctuated e-mail that reads like something dashed off by a hostage while his captors are in the can. It’s understandable: The man’s running the Dallas Mavericks, investing in movie distribution and exhibition companies, sticking it…
There are rich rewards in even the most routine presentation of Tennessee Williams’ 1944 classic The Glass Menagerie. Phoenix Theatre’s production of Williams’ autobiographical drama is proof that almost nothing can dim this story’s enduring appeal. Williams’ timeless people — the Southern belles and gentleman callers of the playwright’s own…
Wending through the summaries of this year’s forthcoming blockbusters — dudes fight evil; chicks keep yanking up their trendy hip-huggers while fighting evil — it’s immediately refreshing to note a movie about furry freaks and saucy geeks whose primary goal is just to, you know, do it. In Human Nature,…
Call it the art-house, or thinking person’s, Ocean’s Eleven. If you’re in the mood for an all-star ensemble but prefer conversation and reminiscence to thievery, try Last Orders, a Fred Schepisi film that features the strongest lineup of English talent this side of Robert Altman’s mega-cast in Gosford Park: Michael…
Just weeks before the September 11 attacks on America, performance artist Jeff McMahon relocated to Tempe. “I had lived just below 14th Street in lower Manhattan for 22 years,” he says, “and I’d been living here for what seemed like a few days when the attacks came. So creating a…
Glass is an unforgiving medium. Whether it’s a sculpture or a functional object in daily life, glass is fundamentally cold, hard and brittle. To work with glass requires deft, meticulous attention to temperature and timing. And it’s so fragile that to merely say it “cracks” when damaged doesn’t have the…
Fully Committed is a play about conversations: Truncated, maddening, sometimes amusing conversations — the kind we all have every day with total strangers we’d probably rather not be talking to in the first place. The difference here is that the conversations are all held by one person, an actor in…
On September 10, Barry Sonnenfeld’s Big Trouble, a slight comic caper drenched in the sweltering muck of Miami, was a nagging chore to be tended to by film critics — one more mediocre multimillion-dollar all-star fiasco in which you can almost hear the filmmakers giggling behind the cameras. On September…
The two slacker antiheroes of Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También (And Your Mother, Too) come saddled with all the usual glitches of late adolescence — raging hormones, impatient wanderlust, contempt for their elders, and a jones for dope and beer. In fact, Julio (Gael García Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego…
It’s no secret that the Valley is a prime stomping ground for motorcycle lovers. Just listen to the roar of open drag pipes echoing down the streets of your neighborhood, especially on a beautiful Saturday evening. Get used to that sound. Learn to love it, even. Because Arizona Bike Week,…
Ten-plus years of filmmaking has been a great experience for Chris LaMont. His knowledge was useful in film festival-making last year, when he discovered that he could organize the fledgling Phoenix Film Festival in the same way he makes movies. Working out of a small space provided by the City…
There’s a note in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot in which the character Vladimir “uses his intelligence.” In spite of all his efforts to obey the author’s parenthetical instruction, Vladimir admits a moment later, “I remain in the dark.” In an e-mail interview with Neal Pollack, author of The…
It’s readily apparent that Danny DeVito’s Death to Smoochy deals with a thoroughly debauched children’s television host (Robin Williams) who plots, amid much dark zaniness, to destroy his squeaky-clean successor (Edward Norton). It’s also quite easy to proclaim it the greatest movie ever made . . . about a singing…
It would be easy, and tempting, to hail Kandahar as a masterpiece without even seeing it: It’s a foreign film, it takes on social issues, it’s directed by Iranian master Mohsen Makhmalbaf, it speaks to the causes of our war on terror and it first hit U.S. shores right as…
There’s a special rush that strikes you when you’re standing in Times Square after the sun goes down. Throngs of hurried people stream down the sidewalks, taxis zoom by with horns honking, the air is filled with throbbing energy and random strains of music. Out of the commotion, shooting into…
At a time when it feels like there are video news crawlers inching across the base of your brain, and so many images you’re subjected to take their meaning from war and austerity, there’s something to be said for seeing things at a standstill. Deborah Beresford is here to remind…
It’s little wonder that Nearly Naked Theatre’s Damon Dering has wanted to produce The King of Infinite Space for more than a decade. Andrew Ordover’s obscure morality play is a satisfying, compelling piece of writing with more dramatic turns than a week’s worth of made-for-TV movies. In the director’s notes,…
Before he died of congestive heart failure in March 1992, Richard Brooks, director of The Blackboard Jungle and In Cold Blood, used to tell this story. It takes place sometime in the late 1940s, when Brooks was ascending royalty in Hollywood; after all, he’d written John Huston’s Key Largo, starring…
It’s Tuesday, and I’m standing outside City Hall, lying to strangers. “I’m going to the Lunch Time Theater program at the Herberger,” I tell a dozen different people. “But I don’t know where the Herberger is.” I’m trying to determine whether people who work in downtown Phoenix know that they…
When asked if we could view a screening of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial: The 20th Anniversary in time for publication, PR handlers at Universal Studios said, quite simply, no. This is particularly strange given that — in terms of this movie’s box-office returns — even a scathing critical pan would amount…
