She sank in 1912, but she keeps sailing on. The White Star Line’s Titanic, either the last great tragedy of 19th-century imperial hubris or the first great tragedy of technological hubris, has sailed through innumerable books, at least three movies — one of them the magnum chick flick of all…
Ah, summer — everywhere else in the country, it’s the sweet season of iced tea and bikinis and electric floor fans. But in central Arizona, iced tea is perennial, bikinis equal melanoma and electric floor fans are roughly as effective as they would be on the equator of the planet…
The title of the 1971 Gordon Parks detective movie Shaft worked as a double-entendre — when it presented Richard Roundtree’s “black private dick” John Shaft as a superstud at whom women of every race threw themselves, it wasn’t hard to believe. The joke changes when the name is given to…
You’ve got to hand it to Variety. Very often, while critics walk on eggshells around cultural generalities, the show-business trade publication cuts through it with an admirable bluntness. Here’s what the paper had to say about producer Ken Gentry’s new traveling version of the Frank Wildhorn musical The Civil War:…
Hey! What’re you doing sitting there at home watching TV, when you could go to the library and . . . watch TV? Tempe Public Library is hosting a bimonthly program that presents the “White House Millennium Lectures,” a series on videotape of talks on a wide array of subjects…
“I came to it late on–17” says Jimi Mistry of acting, and makes his interviewer feel roughly the age of a mummy. The young Brit, who did “most of my growing up in Manchester” before attending the Birmingham School of Speech and Dramatic Arts, made his film debut in 1996…
Despite the title East Is East, the big message of this flavorful domestic memoir is really that West is West. In the tug of war between East and West for a soul, East, the film suggests, may hold out for a while through a combination of nostalgia, pride, national resentment…
Dinosaurs used to be cool. In 1969, if you had asked me what I thought was the best movie ever made, I would likely have told you that it was Valley of Gwangi, in which a group of cowboys find a gully full of leftover dinosaurs, animated by Ray Harryhausen,…
Basketball isn’t really my game. To the extent that I’m a sports fan at all, I like football and baseball. I’m really a movie buff. The signature snack of my pastime isn’t peanuts or Cracker Jacks, but popcorn. As appalling as ticket and concession prices have gotten at the movies,…
It’s often said that women turn into their mothers as they grow up, and in the case of writer-performer Nancy Wolter, that’s proved particularly true. Wolter’s 70-minute performance piece In Her Own Voice: Stories of My Mother is a tribute in which the author assumes the role of her own…
The word “International” has been added to its title, but this year’s edition of the Saguaro Film Festival has become the fest without a country. After debuting at Harkins Camelview 5 seven years ago, Arizona Film Society’s shindig for indies has knocked around the Valley, landing, in one year or…
“Know what I mean, know what I mean, nudge nudge? Say no more, say no more.” No more need be said. Eric Idle, the creator of these immortal lines and many of the other most beloved routines to come out of the one-of-a-kind British TV comedy Monty Python’s Flying Circus…
Glendale’s cool, intriguing, underrated downtown is, sadly, about to get a little less cool, intriguing and underrated. One of the antique mecca’s wittiest shops, Saints & Sinners, is about to close its doors in favor of the more cost-efficient online market. Asked to define S&S’s stock-in-trade, co-proprietor Shad Kvetko’s initial…
“I am preparing to go to a meeting at a studio called Big Ticket — a potential deal for a sitcom,” says Richard Jeni. “I’m thinking of calling it Everybody Loves Raymond, because that seems to work. Why reinvent the wheel?” Though he’s a two-decade veteran of the comedy-club scene…
“You don’t come up to people’s doors!” yells a woman to a pair of Mormon missionaries, before slamming her door in their faces. The scene, near the beginning of the film God’s Army, is intended to illustrate the difficulties of Mormon missionary work, which I suppose it does. But my…
The 25th annual edition of the Maricopa County Fair — regarded by many as a cozier, countrier, cooler, marginally less hucksterish version of the Arizona State Fair — continues through Sunday, April 16, at the fairgrounds, 19th Avenue and McDowell. Along with the inevitable carnival rides and games on the…
If you have a full wallet and an empty stomach, you can empty the former and stuff the latter silly at this year’s Scottsdale Culinary Festival, which runs through Sunday, April 16, at various venues around Scottsdale. You’ve already missed the Culinary Student Competition Awards Dinner on Wednesday, April 12,…
After decades of civil war and epidemic-level AIDS, Uganda has found itself abundant in something other than coffee, tea, peanuts, tobacco and copper. The little landlocked country in central Africa, best known here for its miseries during the eight-year reign of Idi Amin Dada, has also become far too great…
Having cleaned out their home or office, somebody recently set some books out in the editorial bullpen here at New Times about a week ago, in case anybody else might want to take them home. Among them were textbooks: one titled Tensile Structures, another Real Estate Law, Second Edition by…
“If you mention Robbie Knievel,” snarls motorcyclist Gary Wells, “you’re just wastin’ your ink!” This, of course, virtually ensures that I will mention Knievel fils, and in the first sentence, no less. “I’m the World Champion,” continues Valley resident Wells. “I jumped over 30 cars in Melbourne, Australia, twenty years…
In the opening scenes of Price of Glory, set in the late ’70s, a young prizefighter named Arturo Ortega (Jimmy Smits) loses a career-making bout. He earns a few grand, but he’s plainly washed up in the ring, and we’re meant to see that it’s his greedy manager’s fault –…
It’s not her role in the children’s movie Paulie, in which she appeared with actor/comic Jay Mohr (see feature left), that is being used to showcase one of the truly great actresses of American film, Gena Rowlands, Monday night at Scottsdale Center for the Arts. Rather, it’s her acclaimed turn…
