Arizona filmmakers Susan Broude and Tami Pivnick set out with some heavy goals: to give a voice to bullied youth across the nation, to challenge everyone to treat others as they would like to be treated, and to empower people to help put a stop to verbal abuse and cyberbullying…
In his third collaboration with director Larry Charles, Sacha Baron Cohen plays Admiral General Aladeen, the young, dumb dictator of fictional North African nation Wadiya. Under Aladeen’s rule, oil-producing, uranium-enriching Wadiya is a hostile threat to global peace and capitalism. And yet, Aladeen himself is so attracted to Western culture…
Every once in a while, a movie comes along that’s so utterly shameless that it achieves a certain grandeur. Peter Berg’s Battleship, which, I swear to God, is described in its Wikipedia entry as an “American science fiction action naval war film,” is one such movie. Over the past few…
Twentysomething Silver Lake couple Peter (Christopher Denham) and Lorna (Nicole Vicius) talk their way into an unnamed cult that meets in the basement of a San Fernando Valley split-level in the middle of the night to follow the teachings of the enigmatic Maggie (Brit Marling). A supposedly sickly yet ethereally…
Richard Linklater’s Bernie is the rarest of rarities: a truly unexpected film. It might be classified as a black comedy, for it deals with the murder of an 81-year-old woman in a fashion that is not exactly tragic. But unlike most movies that fall under that label, it never indulges…
After alien invasions and Samuel L. Jackson appearances, time travel is the next best plot device Hollywood can inject into a film to maximize audience attendance.The latest example: Men In Black 3 (released next week — in 3D!), in which Will Smith goes back to the 1960’s to meet a…
Nightowls, film fiends, and underagers alike can celebrate additions and changes in the works at Downtown’s FilmBar. Kelly Aubey, who owns the independent theater/bar at 815 North Second Street announced this week that next month, FilmBar will be screening midnight movies from Thursday through Saturday, sell tickets online, and lower…
There’s a lot wrong with French star Julie Delpy’s new indie flick, 2 Days in New York, but there’s one thing that’s very, very right: Chris Rock. As Mingus, Rock is the saving grace of an often disjointed mess of a film, a screwball comedy that tries to force quirkiness…
Bobcat Goldthwait is moving farther and farther away from Hollywood — the industry that paid him to star in three Police Academy movies and the geographical area of Los Angeles. Last week, he presented his new directorial effort, God Bless America, at a radio-station promo gig in Omaha and, a…
Much of Tim Burton’s output over the past decade has been concerned with slipping the “Burton treatment” to susceptible texts: Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — and now, Dark Shadows. A supernaturally themed daily daytime soap, Dark Shadows…
Frank (Joel Murray) is an outcast. We first meet this divorced, 50-ish, glumly alcoholic white-collar worker — the protagonist of Bobcat Goldthwait’s God Bless America — on one of his sleepless nights, entertaining homicidal fantasies about the couple next door. “They’re incapable of comprehending that their actions affect other people,”…
Sometimes a movie screens for one night only, and sometimes it shows for weeks or months. That’s why when it comes to moviegoing, planning ahead is crucial. Planners that we are, we’ve selected five must-see flicks screening in the Valley this month. Stock up on your preferred salty, sweet snacks…
At the start of Joss Whedon’s long-awaited Marvel superhero supergroup flick, The Avengers, the Tesseract — a powerful, potentially dangerous glowing cube that fell to the ocean floor after Captain America (Chris Evans) liberated it from the Nazis in his movie last summer — is in the hands of NASA…
Nathan Blackwell can remember being a kid and shooting one of his first films about aliens and rayguns. Decades later, after starting a production company, Squishy Studios, and buying a few more cameras, he’s back in space. This week, Blackwell’s kicking off production of the second season of Voyage Trekkers,…
Welcome to the Morning Buzz, a catch-up on interesting happenings around the city and country and a quick guide to what (and who) to keep your eyes on. We’ll be here, first thing every weekday, to get you going. Here’s what’s buzzing this morning: When the local chapter of design…
“It was a great, great shame,” says Peter Lord of the 2005 fire at the Aardman Animations studio storage facility. “Hundreds of chickens went up in smoke.” Of course, Lord isn’t talking about live chickens; he’s referring to the hundreds of clay model chickens produced for the Golden-Globe-nominated Chicken Run…
With The Deep Blue Sea, the great British director Terence Davies returns to the post-war period — though in a sense, he has never left. The cinema of Davies (born in 1945) is defined by a mixed pity and fondness for the world of yesterday, a past he seemingly finds…
The Deep Blue Sea, the first fiction feature in a dozen years from visionary British director Terence Davies, is a film about love that in no way reassures that love conquers all. Plumbing disquieting depth, Deep Blue Sea investigates the insoluble dilemma of romantic love: the expectation, contrary to experience,…
Lee Storey has a brand new reason to smile ’til it hurts. A Phoenix-based water rights attorney with Ballard Spahr LLP, Storey earned a spot as one of our 2011 Big Brain Finalists for her debut feature documentary, Smile ‘Til It Hurts: The Up With People Story. The film tells the…
Without working ourselves into too much of a premature lather let’s note: 30 Rock is a few episodes away from its season six finale, which airs May 17, and NBC has yet to renew the Thursday night standby for another season. And it sure seems possible that the premise of…
Whit Stillman made a name for himself making semiautobiographical, deadpan, highly literate comedies about the night lives of idle heirs (his 1990 Oscar-nominated debut Metropolitan), privileged Americans abroad (Barcelona, 1994), and resilient yuppies in decadent early ’80s Manhattan (The Last Days of Disco, 1998). But for more than a decade,…
It’s Nicholas Sparks’ world; we just live in it. Sparks, in case you haven’t scanned the paperback racks lately, is the former pharmaceutical salesman who’s written 16 bestsellers since 1995, when The Notebook was plucked from the slush pile by a wily publisher. The 2004 movie version of The Notebook…
