The first weekend of the theater season looked like show business as usual. Phoenix Theatre was kicking off its 78th year with another tried-and-true musical; Theater Works was tackling a show beyond its limited means; and Planet Earth was providing its usual quirky, black-box alternative to both of the above…
Back in the early Seventies, when John Waters made his first splash with such low-budget gross-outs as Pink Flamingos and Multiple Maniacs, who would have guessed that someday he’d be making a Hollywood film as benevolent as Pecker? In retrospect, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. If any director has ever…
As a director of action thrillers, John Frankenheimer has been a peerless stylist for nearly four decades–without leaning on a pile of glitzy special effects. What’s more, his most memorable movies, from The Manchurian Candidate (1962) to The Birdman of Alcatraz (also 1962) to 1986’s wickedly entertaining, unappreciated 52 Pick-Up…
For those of you wondering what, besides cigars, salsa music and topnotch baseball talent, the 36-year-old embargo against Cuba has kept from you, the Arizona State University Art Museum has planned a series of events in conjunction with its “Contemporary Art From Cuba: Irony and Survival on the Utopian Island.”…
“I love to go to the zoo,” asserts Wendy Liebman, by phone from her home in L.A. Her least favorite creatures, though, are “the things with the really tiny heads–don’t tell me, don’t tell me. . . .” At last the species in question dawns on her: “the kids.” This…
thursday september 24 How often can you mention the Dalai Lama and the Beastie Boys in the same sentence? The lads take a break from fighting for their right to party in order to help out in the fight for the rights of the Lama’s ‘hood in Free Tibet, a…
The Galapagos tortoise lumbers along slowly in its outdoor enclosure at the Phoenix Zoo, plodding in the general direction of its less flamboyantly active companion. As I approach the concrete wall for a look, the enormous reptile pauses, and with stately deliberateness cranks its head around to peer at me…
One True Thing, directed by Carl Franklin, is trying to be the Terms of Endearment of the Nineties. Scripted by Karen Croner from the 1995 Anna Quindlen novel of the same name, One True Thing pushes the same high-gloss homilies about making peace with your family, and it caps everything…
The title Post Coitum derives, presumably, from the ancient Latin aphorism “post coitum omne animal triste”–every creature is sad after sex. The creature with which this French film concerns itself is Diane, a married, 40ish book editor played by Brigitte RoYan, who also co-wrote and directed. This attractive woman’s midlife…
A leg brace, a debilitating disease, sexual frustration, and Jackie Kennedy hair–breathes there a movie actress anywhere who could resist such fare? They’re as seductive as Richard III’s hump to the stage actor. Joanna Going straps it on–the leg brace, not the hump–and has a ball as the delicate heroine…
Jackie Chan’s American fans–and I include myself among them–have suffered through a nervous 1998 so far. The momentum the star earned with the 1996 release of Rumble in the Bronx has seemed to dissipate steadily: An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, the first American production to employ Chan since…
Anybody who doubts the phallocentric theory of history need only hear the tale of the Athenian General Alcibiades (circa 450-404 B.C.)–as it is told, at least, by Alan J.M. Haffa, Ph.D., Director of Classical Studies at Phoenix College. Whitewashed as a character in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, Alcibiades was, in…
thursday september 17 Those of us who feel inadequate should take heart to learn that even the Grand Canyon wasn’t always so honkin’ grand. Historian Stephen J. Pyne is scheduled to talk about his new book How the Canyon Became Grand: A Short History, which combines “environmental, social intellectual, political…
I once interviewed a film actress who was attempting a comeback with her own television show. “I always tell people that I do this for the art, for the love of the craft, all that hogwash,” she told me. “The truth is, I started practicing my acceptance speech when I…
The heroine of The Governess is a young Jewish woman–a “Jewess,” in the parlance of 1840s London, in which the first scenes of the film are set. I thought that this drama, the feature debut of the young writer-director Sandra Goldbacher, might explore a chapter in Britain’s long, abysmal, and…
Men don’t get it. Moms don’t get it. Sometimes, even your roommate or best friend doesn’t get it. But if you bray and carp and vent long enough, someone will listen, someone will begin to understand the precious particulars of a young woman’s sexuality. Whether they’re interested or not. That’s…
The opening credits of Simon Birch assert that it was “suggested” by John Irving’s popular 1989 novel A Prayer for Owen Meany. Actually, it’s a thin but relatively faithful adaptation of the first few chapters of Irving’s comic ramble through the nature of religious faith, predestination, and heroism. Screenwriter Mark…
Matt Damon, the blond matinee idol, has apparently become Hollywood’s idea of a deep thinker. After playing a math whiz in last year’s Good Will Hunting, he’s now been reinvented as a poker genius in John Dahl’s Rounders. So anybody who had doubts about the second coming of Albert Einstein…
Despite what the show’s title might lead you to believe, not all of the works included in the exhibition “You Draw Like a Girl,” currently on view at Arizona State University’s Downtown Center Galleria, are drawings, nor are all of the participants female. According to Sherrie Medina, participating artist and…
thursday september 10 Short-story writer Ruben Mendoza, author of Loteria & Other Stories, reads from and signs his work at 7 p.m. Thursday, September 10, at the Tempe Square location of Changing Hands Bookstore, 6428 South McClintock in Tempe. Admission is free. 730-0205. Glendale Public Library hosts “Hypnotic Nights and…
John O’Neal knows that the road from political activism to the stage of the Kennedy Center is a long one. O’Neal is artistic director of Junebug Productions, a troupe he rescued from the dying embers of the Free Southern Theater, a cultural arm of the civil rights movement that he…
You don’t often notice the effect that a museum’s architecture has on exhibitions–the way the surroundings bolster some shows and diminish others. But it’s difficult to miss the boost that the Phoenix Art Museum’s 1998 Triennial gets from the museum’s hangarlike Steele Gallery. From the moment Carlos Mollura’s giant, black…
