We may never know why sports elevated the ancient Grecian imagination to Praxiteles, and has lowered the current Phoenician one to the art at Bank One Ballpark. But the modern impulse to turn every little sports-related thing into a marketing scheme may have something to do with it. Diamondbacks spokesmen…
Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame formula does not apply to undiscovered playwrights. They get only seven minutes, if they’re lucky, rarely get their work read or produced, and are seldom heard from beyond tiny theater circles. Phoenix, ever a cultural backwater, has founded few programs aimed at nurturing up-and-coming…
Smoke Signals is a rare drama about modern life on an Indian reservation that, unlike Hollywood fare such as Dances With Wolves, has been written and directed by Native Americans. It’s a film that feels genuine and heartfelt–it understands the problems its characters are experiencing. It’s often a quirky, whimsical…
In The Mask of Zorro, Anthony Hopkins plays the eponymous masked hero as if he were doing Shakespeare. He’s trying to turn a kitsch hero into a real one, and his efforts are so weirdly off-key that you don’t know whether to applaud or titter. This dolorous Don Diego de…
For those who thought Dumb and Dumber signaled the end of the world as we know it, my advice is duck and cover. Comedy avatars Peter and Bobby Farrelly, the odium savants behind what some have considered Jim Carrey’s Hamlet–as well as its follow-up, the mondo bowlerama Kingpin–have turned their…
Something about Arizona brings out the rugged–or eccentric–individualist in people. It makes a certain kind of sense that the breeding ground of Barry Goldwater would also draw the Rainbow People’s convention. If there’s going to be a harmonic convergence, maybe it really will happen in Sedona. Build a Biosphere and…
thursday july 16 That least egotistical species of actors–puppeteers–convenes in Tempe for the Pacific Southwest Regional Puppeteers of America Festival, from Thursday, July 16, through Sunday, July 19, at the Tempe Mission Palms Hotel, 60 East Fifth Street. The weekend, which includes public performances, educators’ workshops and such prestigious guests…
Every now and then, Theatre Works departs from its standard practice of serving up audience-pleasing productions of mostly conservative faves, and presents something odd to shake up the subscribers. What other community theater–with a Sun City audience base, no less–would attempt Marat/Sade, or Steven Sondheim’s controversial musical Assassins? This tradition…
Spike and Mike’s Classic Festival of Animation is the other yearly film anthology from the same two Californians–Spike Decker and Mike Gribble–who concoct Spike & Mike’s Festival of Sick and Twisted Animation. Like Sick and Twisted, their annual blowout of scatology, sacrilege and sensationalistic sex, the Classic festival is a…
High Art is a low-budget American independent movie about a junkie, lesbian photographer, Lucy Berliner (Ally Sheedy), who spends most of her time looking romantically mournful. She’s famished and abrasive and oh-so-world-weary. When she smokes cigarettes, she exhales in a way that can best be described as existential–the smoke curls…
For Valley Shakespeare buffs, north is an inviting direction this summer. Even for practitioners of “bardolotry”–to use Shaw’s sneering phrase–unwilling to trek all the way to the Utah Shakespeare Festival, a couple of more modest pilgrimages are possible: There’s iambic pentameter among the pines at Flagstaff’s Grand Canyon Shakespeare Festival…
thursday july 9 Four Valley photographers–Tim Lanterman, James Leland, Bill Timmerman and John Wagner–were given a nice narrow theme to explore: “America.” The resulting exhibition, called “American Photographs,” continues through Friday, July 31, in the central gallery of the Burton Barr Central Library, 1221 North Central. New Times staff photographer…
That oversize place everybody keeps calling BOB and its snaky home team may get all the press, but they ain’t the only game in town. For a solid season before the Diamondbacks came along, we have had an unsung team chock-full of local athletes playing pro ball for a small…
Except when they’ve been busy defeating the Nazis or something like that, every generation of young adults has whined. Usually it’s about their poverty and their crappy prospects and the failure of the world to recognize their innate value and reward them accordingly with money, praise and sex. But it’s…
In Mr. Jealousy, director Noah Baumbach (Kicking and Screaming) takes on the most coiled and resilient of the seven deadlies. Even as Eric Stoltz’s romantic comedies were becoming forced and generic by the time of Kicking and Screaming, in this bright comedy of manners his amiable every-mannerisms are sharpened by…
Michael Bay is the director of Bad Boys and The Rock and the new asteroid-attack movie Armageddon–which should be called The Very Big Rock. He has, I’m afraid, perfected a new form: His movies are trailers for themselves. Every scene is all climax and no foreplay. When it’s all over,…
An indefinable tribute to all things rhythmic, Stomp has officially made the transition from hip happening to pop-culture reference. Though it already had its own fan club, Web site and monster-size merchandising machine, the clincher for the troupe came when its members turned up in television spots for Target department…
Technicolor was a movie lover’s aphrodisiac during Hollywood’s Golden Age. It produced colors of astonishing depth, boldness and subtlety via a complex beam-splitting camera that generated three separate negatives. Lab technicians built them into a photographic sandwich that was developed with a unique dye-transfer system called imbibition. Now New Line…
thursday july 2 Veteran actor John Ratzenberger is best known as the know-it-all Cliff on Cheers. He’s less well-known as the father of a kid with diabetes, a vigorous activist in raising money for research into a cure for that condition, and an avid motorcyclist. Ratzenberger, now on Harley-Davidson’s cross-country…
Say what you will about the state of theater in Phoenix; at least our mask and wig clubs know their limitations. I’ve seen smallish Los Angeles companies cram colossal shows onto postage-stamp-size stages (most memorably a production of Showboat, shoehorned into a 100-seat house), but community theaters here typically work…
One of the more frequently occurring adjectives in reviews of The Truman Show, which continues to chug away at the box office, is “original.” Well, The Truman Show may be clever, may be touching, may be visually elegant, but it’s not original. The film is, indeed, a virtual amalgam of…
It’s Christmas vacation, 1958. The movie my dad has chosen for a first-grade pal and me to see is the new Disney live-action adventure Tonka, starring Sal Mineo as a young Sioux named White Bull who traps and domesticates a clear-eyed, spirited wild horse named Tonka. Having seen The King…
