YES YOU MAE

Check out my review, online at Phoenix Magazine, of the 1933 pre-code Mae West comedy I'm No Angel...

...playing at the Orpheum Theatre in Phoenix, as part of that venue's 96th Anniversary, at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, January 4.

A GRILLE IN EVERY PORT

Happy January everybody! Hope everybody had a great holiday.

Check out the January issue of Phoenix Magazine for my "Four Corners" column on Bar & Grille options around the Valley. Also check out my online column on the remarkable Polish movie Communion, playing at 4 p.m. Saturday at Harkins Shea, the Buster Keaton classic The General, playing Sunday afternoon at FilmBar, and my Top Ten List for 2018.

Here's wishing a Happy 2019 to us all!

FAREWELLISON

Happy July everybody!

Check out the July issue of Phoenix Magazine, now on the stands...

...for my "Four Corners" column on the "wrap" in Valley cuisine. Also check out my reviews, on Phoenix Magazine online, of the films Boundaries and Izzy Gets the F* Out of Town, and my attempt, in these times that demand a patriotism in opposition to our beloved country's Administration, at a patriotic July 4th playlist.

June ended on a sad note: RIP to the irreplaceable Harlan Ellison, passed on last Thursday at 84. I spent the weekend In Memoriam for him. Thursday night I watched his wonderful, dreamlike Outer Limits episode "Demon With a Glass Hand," starring Robert Culp, and also turned up a June 1958 issue of Super-Science Fiction...

 
...with an early Ellison story called "No Planet is Safe" that I had never read.

On Friday night, my pal Richard showed us a 1964 episode of Burke's Law written by Ellison, in which his self-consciously florid, allusion-studded dialogue was spouted by guest stars like Joan Blondell, Nina Foch and Betty Hutton. Yet for guest star Buster Keaton he ingeniously crafted a silent-comedy bit. Then Saturday I took down my copy of Strange Wine, and sipped from it for the rest of the weekend.

TRIUMPH OF THE WOOL

Opening today:

  

Shaun the Sheep Movie—The hero of this wonderful English stop-motion feature from Aardman Studios may literally be a sheep. But he’s not a sheep in the figurative sense. For better or worse, he isn’t one to conform, to accept his lot unquestioningly, to follow the flock.

Shaun, who debuted in the Wallace & Grommit short A Close Shave and starred in his own 2007 TV series, lives on a farm under the dominion, not quite cruel but not especially tender either, of The Farmer. Inspired by an advertisement on the side of a double-decker bus, Shaun decides he deserves a day off from being herded around the farm, so he stages a daring escape to spend a day in The Big City.

He hasn’t taken into account the effect his holiday may have on others, however. It results in accidents, homelessness and imprisonment for his flock, amnesia for The Farmer, and peril for all from a relentless animal control officer. Wild slapstick chases ensue.

The characters converse, when they do, only in indistinct jabbering and muttering and grousing. Aside from some song lyrics on the soundtrack, the only clearly enunciated word I heard was “hey!” Thus Shaun the Sheep Movie is, essentially, a silent comedy, and its star, Shaun, is a somewhat stoic, Keatonesque hero.

He isn’t a pure stone-face, however. It’s astonishing how much subtlety and nuance and depth of emotion the animators are able to bring out of the faces of these characters—which include not only the sheep and The Farmer but Bitzer, the wary sheepdog, and a large dramatis personae of supporting dogs, pigs, people and other animals. There wasn’t a moment, watching Shaun the Sheep Movie, when it occurred to me that these weren’t real creatures leading real lives somewhere. Indeed, I still refuse to believe they aren’t.