I expected to be wowed by Michael Grady’s new play, one of two programs by local playwrights to première here this week. I’ve never seen a Grady play that I didn’t enjoy, and The Arizona Project — which winds up Actors Theatre of Phoenix’s 15th season — is one I’ve…
Dinosaurs used to be cool. In 1969, if you had asked me what I thought was the best movie ever made, I would likely have told you that it was Valley of Gwangi, in which a group of cowboys find a gully full of leftover dinosaurs, animated by Ray Harryhausen,…
Despite the title East Is East, the big message of this flavorful domestic memoir is really that West is West. In the tug of war between East and West for a soul, East, the film suggests, may hold out for a while through a combination of nostalgia, pride, national resentment…
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…
Woody Allen is back on screen in Small Time Crooks, a bittersweet comedy that in many ways could have been lifted straight from the ’30s. For the most part, it’s Woody Allen Lite, which is not at all a bad thing. While one doesn’t want to penalize Allen for his…
“I came to it late on–17” says Jimi Mistry of acting, and makes his interviewer feel roughly the age of a mummy. The young Brit, who did “most of my growing up in Manchester” before attending the Birmingham School of Speech and Dramatic Arts, made his film debut in 1996…
Over the past quarter-century, the Hall of Flame Museum of Firefighting has grown into one of Phoenix’s finest museums. The Hall’s extensive collection includes working fire alarms, photos, prints, paintings, patches and uniforms from across America and around the world, along with many superb specimens of wheeled firefighting apparatus. There…
You can call Patti LuPone at seven in the morning, mere hours after she’s finished a backbreaking series of shows in Manhattan, and she’ll talk to you at length about her life and career. You can call her a Tony winner or the recipient of two Drama Desk awards or…
In each of the shows that opened here last weekend, there’s a scene in which the tormented lead demands that his male lover tell him “I love you.” The replies are as different as the productions; one of them a comedy, the other a drama. Both plays deal with issues…
Digital video is poised to become a major factor in commercial filmmaking, and Time Code, the new feature from Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas), could be used as a commercial for the process, which is its greatest point of interest. The movie is not so much an intriguing story as…
Given that most film studios have multimillion-dollar marketing budgets with which to target 18- to 25-year-olds, it’s astonishing how little they seem to know about the everyday life of those they’re supposed to be studying. Drew Barrymore has never been kissed? Please. Rachel Leigh Cook undatable until Freddie Prinze Jr…
When asked to name the most erotic sequence they have ever seen in a film, people tend to pick moments like the love scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in Don’t Look Now or that indelible image of Kathleen Turner in Body Heat, standing just inside her house, silently…
This was to be a column extolling the daring and inventiveness of a very groovy Sci Fi Network television show called good vs. evil, in which two dead men, a fro-sporting, cool-spouting brutha and his pale-faced partner, try to save the souls of those who have made Faustian deals with…
It’s often said that women turn into their mothers as they grow up, and in the case of writer-performer Nancy Wolter, that’s proved particularly true. Wolter’s 70-minute performance piece In Her Own Voice: Stories of My Mother is a tribute in which the author assumes the role of her own…
The first time I talked to Mad Coyote Joe, I asked him how he got started as a TV chef.”To tell you the truth, here’s what I think happened. I think they just said, “You know that fat motherfucker who’s desperate to be on TV? Let’s give him a chance.'”…
Peter Becker is the most important man in the movie business, even though you have no idea who he is. Becker himself would not cop to such a description; he, like few else in the business called show, does not put himself before the work. To describe what he does…
On the last night it played Tucson, The First Hundred Years by Arizona Theatre Company drew more than an appreciative crowd. As the audience filed out, local paramedics filed in, reportedly to remove an ailing patron who’d collapsed during the evening’s performance. He certainly hadn’t laughed himself sick. This one-act…
There is a killing late in Gladiator, Ridley Scott’s new heroic epic, and it is one of those wonderfully cathartic extinguishings that make a wide-eyed audience rise and cheer. After several brutal battles, after much bloodshed, after considerable suffering both needless and entertaining, a blade finds its mark, and a…
The word “International” has been added to its title, but this year’s edition of the Saguaro Film Festival has become the fest without a country. After debuting at Harkins Camelview 5 seven years ago, Arizona Film Society’s shindig for indies has knocked around the Valley, landing, in one year or…
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…
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…
The Asian-American community has never been well served by our mass media or popular culture. Japanese and Chinese images are pretty much limited to servants, “inscrutable” stereotypes, squinty-eyed evildoers or outright racist portrayals by clueless Occidental actors. The Cartwright boys had loyal ol’ Hop Sing to clean up after them…
