According to various unreliable sources on the Internet, Just Married co-stars Ashton Kutcher (forever to be known as the star of Dude, Where’s My Car?) and Brittany Murphy (who wears way too much scary makeup even when she isn’t playing mental patients who’ll never tell) are now actually planning to…
I deplore The Fantasticks. Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s hyper-popular, record-breaking chamber musical is on my short list of shows I wish had never been written — just below Cats and a few notches up from anything adapted from a Disney cartoon. I’ve endured this show numerous times over the…
If you read last month’s Art in America, you know that Studio LoDo (along with a lot of other deserving art spaces in the Scottsdale/Phoenix/Tempe megalopolitan area) is now officially “on the map.” Those of you who’ve been to this warehouse space with a loading-dock entrance don’t need to wonder…
Rats! Barry Paceley’s got them, but like the guy with the proverbial pile of lemons, Paceley has made lemonade — which, as residents of the tony Arcadia neighborhood know, is a roof rat’s favorite beverage. It’s been a year since Paceley and his fellow Arcadians went public about their ongoing…
It’s easy to presume that About Schmidt isn’t much of a movie, since its protagonist, Warren Schmidt, isn’t much of anything. He’s portrayed by Jack Nicholson, but the actor is actually someone who looks like he used to be Jack Nicholson. This Warren, this rinky-dink actuary banished to the wasteland…
There have been other films dealing with the Jewish ghettos during the Nazi occupation of Poland — some very good — but The Pianist, the latest feature from Roman Polanski, may be the best. Of course, it starts out with a huge advantage: The 69-year-old Polanski is probably the only…
People in show biz do very weird things to prove their credibility. Starlets pose for skin mags, actors start rock bands, rockers become sitcoms, rappers become tombstones and, now, in a heartwarming feature called Evelyn, James Bond wants us to believe he’s an Everyman. The lovely thing is, it works…
Francis Ford Coppola dreamed of doing an accurate Pinocchio film, but legal battles took that away from him. Walt Disney’s version is a classic, but omits a huge amount of material from the original book and Disneyfies what remains. And others have tried, over the years, though it’s best to…
You might be tempted to feel a touch of pity for World Wrestling Entertainment honcho Vince McMahon. About the same time his lame football league bit the dust, the wrestling tycoon got spanked in a British courtroom by the World Wildlife Fund regarding his corporate acronym. McMahon complied by renaming…
As a teenager in Haiti, Edouard Duval-Carrié spent a lot of time hanging around artists. “I was fascinated by what they were doing,” Duval says now. “Things have gone not very well since, but there was a period in Haiti when art was quite glorious.” The lost promise that Duval…
Lee Blumberg swears that the way we’re brought into the world can affect every minute of the rest of our lives. That’s why she’s crusading for hypnobirthing, a drug-free, painless means of popping out babies. Recently appointed by the Pennsylvania-based Prenatal Parenting Institute as Arizona’s official hypnobirthing practitioner, Blumberg is…
As Black Theatre Troupe deserts its longtime home, the dilapidated downtown Helen K. Mason Center, for the polished Herberger Stage West, the 33-year-old company has found a marketing niche. Dinah Was, Oliver Goldstick’s biography of blues singer Dinah Washington, is the latest in a string of tune-filled profiles of ill-fated…
Everything about Catch Me If You Can, the loosely based-on-fact tale of a teenager who swindled millions while posing as, among other things, a Pan Am pilot, a doctor and a lawyer, is breezy and easy to swallow. Its maker, Steven Spielberg, hasn’t had so much fun in two decades,…
Al Capone himself probably couldn’t kill Chicago. The bawdy Kander and Ebb musical has been charming theater audiences since 1975 with its gleefully jaundiced view of life, and Rob Marshall’s inventive movie version likely will win a lot of new friends for the stage-struck murderess Roxie Hart, her sharpie lawyer…
Here’s a tricky little movie to review, as it’s going to divide audiences fairly drastically. Conservatives, especially black ones like Larry Elder and Ken Hamblin, will likely laud Antwone Fisher as a heroic story of a triumphant black man who conquers his inner demons and outer obstacles (of which skin…
Based on the true story of three young Aboriginal girls who walked 1,500 miles across the Australian outback to be reunited with their mothers, Rabbit-Proof Fence might well be subtitled True Grit in recognition of the courage and single-minded determination that drove the trio to undertake such a perilous journey…
No, sports fans, Santa won’t grant your fondest wish and bring you an actual NFL-caliber team in place of the hapless Arizona Cardinals, whose season, thankfully, ends this Sunday in Denver. But football fanatics still have plenty to look forward to as the Valley hosts a terrific college bowl game…
You don’t need a subscription to Arizona Highways to know that our state’s landscape is one of the most photographed on Earth. Arizona’s rugged mountains, dramatic canyons and exotic flora are snapped so often, it’s easy to become immune to their charms. And that’s why it’s so refreshing, and even…
May Showers won’t set foot in Sportsman’s Fine Wines. “I’m not goin’ in there,” May tells me, “if there’s smoking and spirits.” I try to tell her that Sportsman’s is just a wine and cheese shop, but she’s adamant — and so we settle in at a curbside table –…
Fonsia Dorsey and Weller Martin are old. They have, like so many elderly people, been abandoned to the American health-care system and have landed in an old folks’ home where they meet one Sunday afternoon. He’s a crotchety codger, she’s a peevish fuddy-duddy, and, for two hours plus intermission, they…
Fantasy is at its best when it ennobles our reality, and in this year’s cinema no fantasy towers above The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. The second installment of J.R.R. Tolkien’s dark and delightful yarn is here adapted just as handily as last year’s The Fellowship of the…
Martin Scorsese’s latest epic of the streets, Gangs of New York, means to show us how a great metropolis was forged in the mid-19th-century caldrons of unbridled greed, ethnic violence and civil war. It means to give us the city as wild frontier — without the usual cowboy hats. This…
