At the movies, the fun-loving temptress has been liberating the buttoned-up clod ever since Katharine Hepburn’s leopard made off with Cary Grant’s dinosaur bone in Bringing Up Baby, 61 years ago. Maybe even longer, if you count pioneer vamp Theda Bara’s effect on a long succession of speechless men. In…
thursday march 18 Some time ago, the nice folks at Mesa Southwest Museum sent this reporter a chocolate coin with a roasted cricket in it, and invited me to join the “I Ate a Bug Club.” I did–it tasted not unlike a Nestle’s Crunch–and, as a proud member of that…
In homage to a half-dozen of the most formidable women in the history of 20th-century art, a half-dozen of the Phoenix area’s more formidable performing artists and arts educators will assume their personas for an unusual interactive performance-art role-playing piece titled “Women Who Do!” Confused? Okay, it works like this…
Putting together a new theater company with a performance space to call your own in the Phoenix area is an exercise in frustration. No one is in a better position to attest to this truism than Michael Alessandro, head honcho and guiding force for Feast of Fools Theatre. In the…
When you think of actors well-suited to the role of Teddy Roosevelt, John Davidson isn’t likely to be the first name that springs to mind. Or the second, or the eighth. But the ’70s-era Cosmo centerfold, Carson guest host and star of Broadway and short-lived sitcoms like The Girl With…
“Like any writer, I’d rather be read than dead. Like any serious ‘author,’ I’d rather be dead than not read at all.” This from Edward Abbey, famous Arizonan and desert and word pioneer, who is said to have preferred being thought of as a serious writer, period, not specifically a…
thursday march 11 For the second year in a row, the Phoenix Art and Antique Show offers a staggering array of bric-a-brac, objets, macguffins and other assorted knickknacks from 43 galleries around the U.S. and Europe, which are exhibited and sold for the benefit of Phoenix Art Museum. The goodies…
A theater critic can’t afford to have a favorite play. Saddled with personal preference and fond memories of a first performance, he’s apt to overlook the show’s flaws once it’s revived. But my response to Lanford Wilson’s Lemon Sky hasn’t been equaled in the 14 years since I first saw…
There’s no faulting Tango where technique is concerned. This collaboration between the Spanish writer-director Carlos Saura, the great Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and the Argentine composer Lalo Schifrin is a dazzling fusion of color and composition, movement and music. There’s some strong acting, too. But the film, reputedly the most…
The Deep End of the Ocean starts out as a maternal horror movie and ends up as a family therapy session. Michelle Pfeiffer plays the photographer wife of a restaurateur (Treat Williams) and mother of two sons and an infant daughter. While checking into a jammed hotel for her 15th…
For Cruel Intentions, his directorial debut, writer Roger Kumble has come up with the clever idea of updating Choderlos de Laclos’ durable 18th-century novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons). With its focus on totally amoral protagonists who use sex as a tool to manipulate innocents, often just for the hell…
There are few of us born before 1965 who wouldn’t have given our eyeteeth to be a fly on the wall of the Lincoln Room on August 7, 1974, when, on the fateful eve of Richard Nixon’s resignation, the about-to-be-former president summoned Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for a late-night…
You see it in American art museums all the time: women towing men from object to object, cooing over things that make the fellers squirm or want to pull out a hammer or a chain saw. But as one official at the West Valley Art Museum/Sun Cities Museum of Art…
Director Garry Marshall (Pretty Woman, Beaches) has always tended toward unrealistically feel-good movies, and The Other Sister is no exception. Billed as “a love story for the romantically challenged,” it concerns a mentally challenged young woman, Carla (Juliette Lewis), struggling for independence from her overprotective mother (Diane Keaton). With the…
When hit men wore hats, and Cadillacs had running boards, the average Mafia don could knock off the Tattaglia brothers in mid-afternoon and sit down to a nice plate of chicken cacciatore that evening, content that he’d seen to the family business and blazed a path for his first-born son’s…
“Honey,” Ellen Burstyn’s character in The Last Picture Show remarks to her daughter, “everything gets old if you do it often enough.” The specific activity she had in mind was sex, but the maxim applies at least as appropriately to genre conventions in movies, which even the casual moviegoer can…
thursday march 4 It’s a big week for the Phoenix Symphony: In addition to a performance by the Concorda Trio (see Sunday), an ensemble made up of PS players, and a PS Close-Up at Borders (see Monday), there’s also a concert by the whole outfit, fronted by two guest artists,…
What is there to say about writer Harlan Ellison that hasn’t already been said? Not much. The winner, probably, of more awards than any other living fantasist, whose works include I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Paingod and The Deathbird, was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1934 and…
Hello Muddah, hello Fadduh, Here I am at Camp Granada. Camp is very entertaining, And they say we’ll have some fun if it stops raining. . . . That classical tune you were just involuntarily singing was Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours.” The lyrics, however, were from the pen and…
About halfway through Sister Amnesia’s Country Western Nunsense Jamboree, one of the characters turns to the audience after a particularly unfunny line and bellows, “Hey, folks, it doesn’t get much better than this.” She isn’t kidding. Dan Goggin’s second sequel to Nunsense, his far-too-frequently produced 1985 off-Broadway hit, is either…
The independent production/distribution company The Shooting Gallery probably got a lot more attention when Monica Lewinsky showed up in Washington, D.C., wearing a cap with its logo than it is likely to from the release of The 24 Hour Woman, a modest, deserving film from writer/director Nancy Savoca. Savoca has…
Under the opening titles of 200 Cigarettes, we hear Bow Wow Wow’s near-peerless bubblegum anthem “I Want Candy.” The movie that follows seems designed to satisfy that craving–it’s sweet, tart, brightly colored, insubstantial and utterly lacking in nutritional value. It’s also fun to consume, and harmless enough as long as…
