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,…
If you’re nostalgic for the cockeyed, let-it-all-out gabfests of the late John Cassavetes, She’s So Lovely will seem like dejà vu all over again. Cassavetes wrote the script more than a decade ago, and now his son Nick Cassavetes–whose first feature, Unhook the Stars, starred his mother, Gena Rowlands–has directed…
thursday august 28 “Art of the Matter: Seven Collaborations in Paper Art”: Organized by the Dieu Donne Papermill of New York City’s Soho district, this installation makes a case that the meticulous, hands-on pursuit of papermaking remains relevant in the Cyberspace Age. Including pieces by artists working in pairs (some…
In G.I. Jane, Demi Moore’s Naval Intelligence officer, Lieutenant Jordan O’Neil, is recruited as a test case to be the first female Navy SEAL. She gets a buzz cut and loses her period. She endures the indignities of the male volunteers snickering at her in the food line. She rolls…
When the beautiful entomologist rips open the chest cavity of a huge, bloodthirsty insect in the sci-fi nightmare Mimic, it turns into Thoraxic Park. This movie, like Steven Spielberg’s, features evolution gone haywire and dramaturgy gone to hell. In the prologue, the heroine–the reckless and courageous (or foolhardy and stupid)…
thursday august 21 “Token City”: The virtual subway station Big Apple-born digital artist Muriel Magenta assembled out of whole cybercloth for this installation is likely the closest the Valley will come to mass transit for a significant span of years. Curated by John Spiak and developed at Arizona State University’s…
“Can’t you feel the weirdness?” asks Brandon Scott. I’m in the grand ballroom of the Crown Plaza Hotel in downtown Phoenix, in the company of nearly 200 people who have gathered for a sorcerer’s apprenticeship. A large percentage are 50ish, balding guys with ponytails, and 40ish women in oversize tie-dye…
Time has a way of slipping away. But don’t worry–studio executives are keeping a typically keen eye on the calendar, and calculating the simple economics of boomer nostalgia. Hmmm . . . 1997 minus 1957 equals 40 years. Forty years of nostalgia times a gazillion boomers plus all the baffled…
Having been fixated all his life with both movies and insects, Mimic director Guillermo Del Toro recently offered his expert opinion on the subject of bugs, especially huge bugs, in the movies. “There are only two giant-insect movies that are really good,” he said, modestly excepting Mimic, of course. “Them!…
