thursday october 2 UK/AZ You Like It: Othello, Zandra Rhodes, “Rootstein Mannequins” and Other Stuff From Beyond the Pond: The UK/AZ Festival, continuing through October (though some of the offerings extend beyond Allhallows Eve), celebrates the–rather tenuous–connection(s) between England and Arizona. Britain’s Royal National Theatre–making its inaugural visit to the…
Everybody likes to run down Canadian movies, but Canadian film festivals–I speak of Montreal and Toronto–are something else again. How can a country turn out such mediocre movies and such terrific film festivals? In Hollywood, at least, we’re consistent: Our movies and our film festivals are equally lousy. I started…
The Peacemaker is the first feature from DreamWorks, the studio headed by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. It stars George Clooney and Nicole Kidman, and it’s about terrorists who steal Russian nukes. As an intelligence officer with the U.S. Army’s Special Forces, Clooney gets to model his jutting…
thursday september 25 Dave Brubeck: Best known as the progenitor of cool jazz in the ’50s (and for “Take Five,” one of the all-time standard-bearers of cool), the West Coast pianist/bandleader is a giant of jazz–period, and no modifier required. Granted, the Brubeck sound cracked open the door, far off…
There’s a lovely formality to the structure of the comedy Wedding Bell Blues. Three young women (Paulina Porizkova, Illeana Douglas and Julie Warner), roomies, take a road trip to Vegas, with the vague plan of getting married, then immediately divorced. Their notion is that a 30ish divorcee is less pathetic…
Every film adaptation of a preexisting work has its own unique set of problems; in the case of Jocelyn Moorhouse’s A Thousand Acres, the problem is compounded. Not only was Jane Smiley’s 1991 novel a Pulitzer Prize-winning best seller with a large number of (presumably) devoted fans, but the book…
Howard and Emily’s wedding is the talk of Greenleaf, Indiana, a small town idyllic enough to repel Norman Rockwell. The town has waited three years for the couple to make it official–and slimmed-down Emily (Joan Cusack) has waited three long years for Howard (Kevin Kline) to consummate their relationship. She’s…
The 1950s-era Los Angeles of L.A. Confidential is Noir Central. Its denizens are tattooed by shadow; the play of light and dark in the streets, the police stations, the morgues, is fetishistic. The postwar L.A. touted in the travelogues and billboards is a boom town, but what we actually see…
thursday september 18 Ballet Arizona’s “Black & White Gala”: The troupe’s formal, season-opening bash features world-class hoofers and a wide-ranging repertoire. The highlights: the premiere of “Solo for a Gala” by BA artistic director Michael Uthoff, danced by Jeremy Raia; Kevin O’Day (Twyla Tharp’s company, Baryshnikov’s White Oak Project) performing…
Aaah, the unspoiled West: Big space. Big light. Big view. Big lure for the millions who yearly go searching for the serenity and wilderness behind this popular yet fading image. For the most part, it is the image featured in Phoenix Art Museum’s “Canyonland Visions,” a show highlighting artists’ portrayals…
A quarter mile northeast from the Church of the Orbital Orgy, a family–mom, dad, big brother, sis–sat on a couch, watching television. “They’re toast,” I thought. And they were. The couch suddenly lurched forward, jerked to a stop for a second, then hyperaccelerated and smashed into the TV, which was…
The Game is a puzzle picture, and beyond its premise there isn’t much you can divulge without giving the show away. I’m not one of those critics who likes to write Stop reading now if you plan to see this movie, so I’m tempted to wrap up things right now…
If you spent a lot of time during the early Eighties watching what were known in those days as “T&A” comedies–low-budget youth sex farces like Hardbodies or Private School–then the new film Butch Camp may amaze you. It’s made perfectly and unselfconsciously in the same cruddy nonstyle. It’s technically shoddy,…
Cold comfort though it must be to those who suffered through it, Great Britain’s Tory-era industrial collapse at least produced two delightful, defiant movie comedies. Mark Herman’s Brassed Off! followed a North England mining town’s brass band on its swan song. The film wasn’t escapist–it was pretty preachy at times,…
thursday september 11 Proposals: The world-premiere tour of Neil Simon’s latest work for the stage–his 30th–plays the Orpheum Theatre following an L.A. run and in advance of productions in New Haven, Connecticut; Washington, D.C.; and, this November, on Broadway. Terrific actor Ron Rifkin (the recent movie The Substance of Fire)…
When Neil Simon’s name appears in print, it’s usually set off by one of those nearly epigrammatic phrases like “a name that is synonymous with American comedy,” or “Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright.” Given the number of Simon plays that was produced here last year, his name might well have been appended…
In Woody Allen’s early comedy Take the Money and Run, stickup man Allen’s wife complains about the unfairness that her husband never made the Ten Most Wanted List. “It’s who you know,” she bitterly insists. The makers of the period gangster epic Hoodlum seem to have felt the same snub…
When Time magazine columnist Walter Shapiro referred to himself last month as part of a generation that still believes “A Thousand Clowns holds all the secrets to human existence,” I thought he must be daft. Yes, high school students took Herb Gardner’s hit comedy about an urban dropout (played by…
thursday september 4 Proposals: The world-premiere tour of Neil Simon’s latest work for the stage plays the Orpheum Theatre following an L.A. run and in advance of productions in New Haven, Connecticut; Washington, D.C.; and, this November, on Broadway. Terrific actor Ron Rifkin tops a cast that also includes Suzanne…
Mike Leigh’s new film Career Girls is compact and minor. I don’t mean that as a slam, exactly. After the dawdling expansiveness of last year’s Secrets & Lies, his latest one is something of a relaxation–it’s appealingly small-scale. Leigh isn’t doing anything here he hasn’t done better before, but at…
Excess Baggage, Alicia Silverstone’s first feature from her First Kiss Productions, turns out to be a rather shaggy and uninvolving jaunt. As Emily T. Hope, the moneyed teenager looking for love from her emotionally distant single dad (Jack Thompson), Silverstone pouts a lot while trying to wring our sympathy. Even…
In the Company of Men is about Chad (Aaron Eckhart) and Howard (Matt Malloy), two thirtysomething white-collar execs who have recently been passed over for promotions and rejected by their girlfriends. En route to a six-week business trip at the home office, Chad, the bristlier and wilier of the two,…
