I SAW DESIGN

Check out my quick preview, online at Phoenix Magazine, of the Arizona Architectural Film Showcase 2025...

...playing at a couple of different downtown venues August 9, August 13 and August 17. It's the latest from my pal Steve Weiss, the man behind the indie film series "No Festival Required."

IT TOOK A VILLAGE

Happy July everybody! The July/August issue of Phoenix Magazine, now on the stands...

...features the 2023 edition of "Best of the Valley." Your Humble Narrator is proud to be one of the authors/arbiters; see if you can guess which of the dozen or so entries I composed.

One entry I wrote was devoted to China Village, a venerable restaurant on East Indian School where I loved to get lunch, often meeting my pal Steve Weiss (of the long-running Valley film series "No Festival Required"). It does not appear in the magazine because, alas, China Village permanently closed its doors between the time I wrote it and the time the issue went to press. So as a fond posthumous tribute, here it is:

BEST THROWBACK CHINESE JOINT

China Village Restaurant

A quick lunch or dinner at this long-standing wok-ery gives you more than just good eats. The blessedly un-updated décor and atmosphere, and the old-school entrees, can give you the uncanny sense that you’ve stepped into 1973. The prices feel like a welcome throwback, too.

2710 E. Indian School Rd., Phoenix

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARC(HITECTURE)

Check out my short article, online at Phoenix Magazine...

...about the upcoming Arizona Architectural Film Showcase. It's the latest from Steve Weiss and his "No Festival Required" film series.

DANCING AND DINNER

Available now from "No Festival Required":

Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters--You probably shouldn't miss this excellent, absorbing performance documentary from Kino Lorber. The focus is on D-Man in the Waters, choreographed by Bill T. Jones for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company in New York in 1989, and regarded as a masterpiece of modern dance. Directed by Rosalynde LeBlanc in collaboration with the veteran documentary cameraman Tom Hurwitz, the film skillfully traces both the original production of the piece--a desperately leaping, strenuous response to the AIDS crisis--and a new production of it at Loyola Marymount. This new mounting is directed by LeBlanc, a former Jones/Zane Company member, with a cast of kids who don't remember the epidemic.

Talking heads, including Jones, from back in the day narrate the evolution of the Jones/Zane Company and of D-Man; at the same time we see LeBlanc struggling to get her young dancers of the social media age to generate some of the sense of anger and urgency that informed the original. Jones visits some rehearsals and gently offers input which LeBlanc and her cast deferentially accept.

The dancing we see, from both productions, is soulful and beautiful, but the people and their stories are probably even more engaging. The tone of the film is quietly joyous; still it's sobering to note that the days of the AIDS plague at its rampaging heights, which seemed so unforgettable at the time, are gradually being forgotten.

Link to it here.

On VOD...

An Exquisite Meal--A trendy Chicago couple invite several of their trendy friends over for dinner. At least two strangers crash the party. One's an electrician whose working-class status makes everybody uncomfortable; the other is an academic with a foreign accent, so he's treated like a rock star. 

Despite the host's elaborate promises of the culinary delights to come, dinner is maddeningly delayed. While they wait, the guests discuss absurdly trendy projects like yoga in war zones and artificial insemination not for fertility reasons but to allow conception with no "connotation" of rape. Before long, violence and sexual treachery are afoot.

Written and directed by Robert Bruce Carter, this indie satire on class has attractive actors and some intriguing ideas, but it doesn't come together satisfyingly. It's only about an hour long, but by the end you may be as impatient for dinner as the guests.

ESCHER THING

This week "No Festival Required" offers, along with the 1976 Texas music documentary Heartworn Highways...

M. C. Escher: Journey to Infinity--Robin Lutz directed this deft and speedy documentary portrait of the Dutch woodcut and print artist famed for repeated symmetrical patterns; birds and lizards taking shape in the spaces between other birds and lizards; gravity-defying, dimension-bending stairways; hands drawing the hands that are drawing them and the like. It traces his life, from art school in Delft and Haarlem to artistic awakening in Italy until Mussolini drove him to Switzerland and then Belgium, where the Nazis made him uncomfortable and ultimately drove him back to the Netherlands.

