Monster-of-the-Week: ...this week's honoree is a Gill-Man...
...from Jacques Tourneur's 1965 War-Gods of the Deep...
He looks like he could be a cousin of del Toro's Gill-Man...
Thursday, December 7, 2017
GILL POWER
Guillermo del Toro's latest, The Shape of Water, which opens here this weekend, features an amphibious humanoid creature. So, since the Creature of the Black Lagoon has already been a Monster-of-the-Week so many times...
Monster-of-the-Week: ...this week's honoree is a Gill-Man...
...from Jacques Tourneur's 1965 War-Gods of the Deep...
He looks like he could be a cousin of del Toro's Gill-Man...
Monster-of-the-Week: ...this week's honoree is a Gill-Man...
...from Jacques Tourneur's 1965 War-Gods of the Deep...
He looks like he could be a cousin of del Toro's Gill-Man...
Tuesday, December 5, 2017
IT'S BACK, ACTUALLY
Harkins Theatres screens Love, Actually tonight as a "Tuesday Night Classic" at 7 p.m. at several different multiplexes throughout the Valley. The chain did this before back in 2014; here's what I posted about it then:
This week’s edition of Tuesday Night Classics at Harkins Theatres is Love, Actually, the 2003 multi-strand holiday comedy-drama by Richard Curtis. As with many of the Tuesday Night selections, it might be slightly premature to call it a classic, but it’s a strong, rich movie, and it wouldn’t be a bad way to get the holidays rolling, actually.
Actually. What a great word. Nobody says “actually” like the English of the posher classes. For them, perhaps, it’s a way of admitting that most of what they say is understated pleasantry, while at the same time asserting that the particular remark to which they’re attaching the modifier is heartfelt, even though they aren’t about to drop the reserved, self-deprecating manner. Coupled with the word “love,” it’s a fairly hot-blooded English avowal of passion, actually.
Even among the English, no one says the word “actually” quite like Hugh Grant. He used it more than once in his halting, foot-shuffling performance in Four Weddings and a Funeral back in 1994, scripted by Curtis, and he used it again in Love, Actually.
Grant plays the young Prime Minister of England, who arrives for his first day at Ten Downing Street only to find himself instantly afflicted with infatuation for a smiling, zaftig office assistant (Martine McCutcheon) who bears, though it’s never stated, some resemblance to our Ms. Lewinsky. This is one of several plot strands which Curtis loosely interweaves. The theme, it need hardly be said, is love: Romantic, marital, erotic, cross-cultural, adulterous, parental, filial, puppy, requited, unrequited, from afar, even patriotic—all of these variations are treated by the enormous cast.
Indeed, the case could probably be made that Curtis, also making his directorial debut, got a bit overambitious here, that there are too many plotlines, that some of them inevitably get short shrift. But I enjoyed the company of all of these people, and even when the movie gets a bit corny and carried away, as in a chase through Heathrow at the end, I found myself indulging it as one would indulge someone going on and on about a new love.
Standouts among the cast include Bill Nighy, hilarious as a down-on-his-luck rock star hoping for a Christmas hit, Kris Marshall as a dorky Brit convinced (not unreasonably) that his accent would make him a hit with American girls, Lucia Montez as the Portuguese housekeeper for whom Colin Firth falls across the language barrier, and Emma Thompson as the wife of the straying Alan Rickman—she suffers courageously in the grand Greer Garson tradition.
Most impressive of all, maybe, is the prodigal young Thomas Sangster—more recently seen in The Maze Runner—as Liam Neeson’s stepson who’s smitten with a girl at school. This kid’s grave, sober line readings dare you to patronize the significance of his feelings.
This week’s edition of Tuesday Night Classics at Harkins Theatres is Love, Actually, the 2003 multi-strand holiday comedy-drama by Richard Curtis. As with many of the Tuesday Night selections, it might be slightly premature to call it a classic, but it’s a strong, rich movie, and it wouldn’t be a bad way to get the holidays rolling, actually.
