thursday november 27 The Ben Folds Five: The piano-bass-drums trio from Chapel Hill, North Carolina–so named because “it sounds better than the Ben Folds Three,” says baby-grand man Folds–plows a deep furrow about midway between roots and alt. In fact, the BFF sounds a bit like a Gen X version…
The Ensemble Theatre’s production of Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story is the sort of theater we see precious little of these days: a spare, uncluttered production that emphasizes a well-written story and some good, solid acting. This small, unpretentious company was founded last year by Arizona State University theater alumni,…
Among this month’s local events commemorating the 50th anniversary of the State of Israel is a pair of thoughtful, Jewish-themed theater productions. Both detail the Nazi oppression of the Jews during World War II, and both are presented by companies funding the shows either with grant money from Jewish organizations…
Weed is a documentary chronicle of the “8th Annual Cannabis Cup & Hemp Expo,” a competition among the marijuana coffee houses in that fabled civil-libertarian utopia known as Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Thousands of potheads from all around the world–but mostly Americans–pay a small fee for the privilege of sampling the…
Ignorance is bliss and success and virtue. The spoils of life go not to the planners but to those who are too dim to know the risks they’re taking. That very American notion was the theme of Forrest Gump; less cosmically–but also much less pretentiously–it’s the gag engine behind the…
Disney Studios has nearly monopolized feature animation for almost 60 years now, only occasionally encountering successful forays by others into its animation realm. Now Twentieth Century Fox and its Phoenix-based Fox Animation studios are going up against the giant mouse with Anastasia; too bad this first effort isn’t better. During…
John Grisham’s The Rainmaker lulls you into the mindset you get while reading a best seller at the beach. What a sad thing to say about a Francis Ford Coppola movie! Rather than heighten your awareness the way The Conversation or The Godfather did, The Rainmaker makes you feel lazy…
thursday november 20 The Food Chain: Though Nicky Silver is one of America’s more promising comic playwrights, his writing sometimes straddles the line that divides standup patter from subtler characterization; there’s surely no little connection between that and men having an en masse attraction to Silver’s humor that mostly eludes…
Put brutally, the marvelous The Wings of the Dove is the story of a romantic frame-up that backfires. Thankfully, nothing is put brutally in this smart, lyrical movie. Director Iain Softley and screenwriter Hossein Amini cut to the thick of Henry James’ masterpiece about amorous extortion and moral purification. Helena…
Fast, Cheap & Out of Control sounds like an old exploitation title, but it belongs to the latest of the idiosyncratic documentaries of Errol Morris. This one interweaves interviews with four men of peculiar occupation, linked only by their study of animal form and function. Dave Hoover trains big cats…
thursday november 13 The Food Chain: Though Nicky Silver (Pterodactyls; Free Will and Wanton Lust) is one of America’s more promising comic playwrights, his writing sometimes straddles the line that divides standup patter from subtler characterization; there’s surely no little connection between that and men having an en masse attraction…
From his office in Los Angeles, Michael Greene, head of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS)–the Grammy people–is waxing passionate about the similarities between playing musical instruments and playing baseball. “The concentration, the focus, the losing of oneself in what you’re doing,” he says quickly in a…
Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee has carved out a niche as our leading director of comedies of manners. His first three films–Pushing Hands (1992), The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994)–combined humor with pathos to shed light on modern Chinese and Chinese-American family conflicts. The news that he…
Family films are often pitched for “the child in us all,” but Bean doesn’t have an ounce of “inner child” in it. It’s been worked out to appeal to, at best, 8-to-10-year-olds; there’s not much to delight even precocious preteens, let alone adults. This really is too bad, since Rowan…
In Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, based on the late Robert Heinlein’s 1959 sci-fi opus, the killer arachnids upstage the humans. Not that it’s much of a contest, since the humans are all raging dullards. We’ve seen these young men and women with their square jaws and pert noses emoting their…
Mad City, a descendant of Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, may irritate orthodox movie buffs. In the Wilder classic, Kirk Douglas’ supremely cynical newspaper reporter turns the rescue of a cave-in victim into “the big carnival” (the film’s alternate title). The protagonist of Mad City, a TV reporter (Dustin…
thursday november 6 The Food Chain: Though Nicky Silver (Pterodactyls; Free Will and Wanton Lust) is one of America’s more promising comic playwrights, his writing sometimes straddles the line that divides standup patter from subtler characterization; there’s surely no little connection between that and men having an en masse attraction…
It is a few minutes before midnight on a recent Saturday and I am about to relive my childhood in a dark, smelly moviehouse in Tempe. Now surrounded by people half my age who are excited just to be awake at this hour, I required an afternoon nap just to…
Three Halloweens ago, Tempe’s Valley Art Theatre hosted a screening of Universal’s 1925 horror classic The Phantom of the Opera, with live-organ accompaniment. On the night before Halloween this year, the admirable experiment is being repeated on a grander scale. Organist Rob Richards, who played the Valley Art show on…
Despite Red Corner’s muckraking pretensions, it is a rickety throwback to escapist adventures that featured beautiful foreign idealists spouting high-flown hooey to fighting Americans. The heroine, a scrappy Beijing defense lawyer, ends up whispering a whole succession of sweet somethings to the hero, a framed Yank. The banalities include (I…
Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights opens with a sinuous, breathlessly extended tracking shot that swoops us into a San Fernando Valley disco and then does a curlicue around a succession of faces. Popping out like jack-o’-lanterns in the discotheque’s low light, they have the look of trashy royalty–exalted and…
thursday october 30 Three Semi-Automatics Just for Fun: The genesis of this black-comic, multimedia piece–produced by Arizona State University’s Institute for Studies in the Arts and billed as “June Cleaver wearing pearls and a pistol”–was a visit to an Albuquerque bookstore by one of the work’s principals, American actress Leslie…