There are a few talking heads: Escher's own (now elderly) kids, and Graham Nash, who's a big fan. But the focus is less on his life than on the evolution of his art, although Escher claimed he was less an artist than a mathematician. Many of us would be inclined to disagree; his style is impeccably lovely, and his visions are playful and beguiling at the same time they carry unsettling perceptual resonances. He is perhaps vulnerable to the charge of gimmickry; this may be why serious critical appraisal was slow to come, despite (or because of) his work's worldwide popularity.

But it would be hard to suppose, based on Escher's diaries and other writings from which the narration of this film is taken, that he was a crass huckster. Indeed, he seems perplexed and a bit pained by the enthusiasm of hippies and rock stars for his pictures. This narration, spoken with Cleese-worthy buoyancy and a touch of comic pomposity by Stephen Fry, is one of the movie's best assets; it's the perfect seasoning to the feast of Escher's images.

PERFECT TIMING

Available today in the "Virtual Cinema" of No Festival Required...

Our Time Machine--The project chronicled in this documentary is a quintessential definition of the term "labor of love." When the Shanghai-based graphic artist and puppet-maker Ma Liang, known as Maleonn, realizes his elderly, distant father is in the early stages of dementia, he crafts an ambitious puppet theatre piece entitled Papa's Time Machine, about a boy creating a time travel device to retrieve his father's memories.

Once a prolific director with the Shanghai Chinese Opera Theatre, Maleonn's father Ma Ke is now a humbled old codger, vaguely working on his memoirs, sadly embarrassed at his loss of capability, ruled by his loving but tough, practical-minded and overburdened wife (where is her puppet show, you may find yourself wondering). Maleonn wants Ma Ke's collaborative help on the show, but he's past all that.

Ma Ke also seems to realize that Maleonn doesn't really need his help; he's an accomplished, even visionary artist in his own right. His work has Bunraku-like elements as well as a Jan-Svankmajer-Brothers-Quay-Terry-Gilliam sensibility, and when in silhouette it recalls Lotte Reiniger. But it's also unlike anything you've seen before, and this film, directed by Yang Sun, S. Leo Chiang and Shuang Liang, introduces a potentially major new international artist--introduced him to me, at least--in a particularly personal, intimate and touching way.

BIG EASY LISTENING

For many years my friend Steve Weiss has been the impresario behind the No Festival Required film series in the Valley; in these times he's trying to prove that No Venue is Required, either. Available for at least a week, starting today, at the NFR "virtual cinema" is...

Up From the Streets: New Orleans: The City of Music--Trying to cram the story of music in New Orleans into slightly over an hour and a half is the sort of thing that could make the head of Ken Burns explode. But producer-director Michael Murphy (not the actor) follows the great trumpeter and jazz composer Terence Blanchard as he wanders the streets of his beloved home town and gushes about the African-American, Cuban, Native American and even classical roots of jazz, blues, rock, funk and hip-hop, and the NOLA giants who guided these styles.

Fellow talking-head gushers include Wynton Marsalis, Irma Thomas, the Nevilles, Allen Toussaint, Dr. John, Harry Connick, Jr., Keith Richard, Robert Plant and Sting, among many others. The movie is at most a quick overview, of course, but it's slickly made, the enthusiasm of the participants is infectious, and the music is obviously irresistible. Indeed, as with many music documentaries, there are times when you may want to say to the interviewees "Shut up so I can listen."

Also playing, in the virtual sense, at Tucson's The Loft Cinema...

Clementine--The beautiful Cuban-American actress Otmara Morrero plays L.A. artist Karen, who, dumped by her older artist lover, impulsively travels to Oregon and breaks into the woman's lovely lake house. While staying there, she gets involved with a mysterious, much younger woman (Sydney Sweeney)--a girl, really--from across the lake.

This very quiet, laconic, subtly tense drama, the feature debut of writer-director Lara Gallagher, seems like an idyll about emotional resiliency and renewal after heartbreak. Then, in its last quarter, it takes a turn into thriller territory. The major theme seems to be that age and experience offer little protection from the stings and bruises and social awkwardness of love and attraction. This won't come as breaking news for most of us; still the performances are touching, Gallagher's direction is assured, and it's hard not to like a film that so clearly recognizes the healing power of dogs.

