When audiences went to Peter Greenaway’s 1989 film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, expecting to see a sexy comedy in a restaurant, they were perhaps among the most unprepared audiences in film history. Rather than a knockabout farce, Greenaway served up a baroquely ferocious black comedy…
Pulp Fiction is rubbish about scum. The plot is a tangled mess of collisions between hit men, drug dealers, crooked boxers, murderous junkies, perverted security guards and the like. The script is packed full of ferocious violence and sadism, and even more full of savage racial and sexual invective. It…
I Like It Like That is the movie that should have had the title Mi Vida Loca (My Crazy Life). This comedy is about the crazy life of Lisette (Lauren Velez), a young, black-Hispanic woman living in the Bronx. Her husband, Chino (Jon Seda), is in jail. Her son, who’s…
Stacking the Decadent The Academy Award-winning movie Cabaret is available at your local video store (even supermarket), with career-defining performances by Joel Grey, Liza Minnelli and Michael York. So why not snuggle up with some microwave popcorn and give it a replay? Why would you want to drive all the…
If overheated histrionics is your bag, Dingo Troupe’s production of A Prayer for My Daughter delivers a fix to satisfy the most insatiable melodrama junkie. The first play by Thomas Babe, a protege of the late Public Theater impresario Joseph Papp, this potboiler premiered in the mid-Seventies, so it is…
Robert Redford’s new film, Quiz Show–his fourth, and perhaps best, effort as a director–stars Ralph Fiennes as Charles Van Doren, the “champion” of the Fifties game show Twenty-One. The role of Van Doren, who was publicly disgraced by revelations that Twenty-One was rigged, is one which, two decades ago, would…
Neither rain nor smog nor threat of armed insurrection can keep any really hard-core Mexican folk art aficionado, including me (and, at one time, Nelson Rockefeller), from tracking down the objects of this insane aesthetic obsession. Recently, as Mexico was in the throes of electing a new president amid highly…
Mutilated human corpses pile up in Port-au-Prince, severed body parts strew the roads of Rwanda, blood flows in Bosnia to cleanse Yugoslavia of ethnic impurity. Even on the eve of an invasion, ruthless dictators cling to power in the name of the people, ignoring the will of the electorate. And…
There’s something admirably gutsy about an independent filmmaker choosing mother-son incest as the subject of his first film, and making it on a shoestring with a cast of unknowns. No matter how good a picture it may be, a topic this disturbing and depressing is not the sort of thing…
The hero of Red Rock West–played, excellently, by Nicolas Cage–is an out-of-work ex-Marine. In the first few scenes, we are shown what a decent, standup guy he is. He refuses a buddy’s offer of a loan. And although he’s penniless and stuck in the middle of nowhere, he resists the…
The Phantom of the Opera is not just a musical. It is an industry. Written by the richest man in the theatre, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and produced by the second-richest man in the theatre, Cameron Mackintosh, Phantom has been marketed to Phoenix as the biggest thing ever to hit the…
In his Confessions, St. Augustine admitted that his prayer for sexual purity had often taken the form Da mihi castitatum et continentiam, sed noli modo–“Give me chastity and continency, but not yet.” Augustine’s candor puts to shame that of William Boyd, author of the comic novel A Good Man in…
In an odd coincidence, two major films of the early ’70s are being rereleased this week, both in restored “director’s cuts.” Both are worth checking out, especially if you’ve never seen them on the big screen–and if you haven’t, it’s fair in both cases to say you haven’t seen them…
If you must hate someone, if you must point a finger of blame, if you must direct the seething waves of unspeakable anger that have been washing over you since hearing the news that the Rolling Stones have canceled their Phoenix dates, then the people of Oakland, California, should be…
The first few shots in Natural Born Killers are of creatures to which the title can be applied without moral judgment. A hawk glares at the desert; a rattlesnake gazes into the camera with a dull, ill face. Then the scene shifts to a roadside diner, where the central characters–Mickey…
John Candy, who died during the filming of Wagons East!, was a great movie comedian who never quite made a great movie comedy. Sadder, even, than the failure of the mostly feeble Wagons East! to break that streak is watching Candy’s weary, joyless performance. This may be his only film…
In the preface to a collection of his plays, author Christopher Durang fondly recalls the famous I Love Lucy episode in which Little Ricky is born. This show prompted Durang to pattern his first play, written in the second grade, after the story. Since this work isn’t publicly available, it’s…
A play about Antarctica seems like a good antidote for the summer heat in Phoenix. But Terra Nova, the story of the 1911 race for the South Pole, trades one hell for another. Playwright Ted Tally uses the death of one of Britain’s most cherished heroes, the explorer Robert Falcon…
Allison Anders’ first solo directing credit, Gas, Food, Lodging, about a single woman raising two daughters in a small Southwestern town, was overrated. It was pretty to look at, but dramatically thin and clich. Her new film, Mi Vida Loca, is even better to look at, and it has a…
Several people walked out of the Barcelona screening I attended. I could only assume they disliked the talkiness and slow pace of this mild comedy of manners, which recounts the romantic adventures of a couple of Americans living abroad in the early 80s. There’s a fine touch of irony to…
My Life’s in Turnaround, a low-budget movie by two slacker types about two slacker types trying to make a low-budget movie, is subtitled Based on a True Story. This same joke was the punch line of Mel Brooks’ most neglected film, Silent Movie. The hero (Brooks) is a director who…
Not having read the books, I can’t say if the film versions of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan novels have been faithful. Based on the content of the movies, I can see no evidence that unfaithfulness would constitute a crime against world literature. This was especially true of The Hunt for…
