In The Myth of Fingerprints, middle-class white people gather at their parents’ home for Thanksgiving, lovers in tow, to snipe at one another and bellyache about how horrible home life used to be. This description would also cover Home for the Holidays of two years ago. Myth’s people are a…
Stylishness without substance can become wearying real fast. Twenty minutes into A Life Less Ordinary, the new movie from the producing-directing-writing team of Trainspotting and Shallow Grave, I was already into overload. It’s not that director Danny Boyle doesn’t have imagination. It’s just that sometimes imagination is all he has…
thursday october 23 UK/AZ You Like It: Romeo et Juliette, Hamlet on Trial and More Stuff From Beyond the Pond: The UK/AZ Festival celebrates the–rather tenuous–connection(s) between England and Arizona. So what have France and Italy got to do with it? Well, Arizona Opera opens its season with French composer…
“Gay men are supposed to be this highly evolved, artistic band of people,” says theater producer Christopher Wynn, “so how come our plays are sold to us with the promise of 10 swinging dicks onstage at every performance?” Wynn, an actor and former Phoenician, moved to Manhattan four years ago…
What a relief it is to see a movie like James Dean: Race With Destiny. It had begun to feel as if the bad movie were dead–not gone, of course; as long as there are movies, most of them will be crummy. But in recent years, movie badness has been…
On the wintry Sabbath referred to by the title of Jonathan Nossiter’s Sunday, a middle-aged homeless man wanders the streets of Queens. Nothing new there. His name is Oliver (David Suchet), and he used to be a married, white-collar company man with IBM, but now he’s divorced, alone, sleeping in…
thursday october 16 UK/AZ You Like It: Phoenix Symphony’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ATOP’s The Essential Henry V, ATC’s Blithe Spirit and More Stuff From Beyond the Pond: The UK/AZ Festival celebrates the–rather tenuous–connection(s) between England and Arizona. Guest conductor Christopher Wilkins wields the baton in Phoenix Symphony’s presentation of…
You can recognize a lady by her elegant hair/but a genuine princess is exceedingly rare . . . –Once Upon a Mattress In the states, we make up for not having our own actual royalty by slinging regal titles as insults: Welfare Queen, Jewish American Princess, royal pain–even kingpin has…
It’s hard to fault The House of Yes, the wry toast of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, for its limitations as a film. In fact, it’s hardly a film at all–rather, it’s a barely staged, five-handed farce that trails its amiable cast around a looming Victorian mansion during the course…
Seven Years in Tibet feels more like Seven Days at the Movies. It refuses to come to life–not even when prodded by Brad Pitt, hirsute as a yak, wandering the frozen Himalayas with an Austrian accent that probably gave his dialogue coach the hives. It’s an epic about how an…
The first scene of Different for Girls is both lyrical and chilling–a teenage boy (Stephen Walker) showers in a school locker room, posed like a Raphaelite statue, with his genitals tucked out of sight. Classmates, fully clothed, approach him through the steam and begin to harass him, until another boy…
thursday october 9 Further Stuff From Beyond the Pond: UK/AZ’s “Wallace and Gromit” Mania, “Rootstein Mannequins” and More: The UK/AZ Festival, continuing through October (though some of the offerings extend beyond Allhallows Eve), celebrates the–rather tenuous–connection(s) between England and Arizona. Nick Park’s beloved claymation characters “Wallace and Gromit” (Wallace is…
By its very definition, a thriller should, you know, thrill. It should not only scare its audience with a quick jolt, that sudden noise in the dark that comes from nowhere and fills everywhere, but with its slow burn. It’s not enough for a thriller to tell its story, to…
Oliver Stone’s low-budget, hopped-up film noir, U-Turn, is being billed as a change of pace for the conspiracy dude, but actually it looks quite at home in the maestro’s hothouse. After all, aren’t conspiracies and the workings of fate what noirs are all about? Stone’s JFK pulped history with the…
Janeane Garofalo plows right through her new film, The Matchmaker, with the same disgruntled sarcasm that typifies her testy, standard-bearer-for-the-underdog persona. Try though it may to cast “America’s favorite antistar” in a “romantic comedy for people who don’t like romantic comedy,” this script, a wholesale retread of Local Hero (which,…
thursday october 2 UK/AZ You Like It: Othello, Zandra Rhodes, “Rootstein Mannequins” and Other Stuff From Beyond the Pond: The UK/AZ Festival, continuing through October (though some of the offerings extend beyond Allhallows Eve), celebrates the–rather tenuous–connection(s) between England and Arizona. Britain’s Royal National Theatre–making its inaugural visit to the…
Everybody likes to run down Canadian movies, but Canadian film festivals–I speak of Montreal and Toronto–are something else again. How can a country turn out such mediocre movies and such terrific film festivals? In Hollywood, at least, we’re consistent: Our movies and our film festivals are equally lousy. I started…
The Peacemaker is the first feature from DreamWorks, the studio headed by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. It stars George Clooney and Nicole Kidman, and it’s about terrorists who steal Russian nukes. As an intelligence officer with the U.S. Army’s Special Forces, Clooney gets to model his jutting…
thursday september 25 Dave Brubeck: Best known as the progenitor of cool jazz in the ’50s (and for “Take Five,” one of the all-time standard-bearers of cool), the West Coast pianist/bandleader is a giant of jazz–period, and no modifier required. Granted, the Brubeck sound cracked open the door, far off…
There’s a lovely formality to the structure of the comedy Wedding Bell Blues. Three young women (Paulina Porizkova, Illeana Douglas and Julie Warner), roomies, take a road trip to Vegas, with the vague plan of getting married, then immediately divorced. Their notion is that a 30ish divorcee is less pathetic…
Every film adaptation of a preexisting work has its own unique set of problems; in the case of Jocelyn Moorhouse’s A Thousand Acres, the problem is compounded. Not only was Jane Smiley’s 1991 novel a Pulitzer Prize-winning best seller with a large number of (presumably) devoted fans, but the book…
Howard and Emily’s wedding is the talk of Greenleaf, Indiana, a small town idyllic enough to repel Norman Rockwell. The town has waited three years for the couple to make it official–and slimmed-down Emily (Joan Cusack) has waited three long years for Howard (Kevin Kline) to consummate their relationship. She’s…