THIEF OF ARTS

Happy Friday everybody!

Check out my "Friday Flicks" column, online at Phoenix Magazine, for my review of the visually fascinating (and sexy) animated feature from Hungary, Ruben Brandt, Collector...

...as well as my review Michael Winterbottom's noir thriller The Wedding Guest and a preview of the March 23 screening of the flamenco documentary Impulso; the latter is part of a new series called Truly Independent Films from Steve Weiss of No Festival Required fame. At least 35 tickets (at $14 each) must be sold for the screening to take place. All I can say is I thought the movie was worth that much.

Have a great weekend everybody!

A LONG STRANGE TRYPTOPHAN

Happy Thanksgiving everybody!

Check out my reviews, on Phoenix Magazine online, of Creed II...

...and the Milestone Films Blu-Ray release of the exquisite 1926 animated film The Adventures of Prince Achmed...

...as well as a preview of the "No Festival Required" showing of the Rural Route Film Festival Touring Shorts at Scottsdale Center for the Arts.

Eat hearty!

RICKROLL

In theaters now:

White Boy Rick--A few weeks ago we had Kin, and now here's another story about a heavily-armed teenager in the dreary streets of Detroit. A real-life inner city Baltimore teen named Richie Merritt plays the title role in this strange true crime period piece. It's about Richard Wershe, Jr., known in the Motor City in the '80s as White Boy Rick, who at fourteen became the youngest-ever FBI informant, and later became a crack merchant himself, all before he was old enough to legally buy beer.

This isn't Scarface, however. There are reports that the film softens the edges of the truth considerably, but at least as depicted by the French director Yann Demange and played by Merritt, Rick was a quiet, nonviolent young man who fell into crime trying to help his broke, troubled family--his big-talking, small-potatoes gun dealer dad (Matthew McConaughey), his drug-addled sister Dawn (Bel Powley) and his cantankerous grandparents (Bruce Dern and Piper Laurie) across the street. Something about Rick's unaggressive yet direct manner inspires trust, including in the drug dealers that buy his old man's firearms and in the FBI agents and Detroit cops that are stalking them, so he drifts into their world without trying to.

The film is full of excellent acting, notably by McConaughey as the dad, portrayed here, rather rosily but effectively, as a loving man who tries, through American-dream bravado, to navigate around the moral bogs from which he draws his livelihood. There's also Powley, a Brit brilliantly and heartbreakingly convincing as the crackhead sister, not to mention Jennifer Jason Leigh and Rory Cochrane as two feds that don't inspire a lot of trust.

But Merritt, a novice to acting, holds his own as the star presence in the film. It isn't just that he feels authentic--the whole movie feels almost as authentic as a documentary, despite the famous actors in it, and despite its liberties with history. But there's also a sweetness, even a guilelessness to Merritt that made me feel protective toward him.

Something feels missing from White Boy Rick at a thematic level; despite the outrageousness of the story and of the outcome of Rick's case, Demange can't seem to figure out what point he's making with it, and this leaves a gap in the movie's reason for existing. But the acting and atmosphere fill that gap--it's never less than gripping, it's often funny, it's ultimately touching.

Not long ago, on one of the retro TV cable networks, I happened to see "The Bard," an episode of The Twilight Zone from 1963 featuring the young Burt Reynolds. His part was small but memorable: He was playing a self-impressed method actor, obsessed with "tertiary motivation" and the like, that was transparently a spoof of Marlon Brando.

Reportedly, Reynolds had run into trouble early in his career because of his resemblance to Brando; it supposedly kept him from being cast in a supporting part in Sayonara. So he may have taken a special glee in his Twilight Zone role. In any case, he was funny.

Reynolds, who passed on earlier this month at 82, was always funny. Even when he played steely-eyed action heroes, there was usually an underlying irony that came through, as if he couldn't (or wouldn't) fully commit to the tough guy persona. At times, notably in a few late '70s-early '80s efforts like The End, Paternity and Best Friends, and especially in his fine star turn in 1979's Starting Over, he displayed a striking vulnerability. But on the whole, he isn't an actor you associate with a lot of emotional range--he's more like a sly, mischievous friend who's fun to hang out with now and then precisely because his company is so undemanding.

