In assessing the merits of Quills, the lusty new feature by director Philip Kaufman (Henry & June), it’s tempting to seek correlative characters from popular movies to illustrate just how radical this business is not. In Kaufman’s film — affectionately constructed upon a screenplay by Doug Wright, who adapts his…
More than any other year I can remember, in 2000 I heard people comment on how particularly bad movies were. In retrospect, I think they were right. The normal preponderance of mediocrity in human affairs makes every year seem like a bad movie year, but then when you review the…
In Hollywood, all it takes is one big hit. Sandra Bullock’s ticket to stardom was the 1994 sleeper Speed, a rip-roaring action/crime thriller that co-starred Keanu Reeves. With her cute girl-next-door looks and ingratiating physical klutziness, Bullock established an instant rapport with audiences. That perception of adorableness was further enhanced…
For the past few years, we’ve been told that Latino standup comedy was booming, and this would seem to be supported by the entertainment options this New Year’s Eve. Two venues are featuring major Latino comics as headliners.George Lopez, who has appeared everywhere from The Tonight Show to The Arsenio…
David Shepherd Grossman’s Stumbling Off 6th Street is, like the previous dozen or so collections from the Valley’s own troubadour, a strong and often stirring song cycle. Grossman, who performs on New Year’s Eve at Michael’s at the Citadel in Scottsdale, has a fondness for musical melancholia, but he never…
It’s where Walter Huston found paradise at the end of The Treasure of Sierra Madre. It’s where the murdering lovers Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw rode into the sunset at the end of The Getaway. It’s where Thelma and Louise were headed when they ended up at the Grand Canyon…
Playwright-filmmaker David Mamet has the sharpest gift imaginable for shooting down the sins of American greed, the con games people run to get ahead, and the corruption that comes with success. Whether he’s haunting a secondhand junk shop, a poker room or an outlying real estate office, he always finds…
All good things must come to an end, my grandmother always used to say. Once again, it looks like she was right. A celebrated performer is stepping out of the spotlight for the final time. Children and adults have adored her for 15 years, but now the time has come…
Christmas lives in tradition. There is something so comforting about dragging down those dusty old boxes, brushing off the cobwebs and pulling out that crude little Christmas tree ornament you made in first grade, the one your mother insisted on displaying so prominently year after year, against your vociferous protests…
Contained within a care package sent by C.D. Payne is a self-penned press release introducing the author as “the Rodney Dangerfield of comic novelists,” complete with a picture of the bug-eyed comedian and his shopworn catch phrase “I can’t get no respect.” As it turns out, this is the letter…
Linda Lewis apparently has a little trouble with authority.In her solo show at the Burton Barr Central Library and group show at Mesa Contemporary Arts, she uses old historical texts and documents to wage an arty war against history’s multitude of oppressive forces. Her weapon isn’t the heady philosophical discourse…
A recent decision to stop using mechanized music instead of live musicians in some theater productions has temporarily healed a rift between artists and producers here. Theatre League, a regional troupe that stages its Phoenix shows at the Orpheum, announced last week that it will no longer use “virtual musicians”…
The Family Man offers but a slight variation on the threadbare holiday theme of what life might have been like had Our Hero followed a different path — or never been born. Not only is it a redo of It’s a Wonderful Life — complete with an angel (played by…
Here you will find the ingredients required to spin an audience into throes of fuzzy warmheartedness — the hope, the compassion, the joie de vivre — all blended with the skill of a consummate confectioner. Much like a box of sweets with a convenient guide inside the lid, there are…
Fair warning: Enough time has passed that it’s okay to discuss the ending of writer-director M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable. Those who’ve not yet seen the film and intend to might want to keep on moving. Or perhaps not: To reveal the ending, all 180 or so seconds of it, is…
It’s no wonder that actress Cathy Dresbach looked disappointed during her second night curtain call for In Mixed Company’s The Mineola Twins. Although she’d delivered a fine performance in a splendid production, much of Paula Vogel’s knotty dialogue had fallen, that night, on deaf ears. The audience had responded tentatively…
What Women Want could be the first movie to win a Clio Award for Advertisement of the Year. No fewer than two dozen products receive prominent placement in the film, from Federal Express to Foster’s Lager to Cutty Sark to L’eggs pantyhose to US Airways. After a while, you begin…
There tend to be two poles when it comes to making semi-autobiographical movies about one’s childhood, and both are designed to make the viewer cry. There’s the “Those were the good old days” approach (see My Dog Skip or Stand by Me), usually depicting the time in a young boy’s…
“See, there’s this pre-Columbian emperor who’s a spoiled brat, and he gets turned into a llama, and he meets this peasant, and the two of them become buddies and save this little village . . .”It takes nothing away from The Emperor’s New Groove, Disney’s delightful new animated feature, to…
A mixture along these lines, with a strong dash of Mannheim Steamroller’s Christmas records, gives some idea of the flavor of Trans-Siberian Orchestra, which performs this Sunday at the Web Theatre. The entertainingly over-the-top symphonic-rock ensemble, which has nothing whatsoever to do with Siberia or with railroads, is a project…
You may have noticed some nuts around the Valley in the last weeks. No, I don’t mean the election protesters. I mean The Nutcrackers. Ballet & Friends in Scottsdale and Ballet Etudes in Chandler wrapped up their wonderful productions recently. That makes two down and one to go, with the…
This is a city of ghosts. Like an ancient necropolis unearthed from beneath the desert, Phoenix is a place of the dead. You see them caught in mid-scream in front of the bronze dome of the State Capitol, wandering eyeless across the dirt mounds of Pueblo Grande on Washington Street…
