Know how to give CPR to a lizard? According to one of the illustrated handouts in the Arizona Red Cross Pet First Aid course, there are four steps. The first two are my personal favorites: 1. “Scoop lizard from pool”; and 2. “Shake out lizard.” Clear so far? From there…
There are worse things to do than sit through a boring history lesson–like attending a dismal comedy trying to pass itself off as a history lesson. A pair of plays that plunder the past opened on neighboring stages at Herberger Theater Center last week. Actors Theatre of Phoenix’s The Complete…
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita still has the power to scare off people. Proof is the book’s new movie adaptation, directed by Adrian Lyne and scripted by Stephen Schiff and starring Jeremy Irons as the passionate pedophile Humbert Humbert, a man entranced by nymphets. Completed more than two years ago, the movie…
Insofar as filmmaker Tony Gatlif’s justly admired “Gypsy trilogy” is an exploration of his roots and a search for his nature–he was born in Algeria to Gypsy parents of Spanish origin, but later educated at Paris’ L’Ecole des Beaux Arts–it comprises one of the most passionate and telling self-examinations in…
The Jonathan Demme-directed Beloved runs nearly three hours, and it’s a long slog. This adaptation of the 1987 Toni Morrison novel bursts with ambition. On one hand, it tries to get inside the fevers of the African-American slave experience, but it also wants to be an epic family saga and…
The hero of The Mighty–the title character, in fact–is an eighth-grader known by the nickname “Freak” (Kieran Culkin). His might isn’t physical–he’s a small, frail boy who suffers from a degenerative birth defect. His spine curves painfully, and he’s able to walk only with crutches and leg braces. But he…
The new album Step Inside This House has Lyle Lovett singing a love song to his home state of Texas, or at least to many of the Lone Star State’s finest songwriters. A two-CD set of cover versions of songs by many well-known and not-so-well-known iconoclastic songsmiths from that musically…
Whirling dervishes? That’s one of those phrases that has somehow entered the language even though most folks have no idea of its meaning. The first thing that pops into your mind could be that destructive cartoon character Tasmanian Devil, or perhaps Grateful Dead fans twirling away at some outdoor concert…
thursday october 15 Arizona Opera opens its season with Lucia Di Lammermoor, Donizetti’s unforgettable, baleful 1835 tragedy of madness, murder and forced marriage–in reverse order–based on Sir Walter Scott’s 1819 novel The Bride of Lammermoor. Performances, in Italian with English surtitles, are at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, October 15; 7:30 p.m…
It’s fairly easy to fall into the trap of looking to a nation’s art for state department insights about its culture–one nation one art. But even before you’re through the first gallery of the ASU Art Museum’s “Contemporary Art From Cuba: Irony and Survival on the Utopian Island” it’s clear…
Recently a woman I know in her early 20s–about the same age as Sarah Jacobson, the writer/director of Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore–told me that, though she was well-versed in films ranging from The In-Laws to Pretty in Pink to Tommy Boy, she had been chided by a friend…
The Montreal World Film Festival ran for 10 days through Labor Day, and the Toronto Film Festival picked up a few days later and carried on for another 10. Twin colossi of the Great White North, they each unspooled some 300 movies, and, as in the past three years, I…
Ancient Chinese esoteric disciplines are rarely associated with electronic music, but Orlando, Florida’s Q-Burns (a.k.a. Michael Donaldson) uses them precisely to define the sonic landscapes he manufactures under the moniker Q-Burns Abstract Message. He defines his constructs as aural Feng Shui, a concept he describes as “utilitarian art, where every…
Even a good laugh needs an administrator. Chicago native Daniel Mer came to the Valley about four years ago to manage the then-ailing Tempe Improv. “It had been losing money for about two years, and they asked me to come out and help them turn things around,” says Mer, who…
thursday october 8 Wild ‘n’ crazy guy turned sophisticated humorist Steve Martin’s dramatization of an apocryphal 1904 meeting between Einstein and Picasso, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, opens the season for the state’s official professional theatrical entity, Arizona Theatre Company, in Center Stage at Herberger Theater Center, 222 East Monroe…
The ants in Antz show a lot of personality. The film is the best example yet of how a fully animated computer-generated feature can delineate facial movement. Toy Story (1995), the first such feature to be released, was brasher and more child-friendly, but Antz is more of a–how shall I…
As a professional lamenter of how “they just don’t make ’em like they used to,” I am always thrilled on those rare occasions when someone even tries to make ’em that way. So I am doubly thrilled that, with The Impostors, writer-director Stanley Tucci has tried and richly succeeded. Those…
Have adultery, murder and greed all moved to the sticks? Once firmly rooted in the big city, the seven deadly sins have taken on a distinct country-and-western twang in recent years, thanks to noirish, tough-minded scam fests such as John Dahl’s Red Rock West (1992) and The Last Seduction (1994),…
thursday october 1 He used to open for Michael Bolton, but don’t hold that against George Lopez. The comic, veteran of many appearances on Carson’s and Arsenio’s stages, performs at 8 p.m. Thursday, October 1; 8 and 10 p.m. Friday, October 2; 8 and 10 p.m. Saturday, October 3; and…
Shylock, the malevolent old Jewish usurer of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, has been subjected, over the centuries, to a wide variety of interpretations. Growing out of the tradition of English anti-Semitism that produced such stereotypically wicked portraits as Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, the old Belmont moneylender has…
Sure, it’s all good fun now. But who knows what unearthly peril Phoenix Art Museum may have put our community in? With the “Splendors of Ancient Egypt” show opening on Sunday, October 4, and continuing through March 28, 1999, PAM would seem, at first glance, to be offering us a…
The primary theme of Galeria Mesa’s current exhibition, “Light Sensitive,” is photography and the photographic processes that artists are using to make their images. Yet the show’s quieter point is the difficulty this kind of exhibition has in attracting first-rate work. Like many exhibitions developed by small art centers around…