But within that limited range, he was able to carve out a career for himself as a true movie star--indeed, along with Clint Eastwood, he was one of the last of the old-school American male stars. When you run down the list of his films, you'll notice, along with plenty of real dreck, how many thoroughly substantive and re-watchable pictures he made: Deliverance, of course, and The Longest Yard and chase flicks like White Lightning and Gator and that cornpone classic Smokey and the Bandit and, maybe best of all among his car-crash comedies, 1978's Hooper, and his slightly underrated caper movie Rough Cut and his hilarious cameo in Mel Brooks' Silent Movie and his capable leading man work in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. I even found his Elmore Leonard-based 1985 misfire Stick, which he also directed, sort of compelling.

Later on he did notable turns in Bill Forsythe's Breaking In, and on television in Evening Shade, and in character parts in Citizen Ruth and Striptease. And in 1997 came his Oscar-nominated performance as the inscrutably easygoing porn director in Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights. There's a lot of variety there, and a lot of fun. If he never quite scaled the heights that Brando did, he certainly transcended the youthful resemblance, and in his own way made at least as big a mark.

Tomorrow, Wednesday September 12 at 7 p.m., "No Festival Required" offers the documentary Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf, a portrait of the famed Dutch garden designer, at Third Street Theatre, Phoenix Center for the Arts. My pal Steve Weiss, longtime director of the not-a-fest, says it may be his favorite film he's ever presented, a "75-minute vacation," and a sorely needed one in these troubled times. I liked it a lot too.

Monster-of-the-Week is on hiatus these days, but there's a de facto MOTW in this week's box office champ, The Predator...

Check out my reviews of that film, Five Seasons and A Simple Favor online at Phoenix Magazine.

THANK GOD IT'S, WELL, YOU KNOW...

Check out my online column at Phoenix Magazine, featuring movie choices this weekend, including the Iraq war drama The Yellow Birds with Alden Ehrenreich, 50th anniversary showings of 2001: A Space Odyssey at Harkins Tempe Marketplace and the Monkees movie Head at FilmBar, and...

...a "No Festival Required" showing of the documentary Lives Well Lived Sunday afternoon at Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts. No problem staying out of the sun for the next few days...

WOODSTOCK FOOTAGE

Check out my review, on Phoenix Magazine online, of Hippie Family Values...

 
...Beverly Seckinger's documentary which screens this Sunday, May 27, at Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts.

So, just because hippies...

Monster-of-the-Week:  ...our honoree is Bert, the shaggy, dune-buggy-driving title character of The Werewolf of Woodstock...

...a curmudgeonly local farmer, furious about the mess left behind at Woodstock after the festival. He's ranting in a lightning storm, like Lear, about the "miserable freaks," until he gets lightning-struck, which turns him, as lightning strikes so often do, into a werewolf.

If you get a chance to see this rather hilarious 1975 shot-on-video TV movie, made by Dick Clark's production company and filled with vets like Michael Parks, Harold J. Stone, Ann Doran, Richard Webb, Meredith MacRae and Belinda Belaski as the goodhearted hippie-chick hostage, I highly recommend. Bert was played, in his human form at least, by Tige Andrews of The Mod Squad. The guy had to put up with hippies throughout his career.

IN MY RUMBLE OPINION

Playing Tuesday night:

Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World—The “Rumble” in the title refers to the classic, greatly influential instrumental single of 1958 by Link Wray. Iggy Pop claims to have decided to pursue music in earnest after Wray’s thundering power chord air, as did Pete Townsend and other rock giants.

But this documentary by Catherine Bainbridge and Alfonso Maiorana, which screens Tuesday night at Third Street Theater in Phoenix as part of the “No Festival Required” film series, isn’t just about the influence of Native Americans on rock. It’s also about their influence on jazz, blues, roots, folk and heavy metal. There are episodes on Charlie Patton, Jimi Hendrix, Pete La Farge, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Jesse Ed Davis, Mildred Bailey, Howlin’ Wolf, Robbie Robertson and Randy Castillo, among others. The talking heads include Robertson, Iggy Pop, John Trudell, Steven Van Zandt, Taj Mahal and Martin Scorsese, among many others.

