Secondhand Lions is cornier than the cornfields spread out in front of the dilapidated rural Texas manse inhabited by Robert Duvall and Michael Caine, playing grumpy old brothers with mismatched accents. (Caine, in fact, has accent enough for three actors -- one English, another maybe Texan, another perhaps Australian.) There...
Kevin Costner appeared in his first Western when he was 30 and looked to be in his early 20s. He was a slender, restless actor in Lawrence Kasdan's Silverado, the 1985 film in which Costner played the blithe brother of a somber Scott Glenn -- all giggles and gunshots, a...
Tue 7/29 "It's a grudge match," asserts boxer Leslie Sonnenklar. "She's going down in 48 seconds flat." Sonnenklar is being facetious in predicting the outcome of her first non-kickboxing bout, but when she goes up against Chrystal Proctor on Tuesday, July 29, she won't be in the ring to read...
For a few minutes, at least, things don't look so bad. Watching Ben Affleck swagger around as the thuggish title character of Gigli ("Rhymes with really," he tells us, twice) is amusing for a bit. Affleck's eminently qualified for the role, actually -- that of a low-level hood pretending to...
ONGOING More than 40 years after his death, Frank Lloyd Wright remains a true giant in the world of architecture. Evidence of his genius abounds, and nowhere more so than at the winter home, studio and architectural campus he created at the foot of the McDowell Mountains: Taliesin West. Experience...
He knows there are people, too many, who do not like him. He has to know. They've told him to his face--the studio executives who slice and snip the scenes he loves the most and suffer his outbursts for it, the directors he's pushed out of the way so he...
If you're reading this paper, chances are you're more literate than the average American. If you're reading the film reviews, it's also likely that you've become familiar with words like "bravura" and "eponymous," which seem to exist only in the vocabularies of professional movie assessors. But what if you were...
At the colorful Mariscos Ensenada restaurant on 59th Avenue and Thomas, owner Oscar Rubio demonstrates how to make a michelada. He takes a salt-rimmed frosty mug filled with ice and adds lime juice, Tapatio salsa, salt, pepper and lots of Clamato -- the tangy clam-juice-and-veggie drink that Latinos love. Then...
The PC forces may not want to hear this, but the porn industry of the 1970s wasn't all bad. It created numerous professional opportunities for artists, and I'm not necessarily talking about Bambi Woods and John Holmes. Writers like Nick Tosches and Sam Shepard helped fill up countless pages in...
Culture Shock Prophet margin: A very strong case can be made that the polygamists of northern Arizona and southern Utah are, at their core, a criminal cult subsidized -- in large part -- by tax dollars ("Dirty Tricks," John Dougherty, July 31). It is a truly shocking and generally underexamined...
He's 12 feet tall. He's ripped. He's as quick as a tiger and fierce as a dragon. Lit by his fury to a dull green glow, the guy is sheer, boundless power. Any NFL team you can think of would love to start him at middle linebacker. But, as art-house...
6/276/29 From Orson Welles to Steven Spielberg, the fraternity of successful filmmakers is a select one indeed. And while it's safe to assume that the many intricacies required to bring an idea to the big screen are most likely cultivated over the course of a lifetime, a weekend crash course...
If grown-ups were meant to watch Walt Disney cartoons, God would have kept us all in the third grade for two or three decades. Still, somebody has to drive the SUV every time the Disneyfolk decide to lure the little ones down to the multiplex, and as long as the...
I find myself on the couch excited about watching the last few innings of an Arizona Diamondbacks game. I haven't felt this way since the postseason run in 2001. What the hell is going on here? I'm supposed to be mowing. My 10-year-old son joins me. I look at him,...
Ross Hunter, dead seven years, hasn't been this alive at the movies since the 1950s and '60s, when he produced some of the weepiest melodramas and cheeriest romantic comedies ever to barely stick to the screen. His ghost has been wandering up and down the aisles ever since Don Simpson...
"Phoenix, MEXICO!"² Lupillo Rivera's shout is swallowed up by a deafening roar from the tightly packed audience in front of him. The singer grins at what he sees. Men in cowboy hats and women wearing tight jeans and halter tops fill Club 602, a large nightspot in west Phoenix and...
In 1997's The Apostle, Robert Duvall took on a subject near and dear to his heart: Southern Pentecostal preachers. No one would make the film for him, so he went ahead and directed it himself, garnering much acclaim from media both secular and religious for his warts-and-all portrayal of a...
Among Anger Management's copious flaws is the fact that its premise doesn't wash. Adam Sandler's Dave Buznik, a designer of catalogues for overweight-cat clothing, isn't really angry at all; he's just a self-loathing, introverted mess whose insecurities date back to a crowded street party in Brooklyn circa 1978, when he...
It's been nearly three years since Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Perhaps it's in the spirit of spreading things around that Spain has not nominated Almodóvar's latest, Talk to Her, as its entry this year. Certainly it's hard to imagine any...
The Hunted pits Tommy Lee Jones versus Benicio Del Toro in a battle of hand-to-hand, wit-to-wit fighting skills. Frankly, my money would be on Tommy Lee any old day: He may be old, but he's a tough geezer who looks like he could mop the floor with Benicio. (Also, frankly:...
I'm feeling like that guy in Mystic Pizza, the cozy Julia Roberts movie from 1988. Remember him? He played "The Everyday Gourmet," a TV restaurant critic who traveled to Mystic, Connecticut, just for a bite of Mystic Pizza pie. He was endearingly pompous when he arrived, making high theater of...
