Although some highbrow critics have scoffed at them over the years as aesthetic wanna-bes, riding the coattails of artists like Henry James and E.M. Forster to the illusion of stature, the producer-director team of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory has had a long a career in the arthouses. In the…
thursday august 20 The three one-acts that compose The Silent Accord of Transience: The Aluminum Can Man Trilogy detail the encounters of Al, who makes his living collecting aluminum cans, with three different women. The Unlikely Theater Company presents this work, by Victoria Safriet, in its main-stage venue for the…
Based on a French film of 1990 called Force Majeure, the unhelpfully titled Return to Paradise aspires to be a morality play, one of those stories that makes you fret about what you would do in the same situation. It also wants to be a belated coming-of-age story, the drama…
thursday august 13 One of the stories I’ve heard all my life/Is about why a rancher takes a wife/So here’s the facts that everyone knows . . . . If you’re on the edge of your seat to know a) why a rancher takes a wife and b) what rhyme…
There are three reasons one might want to brave the August heat and go to the Phoenix Zoo this weekend, when the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile pulls in. One is to participate in the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile Talent Search, a national hunt for a new moppet between the ages of 3…
The Monty Python kid show How to Do It promised, among other things, to teach children how to play the flute. Here, in its entirety, is the instruction for that discipline: “You blow in one end, and move your fingers up and down the outside.” Proof that the Pythons had…
The unkillable masked killer in John Carpenter’s slasher-movie prototype Halloween is the most generic of all movie monsters. Even his name–reputedly borrowed from a British film distributor who made an overseas hit out of Carpenter’s early film Assault on Precinct 13–is prosaic: Michael Myers. He’s just a tall, silent stunt…
Jamie Lee Curtis is the most obvious graduate of Slasher U to cross over into big-time stardom–she’s back, in Halloween: H20, for the class reunion. But she’s not alone. Some major, no kidding, Oscar-winning, A-list stars have also matriculated the world of disreputable, low-budget slice-and-dice movies. Here’s a brief compendium:…
thursday august 6 “Arizona” and “ice hockey” aren’t exactly terms that go together like a horse and carriage, so perhaps to raise consciousness about the chilly sport here in the land of dry heat, the Phoenix Coyotes present the second annual Power Play Tour, which kicks off from 4 to…
thursday july 30 One of the more lighthearted and pleasingly unpretentious of the area galleries, Wilde-Meyer wraps up its summer show “Fun With Flora, Fauna and Fruit,” which includes works by such faves as CarterHolman, Jacqueline Rochester, Brian Cook, Chuck Davison, Dyanna Hesson, L.A. Hecht and Rudi van Brussel. Also…
Well I’m leavin’ this morning, baby, ridin’ that new highway, Yeah, I’m leavin’ this morning, baby, ridin’ that new highway, And the more you cry, the more you’re gonna drive me away. These lines are from a bluesy cut called “New Highway” on Blackjack David, the fine new HighTone album…
Though Ryan Noble’s documentary A Day With Sheriff Joe is just 29 minutes long, its title is apt. Half an hour of listening to Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio talk really does feel like putting in a full day. It could have been longer–feature-length, even–had Noble used all of the…
In the little Pacific Northwest town of Cradle Bay, troubled, “underachieving” teenagers appear to be an endangered species. One day a kid will be a hoodlum or a pothead or a slut, and the next he or she will have joined the “Blue Ribbon Club,” whose members all have tidy…
thursday july 23 “A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, a huge tube of sunblock, a bottle of rattlesnake antivenom serum, and thou . . .” Yes, the romantic side of our state was chosen as the subject of the very first episode of Romancing America, a new show…
You are getting sleepy . . . veeeery sleeepeee . . . Hey! Wake up! Pay attention! Stage hypnosis seems like it should belong to another age of show business, but a surprising number of performers remain on the national circuit with acts in which they put audience volunteers into…
Recently I asked the director and screenwriter and several of the stars of Saving Private Ryan what their favorite war movies are. Their selections: Steven Spielberg (director): “My favorite, favorite war movie is Battleground [MGM, 1949]. It’s the story of the Ardennes, and the “Battling Bastards of Bastogne,” directed by…
The deferral of grief through sex is the theme of Under the Skin, the fierce, occasionally impressive feature debut of Brit writer-director Carine Adler. The central character, Iris (Samantha Morton), a 19-year-old in suburban Liverpool, loses her mother (Rita Tushingham) to a swift, unexpected cancer. Iris’ married, pregnant older sister…
thursday july 16 That least egotistical species of actors–puppeteers–convenes in Tempe for the Pacific Southwest Regional Puppeteers of America Festival, from Thursday, July 16, through Sunday, July 19, at the Tempe Mission Palms Hotel, 60 East Fifth Street. The weekend, which includes public performances, educators’ workshops and such prestigious guests…
thursday july 9 Four Valley photographers–Tim Lanterman, James Leland, Bill Timmerman and John Wagner–were given a nice narrow theme to explore: “America.” The resulting exhibition, called “American Photographs,” continues through Friday, July 31, in the central gallery of the Burton Barr Central Library, 1221 North Central. New Times staff photographer…
For Valley Shakespeare buffs, north is an inviting direction this summer. Even for practitioners of “bardolotry”–to use Shaw’s sneering phrase–unwilling to trek all the way to the Utah Shakespeare Festival, a couple of more modest pilgrimages are possible: There’s iambic pentameter among the pines at Flagstaff’s Grand Canyon Shakespeare Festival…
Spike and Mike’s Classic Festival of Animation is the other yearly film anthology from the same two Californians–Spike Decker and Mike Gribble–who concoct Spike & Mike’s Festival of Sick and Twisted Animation. Like Sick and Twisted, their annual blowout of scatology, sacrilege and sensationalistic sex, the Classic festival is a…
thursday july 2 Veteran actor John Ratzenberger is best known as the know-it-all Cliff on Cheers. He’s less well-known as the father of a kid with diabetes, a vigorous activist in raising money for research into a cure for that condition, and an avid motorcyclist. Ratzenberger, now on Harley-Davidson’s cross-country…
