Although David W. Rintels’ Clarence Darrow: A One-Man Play — adapted from Irving Stone’s novel Clarence Darrow for the Defense — is best-known as a ’70s-era stage vehicle for Henry Fonda, Paradise Valley resident Leslie Nielsen has also enjoyed much success in the role, touring his native Canada with the…
Whether it’s bad or good commercial luck that the thriller Stir of Echoes follows so closely on the heels of The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan’s wildly successful ghost-story sleeper, it’s bad critical luck. The film has some startling parallels with The Sixth Sense: Both concern psychic communication with the…
Demonstrating that anthropology is one of the liveliest and broadest of sciences seems to be the objective of the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival. Nine of the diverse cultural documentaries from the American Museum of Natural History’s fest, named for the much-admired anthropologist, are to be shown during September…
Fortune has smiled on Brendan Fraser. The star of the new Dudley Do-Right may just have the most pleasant lot of any young male actor in American movies right now. He looks great in or out of his clothes, he has an easy, self-effacing likability on screen, and, maybe most…
When she dislocated her knee a few years ago, the busy local stage actress Cindy Wynn had no reason to assume that it would prove a turning point in her career and life. But when what appeared to be a minor injury didn’t get better, and when she was diagnosed…
The comedy With Friends Like These has a setting with possibilities — the world of second- and third-tier Hollywood character actors, the hustlers who make a decent living in movies and TV but rarely get the sort of roles that are a joy to play, or that bring fame and…
Easterners come to live in the Valley for a variety of reasons. Indeed, the metro area is beginning to split at the seams, the air to curdle and the pavement to crack under the strain of all the people from the East, and elsewhere, who found so many good reasons…
First published under the title The Iron Man in Great Britain in 1968, The Iron Giant is a minor classic of 20th-century children’s literature. The slim volume by the English poet laureate Ted Hughes is a pacifist parable in the guise of a sci-fi hero fantasy. Hughes spun his yarn…
Brad Bird, the adapter/director of the warmhearted animated feature The Iron Giant, made his name with edgier fare: He created TV’s Family Dog, and worked on such series as The Simpsons, The Critic and King of the Hill. On a recent visit to Phoenix, he explained his contribution to the…
If you plan to park your kids in front of Inspector Gadget for 80 minutes, have at it. The film is terrible, drab, spiritless and empty, but it’s also harmless enough. Sure, it’s full of anarchic, slapstick violence, and it encourages the belief that if you stuff a trench coat…
thursday july 22 Jazz sax man Gato Barbieri honks away, touring behind his Columbia Jazz CD Che Corazon, at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, July 22, at the Red River Music Hall, Mill and Washington in Tempe. See the story on page 104. Tickets are $28.50. 602-829-6779 (Red River), 480-503-5555 (Dillard’s). A…
To promote the Friday, July 23, opening of their glossy remake of The Haunting, the friendly folks at DreamWorks sent me a copy of Haunted Places: The National Directory (Penguin, 1994), a state-by-state compendium of places where ghosts, aliens, legendary creatures and the like are said to hang out. Perhaps…
thursday july 15 “Was Jack the Ripper a Woman?” That’s the question that’s being used to promote Paradise Valley Community College student playwright Allison Rose’s new speculative drama The Fifth Victim: Jack the Ripper Discovered. The work, directed by Gray Zaro, is the inaugural production of PVCC’s summer theater program…
The Blair Witch Project, the bone-chilling indie by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, is easily the scariest horror picture of the ’90s, a movie that can take a place among the most potent and inexorable of modern shockers, like Night of the Living Dead or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Three…
Gladys Knight & the Pips Claudine Bobby Womack The Poet Leon Huff Here to Make Music (The Right Stuff) This trio of R&B rereleases from The Right Stuff label dates back to the heart of the disco era. Released at any other time, two of the albums would easily have…
Thursday July 8 Several of the Valley’s top female vocalists–Ayanna, Karen Brooks, Dorothy Grayson, Maxine Johnson, Lady J, Kauffe, Lila, Karen Scott, Patti Williams and others–perform, backed up by Blues Ratio, at “Phoenix Divas Live: An Evening With Ladies of Color,” a benefit show scheduled for 8 p.m. Thursday, July…
In a touching effort to help the devoted art rats who turn out for the “Summer Spectacular” Art Walk stave off the heat, Coldwell Banker’s Success Realty Concierge Services has erected a “Tunnel of Mist” to keep walkers cool between galleries on Scottsdale’s Main Street, and China Mist Tea will…
“Was it I that hurried to the deed? No. It was the daemon that possessed me. My limbs were guided to the office by a power foreign and superior to mine. I had been defrauded, for a moment, of the empire of my muscles. A little moment for that sufficed…
The sun was coming up when I finished reading Thomas Harris’ Hannibal, the sequel to The Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon. The third leg of his trilogy of wildly popular psycho-thrillers featuring the supergenius, psychologist and cannibalistic serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter is a crazy and maddeningly uneven…
If aural fireworks stir your red American blood more than midair explosions, here are some traditional Independence Day Weekend Concert options. Among the ensembles below, there probably aren’t quite 76 trombones, but it’s likely to sound as if there are. Scottsdale Symphony Orchestra: The outfit offers its 23rd annual patriotic…
thursday july 1 Down-home country comic Rodney Carrington–sort of a cross between Tim Allen and Garth Brooks–spends his Independence Day weekend in the Valley at 8 p.m. Thursday, July 1; 8 and 10 p.m. Friday, July 2; and the same times Saturday, July 3 at the Tempe Improv Comedy Theater,…
Because the Fourth of July falls on a Sunday this year, many of the celebrations, concerts and the like are being pushed forward to Friday or Saturday. For the hardy souls who wish to brave the crowds, heat and parking purgatory on Sunday night, not to mention a bleary-eyed Monday…
