The most erotic moments in movies, as in life, tend to have a spontaneous, uncontrived quality. This may be utterly illusory–intense thought and care may have gone into crafting the abrupt kiss or smoldering stare or well-turned piquant phrase that seems so urgently and inexplicably sexy. But at their best,…
Though it has been remade at least a half-dozen times for film and television, and at least twice for the stage, no adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s 1908 penny dreadful The Phantom of the Opera makes quite the same claim on the emotions as the original film of 1925. It’s a…
Watching a documentary about the lives of people of no notable accomplishment could be as entertaining as watching winter grass grow. 35 Up has watched 14 people grow for 28 years, and it is fascinating. In 1964, Great Britain’s Granada television program, World in Action, interviewed a group of 7-year-old…
The October 10 cover of Time magazine boldly proclaims the advent of a black renaissance here in America. The cover declares that “African-American artists are truly free at last”–at least in an aesthetic sense. But photographer Rene Cox, an African-American artist from New York, would probably take great issue with…
Presumed by many to be Shakespeare’s first play, The Comedy of Errors is a terrible comedy. Based on an ancient Roman farce written by Plautus 1,800 years or so before Shakespeare, the plot is so mechanical and the exposition so cumbersome, it is amazing a writer of any skill would…
An injudicious case of grand larceny is taking place at Dial Corporate Center’s Playhouse on the Park in downtown Phoenix. It might be termed “Crimes of the Art.” The occasion is Phoenix Theatre’s production of Beth Henley’s 1981 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Crimes of the Heart, and it blatantly steals from…
The term “art film” might have been coined to describe Peter Greenaway’s movies. They embody everything, good and not so good, that is suggested by that usually unhelpful label. They play in “art house” theatres, and they are arty in their (not always unjustified) pretensions. But above all this, Greenaway’s…
If Pirandello had ever made a splatter movie, it would probably have been along the lines of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare–the title might be Five Knives in Search of a Sequel. Wes Craven, writer-director of the first (and only good) A Nightmare on Elm Street film, back in 1984, has…
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…
