Sam Hamm is, relatively speaking, a successful Hollywood screenwriter, meaning he earns his keep penning screenplays without having to subsidize his income by tending bar or waiting tables. He has a handful of films to his credit, some little known (1983’s Never Cry Wolf, his debut), some enormously profitable (1989’s…
Pornography. Say the word out loud — do you spit it out with disgust or roll the syllables off your tongue gently, dreamily? Does the mere thought of pornography revolt you, make you muse about the decline of Western civilization in the 21st century? Does it weigh you down with…
Forget that I’m an atheist. Or that the last time I heard a disco song I liked was nearly a quarter-century ago. My objections to God’s Trombones are strictly critical. In its new production of this terribly contemporary musical, Black Theatre Troupe delivers a loud but largely ill-conceived collection of…
Having given us opera’s all-time greatest bad girl earlier this season with Carmen, Arizona Opera has been taking pains to compensate, with two heroines in a row so goody-goody that Jeanette MacDonald might find them square. First there was Minnie, The Girl of the Golden West, holding Bible study for…
Two nude dancers pace ritualistically toward an offstage light, their bodies breathtakingly painted by tattoo artist George Long. It takes hours to perfect these full-body tattoos before each performance, and you can only imagine the loving care Long must give to each curlicue that encircles the cheeks of the dancers’…
Leave it to Hollywood to sell us the insipid romance of a thoroughly irritating white couple as the solution to an archaic Latin American mystery. As pure bang-up adventure, The Mexican is certainly more user-friendly than childish junk like The Way of the Gun, but the attempt to weave adult…
Have you heard? Beauty’s only skin deep. Pay attention now: When it comes to love, experience is the best teacher. And just in case you didn’t know: Youth is wasted on the young.Such are the banalities director Tonie Marshall dispenses, more or less, in Venus Beauty Institute, a French romantic…
Back East, and elsewhere in the world, Arizona is thought not to have seasons. Or, rather, we’re thought to have two seasons — really hot and really, really hot.Once you’ve lived here a couple of years, however, you recognize that there are very distinctive seasons here, and few are as…
Henry Rollins doesn’t have a lot of spare time. He is well into his second decade of dividing his energy among careers as musician, author, actor, publisher, commercial spokesman and general heavily tattooed man about town. His most interesting and unique gig has got to be the so-called “talking shows”…
It was to have been a routine stop on a routine press tour, yet another town in which the actress was to show up, chit and chat with the local media about her movie, then move on — the traveling salesman getting the word out, moving The Product. Denver, Dallas,…
In Ira Levin’s stage mystery Deathtrap, a playwright glumly declares a rival’s play so good that a talented director couldn’t hurt it. That’s how good the best works of Gilbert and Sullivan are. Take, for instance, The Gondoliers, or The King of Barataria. Not, perhaps, on the level of The…
It’s almost impossible to know what to make of Monkeybone after one viewing; there’s so much going on in this dreamland of stop-motion and computer-generated animation and celebrity cameos that you have trouble keeping up with it. Indeed, like a half-remembered dream, the movie’s often so overwhelming that even its…
Every year that I’ve gone to Spike & Mike’s Sick & Twisted Festival of Animation, I’ve done so with less enthusiasm, not because the fest that discovered Beavis and Butthead and South Park has gotten any worse, or any more shocking, but because I’ve become more acutely aware of the…
Because nothing says “unlimited potential” quite like a cold, dead fish, it is perhaps not obvious that your best option, when confronted with one, is to bury it in cat litter.Such practical advice is the subject of “Mummify a Fish,” which, although it would be a great name for a…
The opening reception for “For Adults Only” at Eleven East Ashland looks like a house party, with people mingling on the porch drinking cheap Chardonnay from plastic cups. I slide through the front door without pausing to drop a donation, somehow convinced that everything’s going to be perverted, maybe even…
Early last November, in a vacant area of the Glendale swap mart, the most important underground hip-hop event of the year kicked off, and chances are you heard nothing about it. The fourth annual Styles Crew Anniversary Show didn’t attract crowds of Power 92 listeners, DMX fans, club kids or…
The parade of classic characters from the pen of William Shakespeare is seemingly endless. During the relatively brief span of 24 years (roughly 1589 to 1613), he gave the world an entire universe of unforgettable creations. The list of well-loved characters includes the conflicted Prince of Denmark named Hamlet, the…
Sometimes, usually out on the golf course near his home in upstate New York, Dan DeCarlo feels terrific, far younger than his 81 years. He’ll thwack the ball, reflect upon his 55 years of marriage to the same beautiful woman, and occasionally contemplate a life spent drawing and creating some…
To look at her, Phoenix painter Sue Chenoweth — an indefatigably cheerful 47-year-old married mother of two teenagers — doesn’t strike you as a stereotypically introspective, visionary artist type. But the frenzied mixed-media paintings of this Valley artist, now on exhibit through February 27 at Modified in central Phoenix, underscore…
“Craft” has proven to be a remarkably elastic term. Once a relatively taut label for useful objects made by hand, it has been stretched by artists in the past half-century to cover an ever-widening array of things made mostly to be seen. Just how wide an array is apparent in…
Those of us foolish enough to have left our handkerchiefs at home exited last week’s matinee of Wit wet-faced and weary. Arizona Theatre Company’s production of this extraordinary play, which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1999, is an emotionally exhausting hour and a half.Both entertaining and intellectually challenging,…
Sara is quirky and free-spirited. That, at least, is the premise of the hilariously wretched new weepie Sweet November, of which Sara, embodied by the breathtaking Charlize Theron, is the heroine.But if you’re smart enough to run in terror at the threat of a movie character who’s quirky and free-spirited,…