This smoothly made, graphically engaging movie makes a really convincing case, not only that many individual artists of Native American ancestry made a profound impact on popular music, but also that their contribution was itself heavily influenced by indigenous musical traditions, often in combination with African-American traditions. We see footage from Mardi Gras in New Orleans, or ensemble singing from Native communities in the southeast, that startlingly demonstrate the connection between these styles and pop forms. We even see Redbone on The Midnight Special back in the ‘70s, staging native dances before striking up “Come and Get Your Love.”

But while the case feels persuasive, Rumble isn’t a dry piece of ethnography. It’s a lively collection of show-business stories, some funny, some heartbreaking, all of them memorable. Music and cultural history buffs are strongly advised not to miss this one.

SHORT AND TO THE POINT

Wednesday evening’s offering from No Festival Required, The 19^th Annual Animation Show of Shows, is a startlingly diverse collection of short films. Much like the Rural Route touring show presented by the redoubtable not-a-festival this past August, this Show of Shows features shorts from North America and Europe. Inevitably, some of the selections on the bill, assembled by L.A.-based animation production company Acme Filmworks, are stronger than others. But far more are interesting than not.

Highlights include the graphically beautiful music video, by Quentin Baillieux of France, for the Charles X song Can You Do It, and the British sci-fi domestic comedy The Alan Dimension. From Switzerland comes George Schwitzgebel’s The Battle of San Romano, a riff on Uccello’s vision of the 15^th-Century scrap. There’s also The Burden (Min Borda) a deeply bizarre musical from Sweden featuring anthropomorphic fish, telemarketing monkeys, grocery-shopping dogs and dancing custodial hairless rats.

From the U.S. comes Dear Basketball, an ode to hoops created and narrated by Kobe Bryant and directed by Glen Keane (son of Arizona’s Bill Keane, of The Family Circus).

Also from the U.S., and worth the price of admission all by itself, is a revival of The Hangman, a 1964 project from Looney Tunes background artist Paul Julian which stunningly (and chillingly) brings to life the Maurice Ogden poem, here spoken by the late Herschel Bernardi, and as relevant as ever.

In short, this Show of Shows features subjects ranging from the dizzyingly cosmic to the mundane. Then comes the finale, Everything, a strange and lovely visualization of an engaging lecture on consciousness and cosmology by Alan Watts, carrying the lofty suggestion that the cosmic and the mundane are interconnected.

LEWIS CHANGE

Saturday night the "No Festival Required" film series features The Rural Route Film Festival Touring Program...

...a collection of striking shorts, both animated and live-action, from the New York-based fest. Check out my review, on Phoenix Magazine online.

RIP to Dick Gregory, passed on at 84, and to actor Jay Thomas, departed at 69.

And of course, RIP to the great Jerry Lewis, passed on at 91. My Mom always found Lewis' comic persona infantile and annoying, and his public persona preening and obnoxious. I can't say she was wrong on either score; the trouble, for me as a kid, was that I loved him anyway. I always felt sheepish watching his movies because of Mom's disapproval, but privately I thought they were hilarious. I remember once being home alone when The Patsy came on TV, and, unburdened by the need to inhibit my reaction, I was left prostrate with laughter by the pre-credit scene alone.

In the mid-'90s, I was lucky enough to see Lewis perform live, in a touring production of Damn Yankees that had been reshaped into a star vehicle for him. He was superb--even if his style wasn't your cup of tea, his charisma and old-school showbiz chops were stunning.

In his honor...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...the nod goes to this grotesque horror...

...into which Lewis, as Professor Kelp, briefly changes in The Nutty Professor, his 1963 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, before changing into the true monster, Buddy Love...

OLD SCHOOL TYRUS

This Sunday afternoon No Festival Required shows Pamela Tom's fascinating documentary Tyrus...

...at 1 p.m. at the Third Street Theater. Check out my review on The PHiX.

