Every year at this time, the media devote some of their attention to the subject of where one can go to gawk at the most elaborately decorated homes in the Valley. Why should we be any different? My own favorite, year in and year out, has been the row of…
Adapting Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park for the screen was never a life’s ambition for filmmaker Patricia Rozema. “It would never have crossed my mind,” she says. The project came her way as a commission, in the midst of the Austen fever that still held Hollywood in its grip a couple…
South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut may have been as vulgar and potty-mouthed as any movie ever made, but what was really remarkable about it was what an exuberant, toe-tapping musical it was. There were classic-style show tunes about avuncular incest and nationalist hatred and the private yearnings of Satan…
The writer of a full-page rave of David Shepherd Grossman’s 10-CD boxed set in the October issue of Songwriter’s Monthly grumbles that New Times didn’t return the writer’s calls while he was writing the story. Since no one from this publication had any comment in that article, let this one…
Before she — or anyone else — had ever heard the term, Lily Tomlin was already a performance artist. Growing up in blue-collar Detroit, Tomlin says that she never missed a chance to dress up and do monologues for her friends and family. “I’d put on my mother’s slip, and…
The legend “That Afternoon” appears onscreen, and then we see a car hurtle past us on a lonely desert road, hotly pursued by two Arizona Highway Patrol units. Behind the wheel, our hero Wade (Drew Pillsbury) sits with a stricken look on his face, plainly baffled at how he’s gotten…
A barren island in the San Francisco Bay, Alcatraz was from 1933 to 1963 the site of the notorious federal prison known by its residents as “The Rock” and famous for its inescapability. Rain forests, found around the world near the Equator, are wet jungles characterized by incredibly dense flora…
With the arrival of Santa/Hanukkah Harry/Y2K still a couple of weeks off, the festive season is at its height this week, and, as a result, holiday concerts are abundant. Here’s a run-down of a few of the possibilities: Phoenix Symphony — Despite all the seasonal sounds around the Valley this…
At the beginning of Spanish Fly, Zoe, the heroine, meets Antonio, who’s both Spanish and fly. Zoe’s an American writer staying in Madrid to research a book on machismo. Antonio, a blocked writer himself and a not-at-all-blocked womanizer, is her interpreter. They start bickering at once, so we know they’re…
If you’re among those who value New Times less for its journalistic and literary merit and more for its excellence as bedding, clothing and toilet paper, a traditional home-cooked meal or a feast at a gourmet restaurant may not be feasible for you this Thanksgiving. (Of course, there are probably…
P.T. would be proud. The Barnum Organization cannot have failed to notice the rise, and the smashing success, of artsy, boutique-style circuses like Cirque du Soleil and Circus Flora. Realizing that, to modify the master’s famous truism, there’s an upscale sucker born every minute, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey…
While Kevin Smith’s Dogma does perhaps offer moviegoers the first slacker angels, higher beings are nothing new in the movies. Silent master D.W. Griffith actually staged the Fall of the Angels, quite spectacularly, in his 1926 epic The Sorrows of Satan. But movie angels since then have usually been folksier,…
Former Phoenix Sun Wayman Tisdale is the headliner at this year’s Cool Desert Jazz Festival. Now a full-time “smooth jazz” bassist, touring behind his Atlantic Records debut, Decisions, the 12-year veteran of the NBA tops the marquee at the fifth annual concert, on Saturday, November 13, at Estrella Mountain Ranch,…
Though there have been a few remarkable exceptions in recent years — An Inspector Calls and Angels in America among them — Broadway tours of nonmusical plays rarely visit the Valley. After a season of Fames and Footlooses, the chance to see three actors talking, just talking their way through…
Horned, fanged, cat-eyed and pointy-eared, the colossal green head glowered down on both lanes of I-10. Tempe Diablo Stadium, over the parking lot of which the Dante-esque visage floated, had never seemed so aptly named. “I don’t think this is the home of the Anaheim Angels today,” remarked the publicist…
“I do these one-man shows based on my life, but fictionalized, though the weirdest stuff tends to be real.” That’s how Josh Kornbluth explains what he does in the theater. “In Red Diaper Baby, I talk about how my father bursts into my room naked, covered with talcum powder, singing…
The everyman hero of the horror movie Bats, a small-town Texas sheriff played by Lou Diamond Phillips, is given an odd character trait. After he and some other people have barricaded themselves into a school building and are awaiting attack by a flock of mutant killer bats terrorizing his little…
The makers of The Story of Us have a premise they want to share. Check it out — according to this movie, men and women often have different responses to life, love and sex, and this can sometimes result in conflict and tension in a marriage. And you thought American…
Thursday, October 7, is shaping up to be Valley theater’s biggest opening night of the year. At least half a dozen fairly major shows open that night. Here’s a quick run-down of your many options as a Mr. or Ms. First-Nighter: Play On! — Arizona Theatre Company kicks off its…
The gentlest and most innocent of the Muppet “monsters” of Sesame Street is aimed at the show’s littlest viewers. As a result, he’s also the least amusing for adults; even if you grant that Elmo is awfully sweet, you may wince at the prospect of sitting through his big-screen starring…
The last year has seen much discussion of Alfred Hitchcock, between Gus Van Sant’s eccentric Psycho reenactment and the 100th anniversary of the master’s birth. Much of the focus, rightly enough, has been on the far-reaching effects of the 1960 Psycho, but the film Hitchcock made the year before, the…
An upcoming two-part PBS omnibus of six documentary shorts has a special and ongoing relevance to this area, which is made clear by its title: The Border. The goal of the show, hosted by 20/20’s John Quinones, is to get away from the hysteria and distortion that surround much of…