Actually. What a great word. Nobody says “actually” like the English of the posher classes. For them, perhaps, it’s a way of admitting that most of what they say is understated pleasantry, while at the same time asserting that the particular remark to which they’re attaching the modifier is heartfelt, even though they aren’t about to drop the reserved, self-deprecating manner. Coupled with the word “love,” it’s a fairly hot-blooded English avowal of passion, actually.
Even among the English, no one says the word “actually” quite like Hugh Grant. He used it more than once in his halting, foot-shuffling performance in Four Weddings and a Funeral back in 1994, scripted by Curtis, and he used it again in Love, Actually.
Grant plays the young Prime Minister of England, who arrives for his first day at Ten Downing Street only to find himself instantly afflicted with infatuation for a smiling, zaftig office assistant (Martine McCutcheon) who bears, though it’s never stated, some resemblance to our Ms. Lewinsky. This is one of several plot strands which Curtis loosely interweaves. The theme, it need hardly be said, is love: Romantic, marital, erotic, cross-cultural, adulterous, parental, filial, puppy, requited, unrequited, from afar, even patriotic—all of these variations are treated by the enormous cast.
Indeed, the case could probably be made that Curtis, also making his directorial debut, got a bit overambitious here, that there are too many plotlines, that some of them inevitably get short shrift. But I enjoyed the company of all of these people, and even when the movie gets a bit corny and carried away, as in a chase through Heathrow at the end, I found myself indulging it as one would indulge someone going on and on about a new love.
Standouts among the cast include Bill Nighy, hilarious as a down-on-his-luck rock star hoping for a Christmas hit, Kris Marshall as a dorky Brit convinced (not unreasonably) that his accent would make him a hit with American girls, Lucia Montez as the Portuguese housekeeper for whom Colin Firth falls across the language barrier, and Emma Thompson as the wife of the straying Alan Rickman—she suffers courageously in the grand Greer Garson tradition.
Most impressive of all, maybe, is the prodigal young Thomas Sangster—more recently seen in The Maze Runner—as Liam Neeson’s stepson who’s smitten with a girl at school. This kid’s grave, sober line readings dare you to patronize the significance of his feelings.
Sunday, December 3, 2017
FRIDA AT LAST
Happy December everybody!
As in years past, The Wife and I spent part of the month's first weekend having fun at the Tempe Festival of the Arts. Giant Frida Kahlo was strolling there too...
Always good to see her.
The December issue of Phoenix Magazine, now on the stands...
...includes my meat-lover's "Four Corners" column.
As in years past, The Wife and I spent part of the month's first weekend having fun at the Tempe Festival of the Arts. Giant Frida Kahlo was strolling there too...
Always good to see her.
The December issue of Phoenix Magazine, now on the stands...
...includes my meat-lover's "Four Corners" column.
Thursday, November 30, 2017
GOOD NABORS
RIP to Jim Nabors, passed on at 87.
He's most remembered, rightly, as the guileless, sweet-souled Gomer Pyle from The Andy Griffith Show and its spinoff Gomer Pyle, USMC. But how many people remember him from the short-lived and fairly painful 1975 Sid & Marty Kroft series The Lost Saucer, in which he and Ruth Buzzi played wacky androids?
Well, in his honor...
Monster-of-the-Week: ...here's The Dorse...
...a half-dog, half-horse from that show.
He's most remembered, rightly, as the guileless, sweet-souled Gomer Pyle from The Andy Griffith Show and its spinoff Gomer Pyle, USMC. But how many people remember him from the short-lived and fairly painful 1975 Sid & Marty Kroft series The Lost Saucer, in which he and Ruth Buzzi played wacky androids?
Well, in his honor...
Monster-of-the-Week: ...here's The Dorse...
...a half-dog, half-horse from that show.
Monday, November 27, 2017
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.
Thursday, November 23, 2017
OFF-BROADWAY TURKEY
Hope everybody is having a joyous, yummy Thanksgiving! In honor of the day...
Monster-of-the-Week: ...the nod goes to the murderous, foul-mouthed turkey from ThanksKilling the Musical...
