As Hollywood satire, Swimming With Sharks is nothing particularly new. It’s The Player mixed with David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow and a perverse pinch of Reservoir Dogs–Tinseltown bile and a drop or two of blood. This small film is worth seeing, though, for the cleanly written, bitchy dialogue by George Huang, and…
There are movie columns that come free from the neon-lighted glare of the multiplex lobby, from the sweet smell of a thousand spilled kernels of stale popcorn. This is one of them. In June of 1995, I’m at my desk, looking at the blinking cursor on the computer screen before…
It’s 4 a.m. Sirens blare, drums are launching off into some crazed atavistic groove and a surging curl of writhing, painted modern primitives snakes toward the stage. A butt-naked bald girl is pelting the audience with chunks of fruit and vegetables. A chunk of melon hits me. There’s lots of…
Groups of movies on the same subject often arrive too close together to be accounted for only by imitation; it may be one of the more unsubtle workings of the collective unconscious. In 1984, three films were released about the struggle to save a family farm, all of them–Country, The…
Two Thursdays ago, I had the honor to be a judge for the third annual Valley Art Cinematic Society Student Film Festival. In the company of fellow judges Jana Bommersbach, former New Times editor turned TV personality, and Steven Brain, new head of Fox Animation, I watched 43 short films…
If Rocco DeVilliers hadn’t been speeding through Missouri a few years ago, he probably wouldn’t be screening his film Pure Race for the European film market at Cannes. The 25-year-old Tempe resident co-scripted, produced, directed and edited the low-budget indie, played a small role in it and did “probably 90…
“Billy Crystal? I crap bigger than that.” So remarked the ever-gracious Jack Palance while accepting an Oscar for City Slickers, a film Crystal had written and produced. The thing is, Palance was right–but at least in City Slickers, the disparity between the two men had made some comic sense. In…
You don’t build the City of Tomorrow in a day. In fact, not even in 25 years, as it turns out, but Paolo Soleri’s vision of Arcosanti has not wavered since he first broke ground for his “urban laboratory” at the basalt cliffs near Cordes Junction in 1970. The beautiful,…
With the possible exception of the Empire State Building in King Kong, it’s doubtful there could be a stronger phallic symbol anywhere in movies than the submarine: an oblong shape that dives into the depths, is loaded with scurrying seamen and is eager to discharge itself. Small wonder that the…
The title The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill, but Came Down a Mountain suggests all sorts of possibilities, starting with a documentary about Sir Edmund Hillary. The movie that hides behind the title, however, is a charming, tall-tale comedy spun with sly, cheeky ease and flashes of visual grace…
Last weekend, in the chilly confines of Mesa Amphitheatre, an actor entreated us: “Gently to hear, kindly to judge our play.” Not to worry. After suffering through a season of Shakespearean mediocrity, Phoenix audiences should welcome a robust rendition of Shakespeare’s most mature historical drama, The Life of King Henry…
If you saw Laurence Olivier in The Entertainer, you may have some insight into the final offering of the season by Actors Theatre of Phoenix, now playing in Stage West at Herberger Theater Center. In that 1960 film, Olivier portrays Archie Rice, a vaudeville song-and- dance man down on his…
Those who squawked about Philadelphia’s depiction of the unwavering support shown to a gay man by his affluent family really will be put out by The Sum of Us. This little Australian film is about the unconditional love of a father for his gay son. Harry (Jack Thompson) is a…
It’s understandable that Eldridge Cleaver would consider Panther “a travesty.” Cleaver, who in the ’60s was minister of information for the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, is a character in director Mario Van Peebles’ new film, and he doesn’t come off especially well. He’s presented as a hothead who can’t…
John Sayles has been making movies for quite a while now, but making them less as a director and more as a screenwriter who directs. His interests are impressively wide, his plots are imaginative, his characters often complex, his dialogue pungent and funny. But his films, though never inept, are…
Last year, I reviewed a film called Go Fish, allegedly a comedy, about modern life among urban twentysomething lesbians. I panned it, and, predictably, got some static from lesbian readers who suggested that I disliked the film because I wasn’t a lesbian myself, and not for the actual reason, which…
After a modest first try last year, Arizona Film Society has taken the next step toward the elusive goal of bringing a regular annual film festival to the Valley–it’s come back for a second year. Saguaro Film Festival II will be held Thursday through Sunday at AMC Town & Country…
Long before Spike Lee and John Singleton made their first films, African-American cinema had had a 50-year history as an alternative genre that few people, even film buffs, knew about. Made independently by African-American directors for African-American audiences, “race films” flourished from after World War I until the late 1940s,…
Stephen Sondheim’s most sublime achievements surpass anything in the musical theatre since Rodgers and Hammerstein. I would include among these Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street; Sunday in the Park With George; and his most recent, the controversial Passion. Still pretty good, if not of the first rank,…
There’s not a bat in sight in the world premiäre of Arizona Theatre Company’s compelling new version of Dracula, currently stalking Herberger Theater Center. But bats are about the only thing missing from Steven Dietz’s faithful rendition of Bram Stoker’s 1897 tale of horror. ATC commissioned Dietz, author of this…
Destiny Turns On the Radio is the unfortunate title of a small, strange, rather agreeable comic fantasy set in Las Vegas. The title cosmic force, personified by Quentin Tarantino as a flashy hipster with a shit-eating grin, finds Julian (Dylan McDermott), an escaped convict, wandering in the Nevada desert and…
Jim Carroll’s book The Basketball Diaries isn’t about basketball, it’s about how the diarist, a Catholic high school kid growing up in Manhattan, happened to quit basketball. It’s an autobiographical work, supposedly the real diary Carroll kept during the mid-Sixties, when he changed from an aspiring poet and star of…
