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…
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…
