I never imagined the day would come when I would cringe to see Ralph Fiennes on screen. Not only is he shamelessly good-looking, but, whether playing the brooding, remote figure doomed by love in The English Patient or the bloodless commandant of a Nazi death camp in Schindler’s List, he…
In the new Jim Carrey farce, Me, Myself & Irene, the rubber-faced comedian plays a meek Rhode Island state trooper named Charlie whose aggressions are so pent-up that they finally have to break out in the form of a second personality called “Hank.”Where Charlie silently endures potty-mouthed curses from little…
She sank in 1912, but she keeps sailing on. The White Star Line’s Titanic, either the last great tragedy of 19th-century imperial hubris or the first great tragedy of technological hubris, has sailed through innumerable books, at least three movies — one of them the magnum chick flick of all…
You know the joke, no doubt — the greatest show-biz joke of all time. It’s been told innumerable times before, at least once in these very pages. You haven’t heard it? Okay, one more time: A guy goes into a bar. He’s sitting there drinking, and after a while he…
There exists deep within any man who once read comic books and collected them–protected them, actually, with plastic sleeves and cardboard backs and boxes that fought off the yellowing of time–the mythical being known as The Fanboy. A long time ago, The Fanboy pored over every issue of World’s Finest…
It’s never been easy to explain the weakness of Phoenix’s downtown art scene. Art martyrs like to pin its frailty on the city’s antipathy toward culture. They say Phoenix has pumped municipal bond dollars by the millions into a few big museums while happily bulldozing smaller downtown galleries and art…
Don’t expect to see the luminous resin shrines and mysterious opalescent spheres for which Valley artist Mayme Kratz previously has been known when you go to see “Waking in the Dark,” an exhibition of Kratz’s most current work at Scottsdale’s Lisa Sette Gallery.The only stylistic remnant of her older artwork…
Elizabeth Egloff’s The Swan is a terrible play. Poorly written and stuffed with repetitive dialogue, it stands stock-still, flapping its wings but never taking off. And in its Ensemble Theatre production, the program is — with one important exception — inexpertly acted. That exception, Ken Matthews’ remarkable performance in the…
The title of the 1971 Gordon Parks detective movie Shaft worked as a double-entendre — when it presented Richard Roundtree’s “black private dick” John Shaft as a superstud at whom women of every race threw themselves, it wasn’t hard to believe. The joke changes when the name is given to…
So, when was the last time you shared a woman with your dad? No, not your mom — don’t be gross. You know, just some woman that you and your dad both dug, who perked you up a bit. It’s probably been a while, huh? What? Never? Really? Well, that…
It’s the year 3028, and man . . . is an endangered species! (Haven’t we heard that somewhere before, like last month?)But this time around, the threat is a little more intimidating than those effeminate, Xenu-worshiping Conehead psychologists in platform boots. The villains in Fox’s new animated spectacular Titan A.E…
Ah, summer — everywhere else in the country, it’s the sweet season of iced tea and bikinis and electric floor fans. But in central Arizona, iced tea is perennial, bikinis equal melanoma and electric floor fans are roughly as effective as they would be on the equator of the planet…
It is nearly 30 years ago. As the movie begins, we see Richard Roundtree walk along New York City streets while Isaac Hayes asks some female backing singers a series of questions that all have the same answer. “Who’s the black private dick who’s a sex machine to all the…
Before we see anything in Croupier, the new film from director Mike Hodges and screenwriter Paul Mayersberg, we hear the grainy whir of the ball spinning around the rim of a roulette wheel. When the image of the wheel appears, the sound drops out, to be replaced by the affectless…
Blink — or, more likely, doze — and you will miss it, this tiny, beautiful oasis in the middle of an otherwise barren wasteland. For a moment — a precious, frustrating moment to be treasured in a movie that flaunts its disposability — Nicolas Cage reminds us how good an…
For years, there has been a hole in the cultural landscape of the Valley of the Sun. We have nationally recognized art museums, history museums, children’s museums, science centers, theaters and symphonies, as well as every professional team sport, but we have never had a natural history museum. Where can…
It’s not like those intrepid theatergoers here in the desert don’t have plenty of chances to brush up on their Shakespeare. Season after season, they can choose from a dozen productions of timeless goodies penned by the fellow from that Gwyneth Paltrow flick, but unfortunately, it seems that local copies…
His name appears in almost every book written about Groucho Marx, so much so, he has been given the appropriate appellation by members of the Marx family: Wesso. But Paul Wesolowski is of no relation to the famous clan. He’s a man in his 40s who lives outside Philadelphia and,…
Summer comes with the cultural expectation that the farther you travel, the better the art gets. Mexico City, New York, Europe and Asia prove that equation. But cultural tourism in Phoenix’s west side remains a mystifying exception.That’s partly why “Three Generations of Great Masters of Mexican Painting,” at ASU West,…
First it was competition from the new sports arena downtown. Then it was the general lack of cultural sophistication that reportedly plagues all Phoenicians. Lately, it’s been the “risky” material chosen by artistic directors.Every season, our local theater companies offer a different reason for their diminishing returns. And several local…
Merchant/Ivory Productions has long been America’s quintessential purveyor of classy “literary” films. At its best, the team of director James Ivory and Ismail Merchant has given us A Room With a View (1986) and The Remains of the Day (1993); at its worst, Slaves of New York (1989) and Jefferson…
For a moment or two, David Lowery — front man for the band Cracker, and before that, beloved college-radio revolutionary sweethearts Camper Van Beethoven — found himself enjoying the book. He laughed in the right places, winced in the appropriate spots and thought, for a moment, the book wasn’t half…