...the stage version of the notorious low-budget 2009 horror indie. It's had productions in Seattle, New York, Atlanta, Columbus and Orlando, and a cast recording is available on Amazon, too, with cuts like "Gobble, Gobble, Motherf***er" and "The Jock and the Hick and the Nerd and the Slut (and Me)." The perfect stocking stuffer!
Monster-of-the-Week: ...the nod goes to the murderous, foul-mouthed turkey from ThanksKilling the Musical...
...the stage version of the notorious low-budget 2009 horror indie. It's had productions in Seattle, New York, Atlanta, Columbus and Orlando, and a cast recording is available on Amazon, too, with cuts like "Gobble, Gobble, Motherf***er" and "The Jock and the Hick and the Nerd and the Slut (and Me)." The perfect stocking stuffer!
Wednesday, November 22, 2017
LAWYERS & MISERS & DREAMBOATS, OH MY!
Opening today:
Roman J. Israel, Esq.--The title character is an L.A.-based civil rights attorney who makes a bad first impression. With thick glasses and a sad, moppy Afro, dressed in an ill-fitting old suit and clip-on tie, making unfiltered (if usually justified) insulting remarks, barking loud derisive laughter, Roman is a brilliant lawyer but a socially awkward misfit without family or close friends.
When his beloved, legendary partner dies, Roman lands at a hotshot criminal defense firm run by the slick Colin Farrell. Farrell's exasperated by his new associate, but too aware of his gifts, and maybe too conscience-haunted about his own lost idealism, to get rid of him. When one of Roman's cases goes tragically wrong, he yields at long last to the temptations of cynicism, and winds up in real trouble.
Writer-director Dan Gilroy is trying for a gripping legal drama in the vein of The Verdict. But while the story has its interesting aspects, it's too loosely structured and rambling to keep us on the edge of our seats, and Roman's plight in the movie's final quarter is unconvincingly dramatized.
While the film falls short as a thriller, however, it succeeds as a character study. Washington taps the prickly side of his own persona to create this maddening and lovable nerd-warhorse, who decides, disastrously, to try wealth and luxury on for size. If the plot were as vividly rendered as the title character and his moral lapse, Roman J. Israel, Esq. would be a classic. As it is, it's an interesting misfire.
The Man Who Invented Christmas--The man in question is Charles Dickens, played by Dan Stevens in this adaptation of Les Standiford's 2008 nonfiction book. Standiford's thesis is that by writing his "Ghost-Story of Christmas" A Christmas Carol in 1843, Dickens helped to bring the holiday, which had fallen somewhat into disuse in Britain, to something of the social importance it now holds, and particularly to its association with charity and liberality.
If this is true, then I think we can forgive him for the long-term downside of this. It's doubtful that Dickens, with his genial vision of helping the needy and partying with family and friends, could have foreseen Black Friday riots and holiday depression.
This is a fascinating story, but while the movie, adapted by Susan Coyne and directed by Bharat Nalluri, is watchable and amusing enough, it seems to me to have been dramatized in the most conventional and heavy-handed way. Like Shakespeare in Love, the film depicts literary inspiration as a direct line from what an author witnesses or overhears on the street to what he promptly runs home and scribbles into his work. But while Shakespeare in Love made a borderline-campy joke of this idea, The Man Who Invented Christmas suggests that it's getting at the Dickens psyche, as the author's imagination conjures up Scrooge, Marley, Fezziwig and other figures, and gets heckled by them.
The film tries to generate suspense over whether Dickens will allow Scrooge his change of heart and spare Tiny Tim at the end of the story, and further tries to link the Scrooginess in the author's own personality to his lifelong conflict with his big-talking, perennially broke father. Both of these ploys feel thin--it's hardly likely that Dickens ever conceived of A Christmas Carol ending with Scrooge unrepentant.
Still, there is plenty of enjoyable acting here. Christopher Plummer, who lent his voice to Herod the Great in last weekend's The Star, is such a natural as Scrooge that it seems odd he's never played the part before. Stevens is exuberant as Dickens, and gets across some of the frustration that anyone who writes for a living feels at interruption. Justin Edwards is likable as the long-suffering Dickens pal John Forster, and it's great to see vets like Miriam Margoyles as a housekeeper and Simon Callow as the illustrator John Leech. The best performance, however, is by Jonathan Pryce as the sweet, cadging fraud John Dickens, genuinely pained by his son's shame over him, but not about to let it stop him from having a good time.