CRUMBS THE WORD

Playing TUESDAY ONLY, November 17, at No Festival Required:

Crumbs—Sure, I know, you’re sick of all those Ethiopian post-apocalyptic sci-fi movies. Well, who isn’t? But this particular Ethiopian post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie, from the Spanish writer-director Miguel Llanso, also has Michael Jordan worship, Michael Jackson veneration, a Christmas tree, toy dinosaurs lined up on a railroad track, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle in orbit, a witch, a shrewd antiques dealer and a bowling-ball-return machine as a major plot point.

Interested now?

The diminutive, hunchbacked and remarkably appealing hero Candy (Daniel Tadesse), wanders through the wastes of northern Ethiopia, scrounging the crumbs of our apparently crumbled civilization. He and his beautiful, beloved Birdy (Selam Tesfaye) live in an abandoned bowling alley, idyllically for the most part, though Birdy is haunted by nightmares and visions and Candy sometimes runs afoul of masked bandits, sometimes wearing Nazi insignia, sometimes on horseback.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, this movie also has masked horseback-riding or Nazi-insignia-wearing bandits.

Anyway, when the ball-return machine mysteriously comes back to life one day, Birdy theorizes that it might be a signal from the enormous spaceship in the shape of an upraised human arm that’s been hovering in the distance, apparently dormant, for a long time. So Candy trudges off across the wilderness to see if she might be right, and if it might spell a brighter future for them.

Had I mentioned that there’s an enormous spaceship in the shape of an upraised human arm hovering in the distance? There’s an enormous spaceship in the shape of an upraised human arm hovering in the distance.

What I’m saying is, this one is enchanting: Dreamlike—yet dramatically satisfying in a way that deliberately dreamlike movies often aren’t—elliptical, unnerving, sweet and funny. I advise you not to miss it.

Oh, and one more thing—this movie has Santa Claus in it. He’s a skinny, violent-tempered Santa Claus who insists everybody go through channels when asking for presents, so he may not put you in the Christmas spirit, but he’s Santa Claus nonetheless.

A-LIEN-LIST

In honor of No Festival Required’s screening of the cool documentary Dark Star: H. R. Giger this Saturday…

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s acknowledge Giger’s most famous creation, the deadly but elegant title character from Alien...

 based on his 1976 painting Necronom IV...

GIGER RECOUNTER

Playing Saturday, June 6, at No Festival Required:

Dark Star: H. R. Giger’s World—The Swiss artist and designer H. R. Giger made his biggest single mark on pop culture as the creator of the title creature in the Alien films. As with much of Giger’s work, the Alien is scary but—to my eye, anyway—not ugly; it has a svelte elegance.

At the beginning of this fascinating documentary, director Belinda Sallin’s camera noses around the quiet grounds of Giger’s rambling, tree-shrouded, cat-guarded old house, set incongruously amidst the sleek modern architecture of Zurich. We’re brought in the door and down the shadowy halls, past freaky murals and heaps of books, to where Giger sits sketching.

Again, the home that Giger pads around does indeed seem “dark,” bizarre and macabre, but not evil. There’s a serene, almost idyllic atmosphere to the place that’s quite appealing.

This effect even applies to the man himself. In the film, completed shortly before his death last year, Giger looks like a real-world version of Tolkien’s Gollum. Written on his round face with sad eyes and small, fretful mouth are both a past that includes tragedy and a life spent transcribing, often via airbrush, the surreal, erotically-charged “biomechanical” visions in his head. He speaks in a low amphibian croak suggesting that he suffered a stroke at some point.

But he’s no recluse. He’s friendly, patient and grateful toward his wife and the many friends and helpers that hang around his home; I found myself wishing I could be among them.

“Hansruedi” Giger was born in Chur in 1940, the son of a pharmacist. His childhood seems to have been happy, although his seminal memories seem to be of his father giving him a human skull or his sister taking him to the Raetian Museum to see a mummy, and he is said to have designed “ghost rides” to entertain neighbor kids.

After art school he gained gradual fame throughout the ‘70s with posters and rock album art—I first became aware of him by his cover for Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery. His Alien design won him an Oscar in 1980, and he worked on many other films, including Alejandro Jodorowsky’s abortive Dune adaptation (Giger is memorable among the talking heads in last year’s Jodorowsky’s Dune).

