In 1992, the world celebrated–or at least acknowledged–the quincentennial of America’s discovery by Italian explorer Christopher Columbus. During that glorious year, open season was declared on good ol’ Chris and on those who followed in his wake. European conquerors were enthusiastically pressed into service for target practice by artists who…
Comedy director Andrew Bergman, who broke in working on scripts for Mel Brooks, is gifted but uneven. In 1990, he wrote and directed The Freshman, a piece of glittering nuttiness built around a beautiful, career-consummating performance by Marlon Brando. The film could only have been the work of an audacious…
After seeing Foreign Student, you may want to talk yourself into the idea that it’s a put-on of some sort. Intended as a weeper of the “Ah, my lost youth . . .” variety, it centers on Phillippe, a young Parisian guy who comes to a college in rural Virginia…
John Cale’s been a busy man the past 30 years. He’s performed marathon piano pieces with John Cage. He co-founded the Velvet Underground, one of the half-dozen most important acts in rock history. Cale’s served as mentor-producer to the likes of the Stooges, Patti Smith, and Squeeze, and his solo…
Hooray for Hollywood, I guess. From what other source can one see Jamie Lee Curtis and Tia Carrere, both in slinky evening wear, having a yowling catfight in the back seat of a black limousine with a dead driver speeding toward a blown-up bridge while a helicopter descends from above?…
With movie adaptations of John Grisham potboilers, the third time has proved the charm. The Firm was limp, and The Pelican Brief wasn’t brief enough. The Client is nothing remotely special, just a routine legal melodrama with some major improbabilities flopping around in it. But director Joel Schumacher, abetted by…
At the beginning of Forrest Gump, a tiny white feather flits in the breeze above Savannah, Georgia. As the credits end, the feather comes to rest on the ground, between the sneaker-shod feet of the title character, who’s waiting at a bus stop. This sequence illustrates the theme of the…
The beauty of This Is Spinal Tap, Rob Reiner’s first and best work as a director, was that it simultaneously zapped the pretensions both of a species of pop music and of a species of cinema. Heavy metal got an affectionate working over from the film, a sham documentary supposedly…
“Fish Out Of Water,” Mesa Southwest Museum’s summer art show, is about the closest I’ve gotten to baiting a hook in 30 years. That’s when my father gave up trying to convert me to the church of fishing–and also gave up dragging me, kicking and screaming, on family fishing expeditions…
“You either go mad or you learn about metaphors.” Allie Light, who made this remark, has done both. Years after being hospitalized for extreme depression, the San Francisco woman became a filmmaker. Her latest is Dialogues With Madwomen, and in addition to directing this unconventional and touching documentary, she is…
Over at Disney, they’ve been brushing up on their Shakespeare the last few years. Think about it–The Little Mermaid had characters named Ariel and Sebastian, as in The Tempest, and Aladdin had a trouble-making, tale-carrying villain named Iago. Even in the Gallic Beauty and the Beast, the brute Gaston’s toadying…
If there was one legendary figure of the Old West who could unambiguously be called a good guy–and there probably wasn’t–Wyatt Earp is surely not the fellow. This sometime lawman, sometime criminal wasn’t actually despicable, like Billy the Kid (although reports suggest Earp had less charm). He was a person…
I am obliged to consider . . . that the assertion that men are turned into wolves and back to themselves again is false, otherwise we must also believe in all the other things that over so many generations we have discovered to be fabulous. –Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia…
After seeing the works on paper in the latest group show being hosted by MARS Gallery, a snide adage pops to mind: “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” Imported from Richmond, Virginia’s 1708 Gallery, a well-established artists’ cooperative, the current show at MARS (Phoenix’s own 15-year-old co-op) boasts…
The title of Widows’ Peak, a comic mystery set in Ireland in the 1920s, refers to a sort of colony of happy widows. It’s a high hill which overlooks the town of Kilshannon, and upon which, by some vaguely explained decree of antiquity, only widows are permitted to live. Presiding…
Valley Art Theatre in Tempe opens the Second Annual Gay and Lesbian Film Festival on Friday. The festival consists of four features and a collection of shorts, all of which are more intriguing than anything new you’re likely to see at the multiplexes this summer. Here, briefly reviewed, are this…
In Lips Together, Teeth Apart, Terrence McNally’s 1991 play staged by Arizona Theatre Company, we’re treated to the spectacle of a weekend with two upscale couples at an expensive Fire Island beach house sipping their bloody marys out on the deck while hating themselves and each other. This is not…
The central character of the Mexican horror movie Cronos is a kindly old man named Jess Gris, the proprietor of a Mexico City curio shop. The luckless Jess finds, amid the dusty bric-a-brac of his shop, a little metal gadget in the shape of a scarab, built by a 16th-century…
Indians in the movies go back about as far as movies themselves. While there’s been enough consciousness-raising in recent decades that only the most naive audience members could still believe that the movie Indians–both noble and savage–we’ve all been brought up on are accurate reflections of real Native Americans, the…
Italy’s Venice Biennale is considered the oldest, largest and most important art party in the world–and Phoenix has just received its engraved invitation to attend. The person who has bagged the invite for the Valley of the Sun is Marilyn Zeitlin, director of the Arizona State University Art Museum. Zeitlin…
Nonthreatening gentleness and prettiness have made Keanu Reeves a teen heartthrob, and the hint of exoticism in his looks has made him a figure of glamour for some adults, as well. If he were a sizzling good actor, he’d have the world at his feet. But alas, poor fellow, he…
“That Fred Flintstone–what an actor!” enthuses a morgue attendant in the Ron Howard comedy Night Shift. I’ve never particularly agreed. Although I dutifully watched, as a kid, Hanna-Barbera’s endlessly rerun cartoon series, which turned humankind’s prehistoric past into a 50s-style, suburban tract-house wonderland, I found it unsophisticated even then–my cartoon…
