UP ON THE HOUSETOP, FLICK, FLICK, FLICK...

Happy Friday the 13th everybody! Check out my "Friday Flicks" column on some of the showings of holiday classics around the Valley, including It's a Wonderful Life...

I wasn't able to post it last Friday owing to a technical issue, but if you want you can read last week's column, with reviews of the creepy thriller I See You...

...and the at least equally creepy In Fabric...

Have a great weekend everybody!

ALAN HAIL

Like all sensible lovers of great acting, I was saddened by the death of Alan Rickman, way too young at 69, earlier this month.

Here in the Valley, Harkins Theatres is paying a very cool tribute to Rickman with a mini-festival of his films today only at the Valley Art in downtown Tempe: Love Actually (11 a.m.); Galaxy Quest (1:50 p.m.); Truly, Madly, Deeply (4:10 p.m.) and Die Hard (8:45 p.m.). (They’re also showing Labyrinth at 6:30 p.m., as a David Bowie tribute.) Tickets are only $5, and proceeds benefit Save the Children.

Great choices, but I would have included Sense and Sensibility, and one of my sisters always raves about a TV movie Rickman starred in called Something the Lord Made.

Anyway…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week our honoree is General Sarris, the menacing reptile-arthropod-whatever played by Robin Sachs in Galaxy Quest…

He was insultingly named, by the way, after the late auteurist critic Andrew Sarris.