It’s not completely fair to say that the string of hits produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer from 1983 through 1996 are stylistically interchangeable. But it’s not too far off: A homogeneous, auteurial touch runs from Flashdance (1983) through Top Gun (1986), Beverly Hills Cop II (1987) and Days…
thursday june 5 Royal Palms Grand Reopening: The Camelback Corridor resort, a formerly funky if somewhat faded dowager that’s had a Phoenix-style face-lift, gets back in circulation with a fund-raising bash featuring grounds tours, entertainment, a “culinary show house” and more. The party’s scheduled for 6 to 10 p.m. Thursday,…
It lasted a mere four seasons, but thirtysomething lives on. Its legacy began the moment the show went off the air in 1991: The yuppie-angst fantasy created by Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick continues to spawn even now, its children looking almost exactly like the parents. First came My So-Called…
The production notes for Female Perversions could make one think that the film’s title was meant to attract the psychology-grad-student audience. This story of a high-powered lawyer struggling with her sexual confusions is a dramatization of a nonfiction psych study, Dr. Louise Kaplan’s Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary…
thursday may 29 Stomp: The wildly popular, London-born, New York-based percussive/movement troupe gives new meaning to the term “found art.” The Doc Martens-wearing crew brings the metaphorical kitchen sink and literally boots it around the stage at the Orpheum Theatre, 203 West Adams, along with a bunch of other unlikely…
Filmmakers and audiences have been captivated by the idea of dinosaurs since the primeval days of the cinema. Not until Jurassic Park four years ago, however, have the movies made truly convincing dinosaurs. Which is not to say that film dinosaurs prior to Park and to its current sequel, The…
Not only is The Lost World: Jurassic Park the sequel to the most popular movie ever made, but it is also the first film Steven Spielberg has directed since 1993’s Schindler’s List. He has finally won his Oscar and achieved Great Artist status in Hollywood’s pantheon of the Righteous, but…
The Substance of Fire ought to be one of the major critical favorites of 1997. It won’t be, but is worth seeking out while it lingers in town. It’s an adaptation of the acclaimed drama by Jon Robin Baitz about Jewish guilt and familial war. Baitz was 26 when he…
thursday may 22 “Our Future in the Desert: Architectural Explorations”: The Arizona VisionWeavers organization, which seeks to “harmonize commercial and private development with the Sonoran Desert environment by encouraging innovative architectural visions,” sponsors this exhibition of conceptual works about desert habitation and conservation by architects from around the state, including…
Last week, two very different plays about ethnic minority cultures opened at local Equity houses. August Wilson’s brilliant Seven Guitars is a study of 1940s black America haunted by the author’s recent statements against multicultural theater, while Our Lady of the Tortilla is Latino playwright Luis Santiero’s satire of old…
On the festival tour that helped the necrophiliac Kissed net prerelease praise everywhere from the Atlantic Monthly to Newsweek, writer-director Lynne Stopkewich said she thought independent films should be judged by their ingenuity and daring rather than by the size of their budgets. As arts-world stump speeches go, it’s a…
Sidney Lumet has had enough ups and downs in his long, prolific career that it’s never safe to count him out . . . even after two disappointing films in a row, A Stranger Among Us (1992) and Guilty as Sin (1993). Even the greatest directors frequently falter in their…
Okay, metaphor buffs: An “albino alligator” is what the other alligators in a group send out as a sacrificial lamb. Members of a second group of ‘gators attack the albino, and the first group violently finishes off its competition. Once this is explained in the movie Albino Alligator, you know…
In Children of the Revolution, Judy Davis plays Joan Fraser, an Aussie communist who sleeps with Joseph Stalin–their tryst kills him–and, unbeknown to anyone, has his child. Davis takes her character through almost 40 years of agitprop hellfire, and she has scaled her performance big. The movie, however, is rather…
thursday may 15 Seven Guitars: Arizona Theatre Company concludes its 30th-anniversary season with the state premiere of August Wilson’s literary memorial to a fictional, star-crossed bluesman named Floyd “Schoolboy” Barton; San Francisco’s Benny Sato Ambush directed. This week’s performances are at 2 and 8 p.m. Thursday, May 15; 8 p.m…
The Actors Group production of Love! Valour! Compassion!, Terrence McNally’s Tony Award-winning epic about friendship and fealty told by a lot of frequently naked gay men, is a manipulative, richly comedic three-act that probably plays better to a gay crowd than a straight one. Its frequent references to campy old…
In The Fifth Element, the all-knowing, all-powerful Supreme Being of the Universe turns out to be Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), an orange-haired babe in a skimpy, Band-Aid-thin mod outfit who speaks in a kind of Slavic scat and cries a lot. It’s as if the filmmakers started out to make a…
You and I both may have complex feelings about reproductive rights, but the lucky folks to the right and left of us don’t–they’re blessed with absolute, black-and-white knowledge. The movies, with few exceptions, have steered clear of this debate, for the same reason that many of us tend to avoid…
thursday may 8 Spearhead: The militant hip-hop/funk group, led by vocalist and former b-ball player Michael Franti (a real tower of baritone power at six-foot-six), offered up a near-great album in 1994 with its debut, Home. The band’s latest, Chocolate Supa Highway, is a tribute, of sorts, to Bob Marley,…
By almost any measure, “An Excess of Fact,” Lee Friedlander’s photographs of the Sonoran Desert at the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography, is an extraordinary event. It pairs one of the nation’s most distinctive photographers with a subject that’s relatively new to him and consistently elusive to most…
College theater depends heavily on the largess of its audience. It may be fair to expect a workmanlike performance from an Equity player, or to grumble about a crummy community-theater production, but it’s unreasonable to expect greatness from theater-student shows. Student productions–the bulk of whose audiences are usually blood-related–beg our…
For the fourth time in as many years, Arizona Film Society presents the Saguaro Film Festival. As in previous years, this year’s selections are a mixed bag, but a rewarding one–along with the usual batch of slackers-trying-to-get-laid comedies, there are such real gems as an enchanting, imaginative riff on the…
