Success is relative in Hollywood, like a third cousin twice-removed who doesn't recognize you at family reunions, and doesn't care to. Fame is so fleeting it has a month-by-month lease. Six years ago, Christopher McQuarrie was as famous as any screenwriter on the backlot known as Los Angeles. He had...
As you know, the Moon is in the Seventh House, and Jupiter aligns with Mars, which means you'll find, in the reviews below, synchronistic synergies and cosmic cross-wiring that reveal which music released during the astrological sign The Love Supreme you should love supremely. Meditate upon the cosmic connections, my...
Director Alison Maclean, from Canada by way of New Zealand, turns her camera on the American landscape -- or, more accurately, the underbelly of the American landscape -- in Jesus' Son, an uneven, but often effective, adaptation of Denis Johnson's autobiographical book. Billy Crudup stars as a thoroughly marginalized character...
She sank in 1912, but she keeps sailing on. The White Star Line's Titanic, either the last great tragedy of 19th-century imperial hubris or the first great tragedy of technological hubris, has sailed through innumerable books, at least three movies -- one of them the magnum chick flick of all...
So the New Times music editor calls up to inform me of a couple tribute bands playing at some horrible yuppie hellhole in Scottsdale. "Tributes" to Van Halen and Mötley Crüe called Atomic Punks and Shout at the Devil, respectively. Like I care. I hate tribute bands on principle. They...
I never imagined the day would come when I would cringe to see Ralph Fiennes on screen. Not only is he shamelessly good-looking, but, whether playing the brooding, remote figure doomed by love in The English Patient or the bloodless commandant of a Nazi death camp in Schindler's List, he...
When stars get popular enough (or win enough Oscars), they begin to get to call their own shots. Thus we have The Big Kahuna, the debut release of Kevin Spacey's production company. Kahuna also marks the film debut of stage director John Swanbeck and screenwriter Roger Rueff. And, boy, can...
It is difficult to reconcile American perceptions of Iran, a rigidly authoritarian Islamic fundamentalist society, with the captivating and compassionate films that emanate from the country. Most of these pictures, including the 1995 Cannes Film Festival Camera d'Or winner The White Balloon and the 1998 Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar nominee...
Nick Park speaks so softly that the tape recorder barely registers him at all. His is a whisper of a voice, the sound of a man who has spent years in isolation talking to no one but himself. Transcribing an interview with him is like trying to decipher a man's...
Boys Don't Cry hasn't garnered the kind of box-office returns you'd expect from an Oscar winner. That's understandable. No matter its brilliance, the film's pallor of rural white trash dysfunction was probably too unsettling for that cash-cow megaplex demographic. After all, it was, as the Sunday Herald in Scotland recently...
"There aren't many Mexican cowboys here tonight," says playwright Guillermo Reyes, with a hint of sardonic disappointment in his voice. A glance around the room affirms his observation. One lone cowboy sits at the bar, complete with 10-gallon hat and dusty boots. The rest of the cramped, humid dance floor...
In place of a bio, Elliott Smith's press kit features two documents: a time line of important events and a selection of his own sound bites from articles written about him. This much we know about Smith: He moved to Portland at age 14, made his first solo album in...
The idea that we are each separated by no more than six acquaintances has become more commonplace than the play, Six Degrees of Separation, which popularized the notion. John Guare's oft-produced one-act (which is, amazingly, making its local debut with this Phoenix Theatre production) is a masterwork of dark comedy...
Trunk Federation Lay the Hip (Plastique Recording Co.) That Trunk Federation even managed to get together and put out a third album after a year of dissolution, defections and personal problems is amazing enough. That Lay the Hip turns out to be their best effort to date is nothing short...
Cheri Jarvis raced to the emergency room, afraid. "When I arrived at the hospital, I did not even recognize my son. He was covered in blood and his head was swollen and his nose was everywhere on his face. He had so much blood caked on his teeth and mouth...
Classical grand opera is no laughing matter. With its labyrinthine story lines, massive productions and pampered performers, it's no wonder that opera scares away many a potential audience member. But B.J. Ward sees through the traditions and focuses on the fun and absurdity hiding just beneath the surface. Since 1990,...
So, let me get this straight. Even after three major film festivals in February -- four, if you count the ongoing Spike & Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation at Centerpoint (see Repertory Film) -- you're still hungry for more film-festival action? Well, okay, but you'll have to hit...
Director Chen Kaige is best known in the U.S. for Farewell My Concubine, the most successful Chinese production ever released here. As many pointed out at the time, this Oscar-nominated 1993 epic of modern Chinese history may have been wholly Chinese in both content and viewpoint, but it was still,...
Garry Shandling does not have a face for the big screen. He has a mug that seems to spread to the edges of the theater; it's like an approaching storm front, a sky full of billowing clouds roaring in from the north. And it's a face built for two emotions:...
It's hard to blame Kirk Douglas for choosing Diamonds as a comeback film, after fighting back from a devastating stroke almost four years ago. Certainly no one can fault him for wanting to act again, to prove he's still got it. However, the question is this: Can the movie that...
"May I smoke?" Agnieszka Holland asks. It's a gracious request, considering that she's sitting in her own hotel room, during a recent visit to Phoenix. Of course, her interviewer tells her; after all, where would a Polish director be without a cigarette in hand? "Yes," she replies, lighting up. "I...
A hunger for the exotic is usually what stirs artists to jump past the humdrum of the "new and improved" to the rarer thrill of things "never before felt or seen." But as the Phoenix Art Museum's "Taos Artists and Their Patrons, 1898-1950" suggests, that hunger isn't confined to the...
