Willie Morris’ autobiographical novel, My Dog Skip, is a nearly perfect piece of bedtime reading for kids and their parents. Each chapter is virtually a self-contained anecdote, the descriptions of World War II-era Mississippi are lush and dreamlike, and the escapades of the central canine character, depicted as smarter, faster,…
A couple of years ago, a drunk started a fight with me in a bar in Tempe. The next day, I gleefully told my martial arts teacher about how I’d used a pair of joint locks to subdue the guy. Rather than shake my hand and promote me to a…
Return with us now to those fabulous days of yesteryear, back to a time when America was not going to let a little thing like World War II get in the way of everyday life on the home front. The 1940s were a time when the American public got the…
A hunger for the exotic is usually what stirs artists to jump past the humdrum of the “new and improved” to the rarer thrill of things “never before felt or seen.” But as the Phoenix Art Museum’s “Taos Artists and Their Patrons, 1898-1950” suggests, that hunger isn’t confined to the…
I had high hopes for Guillermo Reyes’ Men on the Verge of a His-panic Breakdown. The show has the reputation of being very hip, and PlayWright’s Theatre, where Men on the Verge is playing, has — in its first full season — proven itself a reliable source of arty entertainment…
Calling the subject matter of Errol Morris’ latest documentary, Mr. Death, “unpleasant” is like referring to the lavatory on a tuna boat as “lightly scented.” The director who brought us the zany Americana of Fast, Cheap & Out of Control and the lukewarm Stephen Hawking snoozer A Brief History of…
It’s hard to blame Kirk Douglas for choosing Diamonds as a comeback film, after fighting back from a devastating stroke almost four years ago. Certainly no one can fault him for wanting to act again, to prove he’s still got it. However, the question is this: Can the movie that…
Moviegoers, rejoice! The first fun movie of the year has arrived. Oh, Leo’s little seaside adventure was pretty to look at, but the attempts at depth were a real bummer. And let’s not even talk about Scream 3. Even the first one was highly overrated, and it’s been downhill from…
“You can be in little small studio thinking only la cucaracha will listen, and it can go all over the world,” says Charo of her acclaimed 1994 album Guitar Passion. Or, rather, “enthuses” Charo. Or, “gushes” Charo. By phone from Los Angeles, she describes performing recently for an international convention…
So, let me get this straight. Even after three major film festivals in February — four, if you count the ongoing Spike & Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation at Centerpoint (see Repertory Film) — you’re still hungry for more film-festival action? Well, okay, but you’ll have to hit…
As a result of having recently witnessed Phoenix Theatre’s production of Tintypes, I am much too ill to write a theater review this week. Instead, I am submitting the notes I made while watching this program, a musical revue about turn-of-the-19th-century America, which should (despite several lively performances by some…
Film director Agnieszka Holland is the daughter of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, but she was raised in communist Poland in an atmosphere of state-imposed atheism. If those bona fides don’t qualify her to make a two-hour movie about the timeless tug of war between faith and reason,…
Twenty-seven-year-old Ben Younger delivers the message of his first feature, Boiler Room, with all the subtlety of a car bomb. To wit: Greed is alive and well in the new century, fueled by the material dreams of a generation bent on instant gratification and the distorted expectations of neophyte investors…
A late addition to the repertory company headed by A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood, Tigger has enjoyed a surge in popularity in recent years. That is, the Disney incarnation of Tigger has — the hyperactive, striped feline with the spring-loaded tail in Disney’s Winnie the…
When you read the reviews of MOMIX, you see every description under the celestial bodies. The members of this dance troupe have been called magicians, illusionists, surrealists and acrobats. Their performances are called supernatural, stunning, seductive, brilliant, hilarious and inspirational. Almost as an afterthought, the shows are also called an…
When Blues Blast 2000 hits the Valley this weekend, it will offer a bit of the old and a bit of the new, some national acts, some local celebs, and a day of fun in the sun. One of the highlights at this year’s festival will be longtime Chicago blues…
It is not your typical art opening. There are no paintings on the wall, no spotlighted sculptures on pedestals. The usual clusters of murmuring, wineglass-wielding museumgoers, clad in black and ignoring the artwork, are nowhere in sight at the kick-off of “Club Extra,” the ongoing performance/installation created by artist Angela…
Warren Leight’s Side Man is both a perfect example of the American memory play and proof that a Broadway season filled with revivals and imports can produce a Tony win. Side Man won that award last year, despite its rather old-fashioned narrative structure and at least partly because it wasn’t…
Hedda Gabler’s come to town, and she ain’t, as the saying goes, what she used to be. That’s mostly because, in Actors Theatre of Phoenix’s production of Henrik Ibsen’s masterpiece, director Matthew Wiener has taken some unusual liberties with Rolf Fjelde’s popular translation. This classic story of a mean-spirited, batty…
Jane Campion’s 1992 film The Piano was an intoxicating work of art, a film of such beauty and power that it literally took my breath away. Nothing the New Zealand-born writer-director has done before or since even comes close to matching it in form, content or sensibility. And her latest…
A little more than three years after Scream and a little more than two years after Scream 2, director Wes Craven is back with Scream 3, this time without the participation of star screenwriter Kevin Williamson. From the very start, we have been told that Williamson planned for the series…
By far, the most creative thing about Snow Day is its clever integration of the studio logo into the narrative at the very beginning. As a man shovels snow from his driveway, a gigantic snowball falls from the sky and crushes his house. It’s a wonderfully anarchic moment, boding well…
