If it's any consolation to Kevin Bacon, the backers of the Phoenix Film Festival believe he's worthy of recognition, even if the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences doesn't. Bacon's taken the Oscars snub -- the Academy ignoring his leading-role performance in The Woodsman, one most critics said was...
Playwright Oscar Wilde once quipped, "Work is the curse of the drinking class," and we're inclined to agree with the swishy scribe, especially when it comes to this year's St. Patrick's Day. Since the annual exercise in alcohol excess falls on a weekday, you'd better have a sick day up...
Come this time next year, The Jacket may well occupy the slot in movie discourse that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind does now -- that of the film that coulda-shoulda-woulda gotten more Oscar nominations if only it hadn't come out so early in the year and been forgotten by...
"Better than I thought it'd be," was the refrain repeated by those exiting the preview screening of Guess Who, which doesn't mean much -- freebie audiences expect nothing and usually receive it. But in this case, it neatly summed up the experience of catching Ashton Kutcher in a part once...
SAT 3/26 Little girls love their fairy tales of Prince Charmings, glass slippers and magic wands. But Erin Smith wasn't a typical little girl. When her elementary school teachers wanted her to read "Cinderella," she read the "twisted" version from Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes instead. Now 17, the senior at...
It's the witching hour at Sadisco, and the bisexual Brittany Murphy and I are watching a Victorian snuff-play done to throbbing industrial music that sounds like rusty steel grinding against broken glass. One by one, women dressed like Heather Graham's whore buddies in From Hell are chased onto center stage...
Perhaps in honor of the fourth anniversary of Cher's farewell tour, MGM recently released a DVD edition of Chastity, the 1969 stink bomb featuring the singer's first dramatic role. Shot entirely in Phoenix, this long-lost indie (for which Cher's daughter is named) was written, produced, scored, and some claim directed...
You have to hand it to Sean Penn. Okay, you don't absolutely have to, and if you're a Red Stater through and through, you certainly won't want to, but give him some credit. After being pilloried in the press for visiting Iraq under Saddam Hussein's reign, torn apart by housecats...
The Sea Inside, the new right-to-die drama from Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar (The Others), is a flawed film worth seeing. Based on Letters From Hell, a book by quadriplegic Ramón Sampedro about his 30-year quest to kill himself, the movie favors the emotional over the legal, foregrounding Sampedro's relationships with...
2/17-2/20 If you think all black movies have to include the words "phat," "dope" or "fly" in the dialogue, prepare to be schooled at the Arizona Black Film Showcase, which runs from Thursday, February 17, through Sunday, February 20, at South Mountain Community College, 7050 South 24th Street. "This event...
Clint Eastwood began digging into the third act of his career -- the one that reveals the mature, deep-thinking artist . . . with a little jazz piano on the side -- a dozen years ago, with the discomfiting anti-Western Unforgiven. Since then, he's hardly come up for air or...
The early reviews for Beyond the Sea, the Bobby Darin biopic on which Kevin Spacey did everything save for feeding the crew and sweeping the set, have been so hateful that a latecomer to the bashing bash is tempted to head straight for the spiked eggnog and let the man...
To understand this most tumultuous year in film, over which loomed the ghost of a blessed messiah and the shadow of an accursed pariah, turn your eyes from the movie screen and look to the bookshelf. There you will find a copy of Peter Biskind's Down and Dirty Pictures, which...
The parade of real-life figures strolling into the googolplex has been endless this year: Look, there's Jamie Foxx as musical Mount Rushmore Ray Charles, Johnny Depp as Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie, Kevin Spacey as forgotten teeny-popper Bobby Darin, Liam Neeson as sexologist Alfred Kinsey, Kevin Kline as standards composer...
The Czech drama Zelary brings to mind Bertolt Brecht's pointed observation that "war is like love; it always finds a way." In this instance, war creates the atmosphere in which an unlikely love flourishes, then overwhelms that love. Only a fool would try to improve on Brecht, but after absorbing...
Mike Nichols' new film Closer is a boiling pot of lust, mistrust and double-dealing that might well be taken for outright soap opera -- or, in quite a few places, soft-core porn -- were it not for the sophisticated gleam of its well-heeled London desperadoes and the vicious dazzle of...
Shark Tale is an animated film, though after you see it you might wonder whether the term is intended as oxymoronic. Put simply, it has no life in it at all. Not even the kids roped into an afternoon preview screening seemed terribly interested. Perhaps they've grown tired of computer-made...
Fri 11/5 Hodgie Jo is a dancin' machine. He experimented with every style of dance from jazz to break-dancing before going on to choreograph events like the Super Bowl and Special Olympics. Now, Jo brings his artistic vision to the Imation Dance Company, as choreographer for World Beat, the troupe's...
10/29-10/30 Though the mainstream media long ago ceded their role as the voice of the people, it was still jarring to see the lengths to which they embraced the role of administration cheerleader in both the run-up to the Iraq war and the march on Baghdad. Most cynical of all...
College buds. Talented actors. Bright futures headed in the same direction, surely. Before long, Quincy Bernstine and Jennifer Morris might be referred to as "Quennifer," provided their roles in the off-Broadway hit Matt and Ben, which comes to the Scottsdale Center for the Arts on Wednesday, October 6, serves as...
Essayist. Playwright. Radio personality. Librettist. Actor. Novelist. Now, with Bright Young Things, the inimitable British wit Stephen Fry debuts as feature screenwriter and director. Best known here in the colonies either as Jeeves (opposite Hugh Laurie) in Jeeves and Wooster, or as Peter in Peter's Friends, or possibly as Oscar...