Monday night The Kid and I went to Comerica Theatre for a concert by One Direction alumnus Niall Horan; you can check out my review on Phoenix Magazine online.
Roman J. Israel, Esq.--The title character is an L.A.-based civil rights attorney who makes a bad first impression. With thick glasses and a sad, moppy Afro, dressed in an ill-fitting old suit and clip-on tie, making unfiltered (if usually justified) insulting remarks, barking loud derisive laughter, Roman is a brilliant lawyer but a socially awkward misfit without family or close friends.
When his beloved, legendary partner dies, Roman lands at a hotshot criminal defense firm run by the slick Colin Farrell. Farrell's exasperated by his new associate, but too aware of his gifts, and maybe too conscience-haunted about his own lost idealism, to get rid of him. When one of Roman's cases goes tragically wrong, he yields at long last to the temptations of cynicism, and winds up in real trouble.
Writer-director Dan Gilroy is trying for a gripping legal drama in the vein of The Verdict. But while the story has its interesting aspects, it's too loosely structured and rambling to keep us on the edge of our seats, and Roman's plight in the movie's final quarter is unconvincingly dramatized.
While the film falls short as a thriller, however, it succeeds as a character study. Washington taps the prickly side of his own persona to create this maddening and lovable nerd-warhorse, who decides, disastrously, to try wealth and luxury on for size. If the plot were as vividly rendered as the title character and his moral lapse, Roman J. Israel, Esq. would be a classic. As it is, it's an interesting misfire.
The Man Who Invented Christmas--The man in question is Charles Dickens, played by Dan Stevens in this adaptation of Les Standiford's 2008 nonfiction book. Standiford's thesis is that by writing his "Ghost-Story of Christmas" A Christmas Carol in 1843, Dickens helped to bring the holiday, which had fallen somewhat into disuse in Britain, to something of the social importance it now holds, and particularly to its association with charity and liberality.
If this is true, then I think we can forgive him for the long-term downside of this. It's doubtful that Dickens, with his genial vision of helping the needy and partying with family and friends, could have foreseen Black Friday riots and holiday depression.
This is a fascinating story, but while the movie, adapted by Susan Coyne and directed by Bharat Nalluri, is watchable and amusing enough, it seems to me to have been dramatized in the most conventional and heavy-handed way. Like Shakespeare in Love, the film depicts literary inspiration as a direct line from what an author witnesses or overhears on the street to what he promptly runs home and scribbles into his work. But while Shakespeare in Love made a borderline-campy joke of this idea, The Man Who Invented Christmas suggests that it's getting at the Dickens psyche, as the author's imagination conjures up Scrooge, Marley, Fezziwig and other figures, and gets heckled by them.
The film tries to generate suspense over whether Dickens will allow Scrooge his change of heart and spare Tiny Tim at the end of the story, and further tries to link the Scrooginess in the author's own personality to his lifelong conflict with his big-talking, perennially broke father. Both of these ploys feel thin--it's hardly likely that Dickens ever conceived of A Christmas Carol ending with Scrooge unrepentant.
Still, there is plenty of enjoyable acting here. Christopher Plummer, who lent his voice to Herod the Great in last weekend's The Star, is such a natural as Scrooge that it seems odd he's never played the part before. Stevens is exuberant as Dickens, and gets across some of the frustration that anyone who writes for a living feels at interruption. Justin Edwards is likable as the long-suffering Dickens pal John Forster, and it's great to see vets like Miriam Margoyles as a housekeeper and Simon Callow as the illustrator John Leech. The best performance, however, is by Jonathan Pryce as the sweet, cadging fraud John Dickens, genuinely pained by his son's shame over him, but not about to let it stop him from having a good time.
Monday night The Kid and I went to Comerica Theatre for a concert by One Direction alumnus Niall Horan; you can check out my review on Phoenix Magazine online.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