Giger’s wife Carmen tells Sallin’s camera that she finds her husband’s paintings erotic, and at an art gallery in Austria, a curator says that he sees a light behind the darkness of Giger’s visions. I see it too. Although the artist expresses a disbelief in—and a distaste for—the idea of an afterlife, there is, in his work, an exalted spiritual radiance under the chilly surface.

Opening today:

Entourage—The adventures of a pretty-boy Hollywood star and the hangers-on who share his glam lifestyle and guide his career is the not the sort of show I would have expected to enjoy. But the HBO series, which ran from 2004 to 2011, and which this feature continues, became a favorite of mine.

It is, I suppose, a guilty pleasure, loaded with snazzy homes and cars and luxury items and, only slightly less objectified, innumerable nude or scantily-clad young women (yet, oddly, many of the show’s most devoted fans that I know are women). It’s so escapist that it doesn’t even show us the drudgery and tedium of actually working on a movie, only the decadent partying and lively studio intrigues that take place before and after a movie is in the can.

What gave Entourage a heart was the cast. Easygoing Adrian Grenier, as easygoing star Vincent Chase, was rarely the focus of the stories, he was the hook on which the acting ensemble hung—Kevin Connelly as Vince’s Jiminy Cricket manager Eric “E” Murphy, Jerry Ferrara as chauffeur Sal “Turtle” Assante and Kevin Dillon as Vince’s older brother, hack actor and self-appointed chef Johnny “Drama” Chase.

There was a raft of well-realized supporting characters, and many real-life celebrities showed more juice playing themselves here than playing characters in their own movies. But the real energy on Entourage came, beyond question, from Jeremy Piven. As Vince’s wound-up agent Ari Gold, Piven strode around unloading insults and invective in his emphatic, declarative voice, while also letting us see Ari’s underlying conscience, his capacity for affection, and his surprisingly fierce if selectively applied sense of integrity. Ari’s manic efforts to unravel the studio-politics messes in which he finds himself were the true hero struggles of Entourage, and the series would have been inert without him.

Piven and the rest seem happy to slip back into their roles in the new film, directed by series creator Doug Ellin. The plot, around which a half-dozen or so subplots revolve, concerns Vince’s directorial debut, the attempt by the imbecilic son (Haley Joel Osment) of a Texan investor (Billy Bob Thornton) to meddle with it, and the efforts of Ari, now a studio head, to prevent this meddling. The film may not do much for the uninitiated, but for fans, it’s probably enough to say that it plays like a sped-up season of the show. Ellin keeps things moving, and for the short running time of Entourage—it clocks in at well under two hours—I was contentedly entertained. It feels like a reunion with old, immature, disreputable, goodhearted friends.

TANK STOP

Screening Thursday at 7:30 p.m. at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, as part of No Festival Required’s “Summer of Suburbia Films” series, is Cul de Sac: A Suburban War Story.

Garrett Scott’s 2002 documentary, which runs less than an hour, chronicles the sad end of Shawn Nelson, an Army veteran who, one evening in May 1995, stole an M60 tank from a National Guard Armory near his home in Claremont, California and took it on a joyride through the neighborhood, trashing dozens of vehicles but, miraculously, injuring no one except Nelson himself, who was shot to death by the police.

A broke, unemployed meth user on the verge of losing his house, Nelson had dug a 15-foot hole in his back yard earlier that same year, in the delusion that he could mine for gold there. Scott’s film consists of news footage of the tank rampage and its aftermath, intercut with talking-heads footage of Nelson’s friends and family, who seem like they’ve stepped out of a Sam Shepherd play. In the manner of a non-facetious Michael Moore, Scott also presents a sketch of the social and economic history of Claremont and other San Diego-area communities, former defense-industry boomtowns declining to meth-infested near-slums since the Cold War, in an attempt to link Nelson’s weird tragedy directly to the Military-Industrial complex.

I think it’s possible to share the political sentiments implied in this approach (as I do) and still find this an overreach. But Cul-de-Sac is nonetheless an absorbing and painful story, well told.