Wherever we were, it seemed sure we weren't where we wanted to be. The taxi driver had grinned and waved as he sped off, leaving us alone on an empty, pitch-black street somewhere in the middle of Havana. Si, this was where we would eat dinner, he had said, or...
This Saturday evening, the dramatic architecture of the Arizona State University Art Museum serves as the backdrop for an outdoor showcase of inventive filmmaking -- the sixth annual Short Film and Video Festival. But rather than the glamour and gloss of Hollywood, expect low production values and some shaky camerawork...
Five years ago, this interview would have been such the big deal—the coup of the year, the elusive great white at last wriggling on the hook. At least, that's how she was treated back then, when she still took her meals in that velvet closet. She attracted the spotlight (some...
Say this about World Wrestling Federation Entertainment head honcho Vince McMahon: He knows what his fans want. Few movies have ever been as specifically tailored to an existing audience as The Scorpion King, in which McMahon's prize champion, The Rock, portrays The Rock wearing a loincloth and going by the...
Peter Bogdanovich, maybe the last man alive who wears a neckerchief without irony, holds a copy of a newspaper article in which his old friend Larry McMurtry is saying nice, or not nice, things about him--Bogdanovich can't tell which. "He's kind of risen from the dead," McMurtry was quoted as...
Before he died of congestive heart failure in March 1992, Richard Brooks, director of The Blackboard Jungle and In Cold Blood, used to tell this story. It takes place sometime in the late 1940s, when Brooks was ascending royalty in Hollywood; after all, he'd written John Huston's Key Largo, starring...
Sean Penn began 2001 by directing one of the year's most deeply felt films, The Pledge, in which a frazzled, disconnected Jack Nicholson played a retired cop obsessed with solving the rape and murder of a young girl. A year later, he's acting in one of the most woefully manipulative...
"Are we gonna play chicken here, Robert? Who's gonna go first?" That's Chris Moore talking, from the other end of a cell phone--the preferred means of communication for the Hollywood producer too afraid of standing still. Moore--a producer of Good Will Hunting and the American Pie films, partner with Ben...
Al Singer likes to poke fun at his own habit of running at the mouth. "Ask me what time it is, and I'll tell you how to make a watch," jokes the 73-year-old Singer, a lifelong jazz adherent who moved from Michigan to the Valley 11 years ago. But if...
Oscar-nominated Alfre Woodard chooses to call herself an actor rather than an actress, because "actresses worry about eyelashes and cellulite, and women who are actors worry about the characters we are playing." Adapting that comparison for a discussion of female musicians, let's say that a pop diva is more concerned...
In time, 2001 might well be remembered as the year of the overhyped and undercooked, the year storybook wizards cast spells to eradicate critical good judgment, the year from which there was so much detritus to choose that much of the good stuff makes a best-of list only by default...
Appropriately, A Beautiful Mind does not offer a literal translation of the life of John Forbes Nash Jr., the mathematician whose work on game theories won him a Nobel prize in 1994. The film leaves out significant events, people and places; it amalgamates central figures, disguises prominent locations and hides...
Phoenix police officer Franklin Brown Jr. has returned to the scene of the crime."Right here is where it started," he says, standing on an isolated two-lane road at the city's southwest tip, on Lower Buckeye Road between 91st and 99th avenues. "This is where I got shot." Speaking in the...
When he first auditioned for Any Given Sunday director Oliver Stone to play quarterback Willie Beamen, an embittered bench-warmer prone to fits of vomiting before each snap, Jamie Foxx was sure he'd blown it. Stone, as subtle as an ice pick to the cornea, said as much--loud enough so Foxx,...
In a parody of Sally Field's infamous Oscar acceptance speech, readers of a new book are exclaiming, "I dislike it! I really dislike it!"That's the response from a small band of movie buffs who've taken to the Internet to denounce Oscar Fever, a factually challenged study of the Academy Awards...
On Oscar night, do you ever wonder why you've rarely heard of, much less seen, any of the nominees for Best Foreign Film? Let's be frank. Phoenix is not a hotbed of international cinema. But this weekend, the first Scottsdale International Film Festival provides an opportunity to catch up with...
Early last month, a host of show-biz notables gathered at Radio City Music Hall for a TV tribute to John Lennon. Besides proving that Kevin Spacey can carry a tune (his faithful "Mind Games" was spirited, if a bit jarring), the show was a reminder that the work of a...
Ralphie May, who is white, calls black men "niggers." In his standup act, he uses the word repeatedly; he also riffs on Mexicans, who "see the Virgin Mary in everything," and whose names are easy to remember "because they're on their necklaces." He was raised in the deep South, in...
God works in mysterious ways. How else to explain the sudden appearance of a press release about Elvis on the office bulletin board? Well, maybe the "PLEASE POST THIS ON YOUR BULLETIN BOARD" it requested in polite italics, pulsing with the gentle insistence of ALL CAPS, had something to do...
How many times must I tell you kids Before you shut your yaps? Yes, 'n' how many ways must I say the same thing Before I can get my nap? Yes, 'n' how many times must your parents be called Before they make you cut the crap? The answer, you...
Bob Dylan's last studio album, 1997's Time Out of Mind, was about as much fun as a eulogy. With its songs of remorse and regret, with its plaints of begged-for salvation and yearned-for deliverance, that collection sounded like a last will and testament -- a big adios from the jokerman...
