There is evidently no limit to the sacrifices actors will make for their art. If you thought beautiful Charlize Theron went the distance by transforming herself into a bloated, scowling murderess for Monster, just wait ’til you and the kids get a load of Emma Thompson in the darkly amusing…
No one has ever mistaken Rocky Balboa for an officer and a gentleman, but that’s just about what we get in the numbingly predictable and none-too-stirring Annapolis, an underdog-makes-good boxing movie stuffed inside what amounts to a U.S. Navy recruiting pitch, with a dash of Good Will Hunting tossed in…
With the release of The White Countess, the much-honored Merchant Ivory canon is complete. The Bombay-born producer Ismail Merchant died in May 2005 at age 68, and whatever direction his longtime collaborator and life companion, director James Ivory, now chooses, the working partnership that gave us a dozen elegantly furnished…
Richard Trujillo may one day give a more thrilling performance than the one I witnessed on opening night of Actors Theatre’s production of Kiss of the Spider Woman. If he does, I hope I’m present to see it. I usually find Trujillo’s performances stamped too strongly with his own personality,…
Pop-culture pundits generally fall into two camps: those who think entertainment encourages a nation of knuckle-draggers, and those who say it’s actually making us smarter. In the case of Atari’s The Matrix: Path of Neo, both sides have a point. Like the movie trilogy that inspired it, Path of Neo…
The Aristocrats (Lions Gate) The single joke around which Paul Provenza’s documentary revolves has a standard beginning and ending, like pieces of bread that make a sandwich stuffed with excrement, incest, and whatever other foulness the teller can come up with. Provenza and Penn Jillette recorded more than 100 comedians…
Underneath the Lintel: Try though they might, neither actor Christopher Haines, who appears in Glen Berger’s one-man one-act, nor Charles St. Clair, its director, can save this sinking ship of a show. Lintel is an exploration of faith that comments on man’s place in the universe; one that’s couched in…
“Lingerie: Secrets of Elegance” at Phoenix Art Museum: Yep, you read that right. Bras, baby doll nighties, and a sunburst display of girdles are just a gallery over from the paintings of dead white guys in powdered wigs. This fascinating fashion exhibition traces lingerie’s evolution (or maybe devolution) from corsets…
Address Unknown (Tartan) Anyone Can Dance: Nightclub Freestyle (Delta) National Lampoon’s Barely Legal (MGM) Dallas: The Complete Fourth Season (Warner Bros.) Educating Rita (Sony) Flightplan (Touchstone) The Fog (2005) (Sony) God Save the Queen: A Punk Rock Anthology (Music Video Dist.) Hooked (Eclectic) Ludacris: Southern Smoke (Music Video Dist.) My…
Four-time Emmy Award-winning director Charles St. Clair must be exhausted. In between classes at ASU West (where he’s a professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Performance), the co-founder of both the Fairmount Theater of the Deaf and Phoenix’s Black Theatre Troupe is directing Theater Works’ Underneath the Lintel; is shopping for…
America — and, by extension, Hollywood — has an obsession with innocence and the loss thereof. Every generation has that Moment When Everything Changed, from Pearl Harbor to JFK’s assassination to 9/11. The impact takes a while to settle in, then people forget again, and future generations are similarly traumatized…
The critical consensus has Match Point as Woody Allen’s finest film since . . . oh, let’s see . . . Bullets Over Broadway, is it? Or perhaps Deconstructing Harry? Or maybe Sweet and Lowdown? One forgets where the good stuff left off, because there’s been so much bad stuff…
Albert Brooks, the once-funny comic turned filmmaker, plays a once-funny comic turned filmmaker named Albert Brooks in Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, which he also wrote and directed. It’s the second time Brooks has played himself, more or less; the first was in 1979, when he made Real…
We popcorn-chomping hitchhikers never know who will pick us up on the roadside. In Flirting With Disaster, it was a neurotic Manhattan adoptee on a nationwide search for his biological parents. The desert-parched heroines of Thelma & Louise brought us along as they raised hell en route to their doom…
After years of sucking the wind from famous people’s sails, New York journalist Jeannette Walls has achieved some fame of her own. Her best-selling childhood memoir, The Glass Castle (the title refers to a solar-powered house that Walls’ father dreamed of one day building in the Arizona desert), has gathered…
Try though they might, neither actor Christopher Haines, who appears in Glen Berger’s one-man, one-act Underneath the Lintel, nor Charles St. Clair, its director, can save this sinking ship of a show. Lintel is an exploration of faith that comments on man’s place in the universe — one that’s couched…
Movie-based videogames have a well-deserved reputation for sucking. Ever since Atari’s E.T. — a game so ill-conceived that thousands of unsold cartridges were dumped en masse in the desert, creating the crappiest buried treasure of all time — Hollywood tie-ins have bombed big-time. Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game…
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Magnolia) The best two hours you’ll ever spend learning about accounting, Enron is one part civics lesson, one part Greek tragedy, and one part political cartoon. Director Alex Gibney makes no pretense of objectivity; he wants you to hiss and boo at Ken…
At first you don’t even notice it. What’s to see? Funny how the ground level on either side of your feet remains unchanged, or barely changed, for so long. Then, okay, a slight rise, but not so high that you couldn’t jump over it. Not that you do. But you…
I am what is known in polite circles as a collector. I own 16 children’s phonographs, 213 Old Maid card games, 47 LPs by Jerry Vale. Although many people see my endless hunting and gathering of useless ephemera — century-old bars of still-wrapped soap, 1970s breakfast-cereal premiums, thrift-store paintings of…
I always envy those people who glide into January resolving to lose weight, quit smoking, or kick their eBay habits. These are self-inflicted vices, ones that might possibly be solved by the person suffering from them. My problem is completely beyond my control, and certainly beyond the reach of your…
There is no good explanation for the coat that hangs in my closet. Not that it’s ugly. Far from it. Heathery brown tweed, with a nipped waist and shoulders that sit just so, it’s cut beautifully enough to make even Janet Napolitano look lanky. In fact, if I stood up…
