By phone from Kansas City, Missouri — where he’s performing at a comedy club called Stanford & Son’s — Tucson native and MAD-TV regular Pablo Francisco does the most impressive of his several ace impersonations. It’s “The Trailer Guy” — the deep, sonorous voice that intones the come-ons behind movie…
Celtic and dance companies in the Riverdance/Michael Flatley mode, as well as other folk/performance art dance troupes such as the Australian Tap Dogs, have been all the rage as touring companies on stages around the world for the last few years. One would hardly expect a Celtic dance company to…
“Another man said one time Elvis Presley is the biggest thing that ever happened,” the Reverend Leroy Jenkins says. “No, he wasn’t, Jesus was. Amen. Elvis Presley’s dead and almost forgotten; Jesus is still remembered and you haven’t seen him in 2,000 years!” The Reverend Jenkins is witnessing toacrowd of…
Eyes Wide Shut, the final motion picture from the late, great Stanley Kubrick, is easily the most anticipated adult film of the year. It’s Star Wars: Episode I–The Phantom Menace for grown-ups. Any film by the notoriously painstaking auteur would have achieved this status. Kubrick made only 13 features in…
You can tell the first wave of summer blockbusters has shot its wad when the studios start tossing out their second- and third-string films. In the old days, these would have been called “programmers”–thoroughly competent entries that reiterated all the conventions of their reliable, easy-to-market genres. Such is Lake Placid,…
All this millennium talk of recent days is nothing new to Al Stewart. His 1989 song “Last Days of the Century” pointed to the event better than 10 years ahead of time. The lyric to that song included many hallmarks of Stewart’s writing style: literary, cinematic and historical elements that…
To promote the Friday, July 23, opening of their glossy remake of The Haunting, the friendly folks at DreamWorks sent me a copy of Haunted Places: The National Directory (Penguin, 1994), a state-by-state compendium of places where ghosts, aliens, legendary creatures and the like are said to hang out. Perhaps…
thursday july 22 Jazz sax man Gato Barbieri honks away, touring behind his Columbia Jazz CD Che Corazon, at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, July 22, at the Red River Music Hall, Mill and Washington in Tempe. See the story on page 104. Tickets are $28.50. 602-829-6779 (Red River), 480-503-5555 (Dillard’s). A…
I know the scarcity of local summer stock has gotten to me when I find myself driving to Peoria to watch one of our most amateurish amateur companies take a stab at a sophisticated British farce. Not having seen any theater at all in several weeks, I risked Theater Works’…
First the good news: The title of the high school comedy/Gen X nostalgia flick The Wood is not, despite this summer’s rash of double entendres, a dirty joke. The name’s as earnest and literal as the film itself, and simply marks the setting as Inglewood, California, the Los Angeles ‘burb…
Do you feel snug and secure in your cozy suburban life? Are you happy in your picture-perfect home, with your carefully manicured lawn, your kids and your soccer games and your barbecues? Do you feel safe? Well, the creators of Arlington Road, the ponderous new thriller starring Jeff Bridges and…
The Blair Witch Project, the bone-chilling indie by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, is easily the scariest horror picture of the ’90s, a movie that can take a place among the most potent and inexorable of modern shockers, like Night of the Living Dead or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Three…
It’s about time we had a talk. Yeah, you know, that talk. The one about how uncomfortable and strange it is to be a young human male, how raging and unforgiving the hormones, how fragile the ego, how mysterious the female form. You see, well, how do I say this?…
You probably have heard E.G. Daily, even if you’ve never heard of her. If you have children under the age of 10, you can bet you’ve heard her–as one of the busiest actresses in the field of cartoon and looping voice-overs, Daily provides the malapropism-studded voice of Tommy Pickles, the…
Although the Writer’s Voice is a great option for aspiring writers who are Valley-bound, if writing’s your thing and getting out of town your plan, Prescott’s Hassayampa Institute for Creative Writing will be the place to do both from Monday, July 26, through Saturday, July 31. This is the fifth…
thursday july 15 “Was Jack the Ripper a Woman?” That’s the question that’s being used to promote Paradise Valley Community College student playwright Allison Rose’s new speculative drama The Fifth Victim: Jack the Ripper Discovered. The work, directed by Gray Zaro, is the inaugural production of PVCC’s summer theater program…
“Was it I that hurried to the deed? No. It was the daemon that possessed me. My limbs were guided to the office by a power foreign and superior to mine. I had been defrauded, for a moment, of the empire of my muscles. A little moment for that sufficed…
To hear Spike Lee tell it, Summer of Sam means to be a panoramic view of the summer of 1977 in New York City–when temperatures shot into the high 90s and power blackouts set nerves on edge, when the party agenda included snorting coke at Studio 54 and copulating with…
The animated TV show South Park was the big sensation of the 1997-98 season–or at least as big a hit as a cable channel like Comedy Central can manage. It was almost inevitable that creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone would take their batch of foul-mouthed 8-year-olds to the big…
It won’t take long for anyone familiar with the original Wild Wild West from television to notice that something is not right with the listless new Barry Sonnenfeld-directed film version. Yes, the film features Will Smith in the role of James West, and Kevin Kline as his cerebral sidekick Artemus…
In a touching effort to help the devoted art rats who turn out for the “Summer Spectacular” Art Walk stave off the heat, Coldwell Banker’s Success Realty Concierge Services has erected a “Tunnel of Mist” to keep walkers cool between galleries on Scottsdale’s Main Street, and China Mist Tea will…
In mid-1800s London, a group of young men gathered to study and discuss the Bible together. Founder George Williams formed this unassuming reading group in 1841 in an effort to provide post-industrial-age urbanites an alternative to life on the streets. It eventually evolved into a world-famous organization, the YMCA. After…
