Most political thrillers, even the well-made and exciting ones, are cop-outs in the end. Of dozens of titles one could name, from The Manchurian Candidate to The China Syndrome to Capricorn One to The Pelican Brief to Clear and Present Danger, all, good and bad, start by dramatizing some valid…
The Scottish film Shallow Grave is an imaginative little noir thriller with a lively, grisly wit. Like Miami Rhapsody, the film is full of more or less open references to other movies in its genre–Brian DePalma’s Body Double and Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas, most notably. But unlike director David Frankel’s act…
Stark type against a black background, actors’ names listed alphabetically, Louis Armstrong singing “Just One of Those Things”–Miami Rhapsody’s titles let us know at once that we’re in Woody Allen Land. The letters are in purple, however, not in Allen’s traditional white, presumably to suggest the flashier colors appropriate to…
Very few moviegoers today, even those who would consider themselves film buffs, have had more than passing exposure to the films of the silent era. Yet it is in this period that the vast majority of the art’s fundamental techniques were invented and refined, often to levels of great accomplishment…
Some theatre historians have attributed the decline of theatre to the diminishing stature of the dramatic hero. Greek tragedies centered on kings and gods, Shakespeare’s plays on dukes and princes. By the time O’Neill wrote about actors, poets and prostitutes, Miller about salesmen and movie stars, Williams about football heroes,…
The notion of an exquisite young woman becoming emotionally and/or sexually fixated on a paunchy, balding, poorly dressed older man is one that has a certain special appeal for the average movie critic. This may have more than a little to do with why Red, the third film in Krzysztof…
Grand Canyon University’s production of Georg Kaiser’s 1918 play Gas I has scored a bull’s eye on a virtual blind spot in my experience. Never having seen productions of Capek’s R.U.R., Cocteau’s The Infernal Machine, or any of the 73 plays Kaiser apparently wrote in addition to Gas I, my…
Samuel Beckett was arguably the most important writer for the theatre of our century. Winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969, Beckett wrote three masterpieces for the stage: Waiting for Godot (1952), Endgame (1957) and Krapp’s Last Tape (1960). Many people would add Happy Days (1961) to this…
True to its title, French director Nicolas Philibert’s documentary In the Land of the Deaf approaches deafness not as a handicap but as the unifying condition of a subculture. It’s a very simple, unaffected piece of filmmaking, smoothly intercutting several unconnected strands of narrative–the marriage of two young people, a…
While Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump racks up the nominations, let’s pause a moment to take a look at the latest project of Zemeckis’ old buddy Bob Gale, his writing partner on Used Cars and the Back to the Future films. Mr. Payback, which Gale wrote and directed for Sony New…
What’s an O.J. junkie to do? That rascally Judge Ito recessed the Simpson trial for four days, and it looked like a long weekend, indeed, until I found myself at Phoenix Theatre’s immensely satisfying production of To Kill a Mockingbird. There is something inherently dramatic about trials: two sides in…
The flawless, if sterile, computer illusions of Jurassic Park condemned stop-motion animation to extinction as a special effect. First developed in the silents by pioneering animator Willis O’Brien, this technique involved the frame-by-frame shooting of articulated puppets to simulate movement when run at regular speed. But it was always too…
Hosanna! Hallelujah! Hooray! The Herberger has a hit! We have been told that by acquiring a major league baseball franchise, Phoenix will become one of America’s premier cities. Until now, sunny Phoenix has languished in the shadows of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, San Diego and Minneapolis–not…
The first movie I ever saw was the epic drama Blood and Sand. Tyrone Power played the dashing Manolete, the greatest bullfighter who ever lived. With the dramatic flourish of a spangled cape, Arizona Theatre Company is presenting the world premiäre of Milcha Sanchez-Scott’s The Old Matador on the main…
Last week I became a member of that select group of people who can claim to have received a telephone call from the Jerky Boys. Lucky me. Also known as Johnny Brennan and Kamal, the two Queens, New York, natives were in town to promote their bold effort to move…
The first film by New Zealander Peter Jackson to gain much notice here was last year’s Dead Alive. This frenzied, farcical splatter parody, about people turned into cannibalistic zombies through the bite of the dreaded Sumatran rat monkey, was like a cinematic coup de grce–it was so revoltingly, yet hilariously,…
The Wolfgang Press Funky Little Demons (4AD) Cranky Little Demons might be a more appropriate description. Showing the equivalent of an extraterrestial’s grasp on what makes music soulful and thus funky, Wolfgang Press spews lyrical references to Motown on the first two cuts and lifts the chorus from the Four…
When art depicts the pornographic, does it cease to be art? If pornography achieves artistic expression, does it cease to be pornography? What about W.H. Auden’s rapturous paeans to buggery, or D.H. Lawrence’s celebration of coitus, or that bawdy unknown ancient poet who wrote Satyricon, in which no perversion was…
At the university, Polonius boasts in Hamlet, he once was accounted a good actor. Hamlet cannot resist asking: “What did you enact?” Polonius brags: “I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed in the Capitol; Brutus killed me.” Hamlet teases him: “It was a brute part of him to kill…
Oh, dear, I’m not supposed to go mad ’til 1800! –Graham Chapman as King George III on Monty Python’s Flying Circus Most Americans know King George III of Britain, if at all, as the guy who taxed our butt-kicking forebears into revolt, and whom they eventually beat. Some may remember…
Richard Linklater’s films, so far, have shown a unity of time so disciplined that it would gladden Aristotle’s heart. The young writer/director’s first feature, Slacker, took place in a day and a night on the streets of Austin, Texas. His second, the ’70s period piece Dazed and Confused, took a…
Except for Roman Polanski’s 1971 adaptation of Macbeth, the new film Death and the Maiden is his only film version of a play. Shakespeare to Ariel Dorfman–what a comedown. Still, Polanski did his best–he gave Dorfman’s dreary, annoyingly earnest revenge melodrama about political torture a smooth, elegant rendering onscreen. The…
