Among the many mysteries surrounding The Interpreter is the one that finds Sydney Pollack heralded as a major American director, a maker of Serious and Important Movies. His filmography, marked by mawkish mediocrities (Out of Africa, as vibrant as a coffee-table book; The Way We Were, its romance as plausible…
Amanda Peet. Ashton Kutcher. Romantic comedy. Who’d have thought it could work? And yet A Lot Like Love is an entertainment success, a triple threat of fresh writing, inspired directing and, yes, good acting. Fortified with a healthy dose of intelligence, it manages to leap clear across an entire field…
“No more soccer!” declares small-time thug Sing (writer/director/star Stephen Chow) as he vigorously stomps on a child’s ball. In the context of Kung Fu Hustle, it’s a pathetic attempt by Sing to make himself look tough. The larger signal, however, is to followers of Chow’s work — it’s a direct…
Professional volleyball players will do just about anything for their fans. They’ll sign whatever they’re handed, they’ll hang out and party after tournaments, and — if they’re three-time Olympic gold medalist Karch Kiraly — they’ll even propose for you. “There was a couple from Phoenix who came up to me…
Fox Mulder’s undeniable hotness, er, relentless pursuit of the truth regarding alien existence on Earth kept believers and skeptics alike glued to the tube on Sunday nights for nine years via The X-Files. Dr. Stephen Greer, meanwhile, as the founder and director of the nonprofit organization The Disclosure Project, has…
4/22-4/23 Some things are worth the wait — like, for instance, the Mesa Arts Center. After nearly five decades of false starts, failed bond elections, tax hikes and tumult, the suburb’s sleepy downtown finally gets a one-megaton wake-up call as Arizona’s largest cultural complex, located at 1 East Main Street,…
SUN 4/24 We’ve gotta admit that when it comes to our participation in Valley Metro’s annual Bike to BOB event, the season’s the reason. That is, if it’s shaping up to be a banner year for the hometown Diamondbacks, we don’t mind pedaling down Central Avenue for a win at…
SAT 4/23 When it comes to the Tostitos Southwest Salsa Challenge, these chips crunch some high numbers. “We have 63 contestants, and some of them enter more than one salsa,” says Mary Masters, the event organizer. “For each recipe, they have to make 13 gallons of salsa.” That’s more than…
SAT 4/23 The last thing you’d expect from Bisbee indie-folk darlings Nowhere Man and a Whiskey Girl is a cover album. “It seems kind of cheesy,” admits vocalist Amy Ross, “but we’re covering songs by our friends’ bands. It’s not like we’re doing ‘Hotel California.’ These are songs people keep…
Ever have one of those weeks when you just think the opposite sex is completely nuts? That you are one way — the right way — and they just function with no reason or rhyme? Yeah, me too. I swear if it wasn’t for my Prozac and other meds, I’d…
“In Monet’s Light: Theodore Robinson at Giverny”: Impressionist paintings have been reproduced on so many coffee mugs and note cards they’ve become cliché. That’s why it’s nothing short of miraculous that “In Monet’s Light” is able to remind us these sun-dappled landscapes were revolutionary. The exhibition shows how the work…
THU 14 As cynical as we might be at times, we’ll refrain from tagging The Redwalls, who play the Big Fish Pub (1954 East University Drive in Tempe) on Thursday, April 14, as nothing more than a foursome of rip-off artists. Fact is, The Redwalls sure sound like the Brit-blues…
Some women enjoy being a girl, but Elizabeth Bretharte Lyon isn’t so sure. The Phoenix artist vents her doubts about sugar and spice and everything nice in a powerful exhibition of photographs at the Paulina Miller Gallery. Beware, Lyon’s images say, there’s poison in being pretty. At first glance, Lyon’s…
She’s been dead for 34 years, but Diane Arbus, the photographer who found her muse among the weird and the seedy, is hot again thanks to a retrospective of her work at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. You don’t have to journey to Gotham to see her startling photos…
Chris Simcox is not a racist. And he’s not a vigilante. He’s just a nice guy from Tombstone who’s tired of all those nasty Mexicans sneaking over the border looking for better lives here in our sovereign nation. By forming The Minuteman Project, a patrol group bent on “sealing the…
I confess: I didn’t want to see Never Been Thawed when it premièred here about a year ago. I went to the film’s screening as a favor to a friend, whose best friend’s daughter appears fleetingly in one scene, but I’m not a big fan of independent films — especially…
Sean Anders would like you to know this movie thing isn’t as easy as it looks. When he and a friend, Chuck LeVinus, decided to give filmmaking a go three years ago this June, the idea was to put together something loosely resembling a script, harass friends into becoming on-screen…
The Groden family lives out in the middle of the New Mexico desert, far from main roads. They grow, harvest and/or kill all their own food, own their own home, and make what little money they need from crafts. They’ve got no phone or indoor plumbing, and they haven’t paid…
If nothing else, give Dana Brown credit for enthusiasm. A documentary filmmaker in name only, he is really the camera- and microphone-equipped president of several booster clubs — among them what might be called the International Society of Beach Bums and, thanks to his latest exercise in hero worship, the…
Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that your moviegoing family is absolutely up to date on every major release this year. Not a Friday goes by that you don’t go see something new. Then you look in the paper and see that the only major release coming up this…
When the great playwright Arthur Miller died in February, many admirers took stock again of his most enduring creation, Willy Loman. A delusional idealist who finds himself failed and felled by the American dream, the tragic hero of Death of a Salesman has for half a century been the most…
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has made a practice of doling out awards like Sting has sex: a little at a time, prolonging the act of honoring rock ‘n’ roll’s legacy artists for (as of last March) an amazing 20 years — and counting. The Arizona Music &…
