The departure of Andy Griffith early this month is kind of a biggie for me—watching The Andy Griffith Show after school with my brother ranks among the happiest memories of my younger years. Griffith was a seriously skilled performer, and shrewd enough to know that he’d look better yet if he surrounded himself with terrific [...]
The newest Disney princess, Merida, loves to ride her horse and shoot arrows, often at the same time. She has wild red curls and a puckish smirk, and she climbs cliffs in a way that I hope the young audience members of Disney/Pixar’s Brave don’t try to imitate. Merida, voiced by Kelly MacDonald, takes after [...]
Source material for film has ranged from, at the prestigious end, masterpieces of world literature and drama and momentous historical events, down the slide to pulp fiction and comic books to, in recent years, old TV shows and video games and even theme park rides. I suppose it was inevitable than sooner or later somebody [...]
It’s generally agreed that word of mouth is the best advertising there is. But word of mouth isn’t the same as it used to be—the words are often tapped out on a keyboard, and the mouth is often a social media site. Jared Fenix, general manager of Lucky Break Billiards, Bar & Grill, doesn’t think [...]
If it isn’t already, you may want to make Wednesday your official movie night in June and July. Cinemark Theatres, in conjunction with Warner Bros., hosts a Summer Classics series Wednesday from June 6 to July 25, with shows at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. It’s a diverse batch of movies, all worth seeing, or [...]
The weekend of May 10th through the 13th, I had the pleasure to hang out in one of my favorite towns in the country,Palm Springs, at the 12th annual edition of my favorite film festival in the country: The Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival, at the Camelot Theatres on Baristo. As usual this year’s schedule [...]
To celebrate its 35th birthday, Childsplay, the resident theater company for young people at Tempe Center for the Arts, is once again doing a show that isn’t entirely, well, child’s play. “The Color of Stars” is a mystery/drama set in small-town America during WWII, involving both the suspicion and paranoia of such communities and such [...]
The name means “The Old House,” and not for nothing. Monti’s La Casa Vieja’s website lays claim to its renown as the Valley’s oldest continuously occupied building. When you walk into the place, you’re quite literally walking into history. That history begins in the early 1870s, when Charles Trumbull Hayden started work on a rambling, [...]
Wild turkeys have been a recurring theme in my life recently. I missed the screening of The Hunger Games, still mopping up at the box office two weeks after its opening, because I was back East. Among other places, I visited a honey farm in West Virginia, where I saw a small flock of the [...]
Maybe the highest compliment that can be paid to John Carter, the long-awaited version of A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, is that it looks just like it ought to look. Again and again, watching it, I was struck by how seamlessly the filmmakers had captured the visual flavor of the cover paintings [...]
