Be not deceived by the Merchant/Ivory name attached to Ratcatcher; those in search of repressed emotions among the corseted well-to-do will be in for a nasty shock. For this is a Scottish working-class film, and, like its compatriots The Acid House and Orphans, it is laden with squalor and violence…
The current state of American teen romantic comedy can be tough to bring into focus. It may not even really be a genre, but rather one big über-movie, a pulsating — listlessly pulsating — mass of Freddie Prinze Jr. and Julia Stiles and Kirsten Dunst and Jody Lyn O’Keefe and…
Some reserved, polite reading at Borders or Barnes & Noble or Changing Hands this ain’t. The term “penny dreadful” used to refer to potboiler fictions of earlier centuries which focused on the lurid, the sensational, the violent, the debauched. It’s a badge that the five scribblers featured in “Penny Dreadfuls:…
Emily Dickinson, the great spinster-bard of Amherst, Massachusetts, died young. She was just 56 when Death, in her phrase, “kindly stopped” for her in 1886. Death has been much kinder still to lovers of American acting: Julie Harris has outlived Dickinson’s age by two decades, and is still going strong.Of…
Gil Cates takes a long, deep breath before answering the question: Is producing the Academy Awards show the ultimate no-win situation? Cates has produced nine of the past 11 Oscar telecasts, and he returns March 25 after a year’s layoff; for those scoring at home, Cates is not to blame…
One can only imagine the pitch meeting at which comedian-turned-film-actor Denis Leary told ABC programming execs he wanted to write and star in a show about a pill-popping, Scotch-swilling, chain-smoking, adulterous New York City cop who utters obscenities as casually as he exhales. It’ll be a 30-minute show, Leary probably…
Director John Herzfeld’s last feature, the droll and underrated 1996 2 Days in the Valley, was a more than adequate counterbalance to the catastrophe of his first feature, Two of a Kind, a 1983 John Travolta vehicle which, together with Moment by Moment, put its star on the fast track…
In recent years, a theory has gained currency in paleontological circles that, basically, dinosaurs didn’t really become extinct — they just grew feathers, and a few of them learned to fly. Modern-day birds, the theory holds, are not just distant evolutionary cousins of the bad boys of the Jurassic, but…
Considering what’s now on display in “Swans and Portraits” — an exhibition of screen prints and two large paintings by Julian Schnabel at AZ/NY Gallery in Scottsdale — the New York artist better not be giving up his film directing day job anytime soon. AZ/NY Gallery, new to the Scottsdale…
If the measure of a good play is its ability to evoke emotion, then Love Waits is a stunning success. The play’s teeny opening-night audience (I was joined by five patrons and an AriZoni adjudicator, one of those poor souls charged with judging plays for a dubious local theater awards…
With In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-wai solidifies his stature as the subtlest and most idiosyncratic of Hong Kong directors. In an industry best known for its accessible, crowd-pleasing comedies and action films, Wong has turned out a series of increasingly risky dramas that make little or no concession…
Phoenix choreographer Frances Cohen was first to helm a resident modern dance company, Centre Dance Ensemble, at the Herberger Theater Center in 1988. First dancer to win a Governor’s Arts Award in 1994. And first to make a dance (in 1984) based on artist and Holocaust victim Charlotte Salomon, called…
Let it not be said that See Spot Run is without its distinctions. For instance, it is, in all likelihood, the first movie for kids featuring comic castration. It’s also probably the first movie of any kind that subjects its leading lady to explosively ignited zebra flatulence. And then there’s…
Sam Hamm is, relatively speaking, a successful Hollywood screenwriter, meaning he earns his keep penning screenplays without having to subsidize his income by tending bar or waiting tables. He has a handful of films to his credit, some little known (1983’s Never Cry Wolf, his debut), some enormously profitable (1989’s…
Pornography. Say the word out loud — do you spit it out with disgust or roll the syllables off your tongue gently, dreamily? Does the mere thought of pornography revolt you, make you muse about the decline of Western civilization in the 21st century? Does it weigh you down with…
Forget that I’m an atheist. Or that the last time I heard a disco song I liked was nearly a quarter-century ago. My objections to God’s Trombones are strictly critical. In its new production of this terribly contemporary musical, Black Theatre Troupe delivers a loud but largely ill-conceived collection of…
Having given us opera’s all-time greatest bad girl earlier this season with Carmen, Arizona Opera has been taking pains to compensate, with two heroines in a row so goody-goody that Jeanette MacDonald might find them square. First there was Minnie, The Girl of the Golden West, holding Bible study for…
Two nude dancers pace ritualistically toward an offstage light, their bodies breathtakingly painted by tattoo artist George Long. It takes hours to perfect these full-body tattoos before each performance, and you can only imagine the loving care Long must give to each curlicue that encircles the cheeks of the dancers’…
Leave it to Hollywood to sell us the insipid romance of a thoroughly irritating white couple as the solution to an archaic Latin American mystery. As pure bang-up adventure, The Mexican is certainly more user-friendly than childish junk like The Way of the Gun, but the attempt to weave adult…
Have you heard? Beauty’s only skin deep. Pay attention now: When it comes to love, experience is the best teacher. And just in case you didn’t know: Youth is wasted on the young.Such are the banalities director Tonie Marshall dispenses, more or less, in Venus Beauty Institute, a French romantic…
Back East, and elsewhere in the world, Arizona is thought not to have seasons. Or, rather, we’re thought to have two seasons — really hot and really, really hot.Once you’ve lived here a couple of years, however, you recognize that there are very distinctive seasons here, and few are as…
Henry Rollins doesn’t have a lot of spare time. He is well into his second decade of dividing his energy among careers as musician, author, actor, publisher, commercial spokesman and general heavily tattooed man about town. His most interesting and unique gig has got to be the so-called “talking shows”…
