The ad line for As Good As It Gets is “a comedy from the heart that goes for the throat.” Isn’t this simply another way of saying, “You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll gag”? Jack Nicholson plays, of all things, a prolific romance novelist who’s a virulent xenophobe and a hopeless…
Deconstructing Harry opens riotously with a middle-aged man and his lover–who is also his sister-in-law–surreptitiously coupling at a family get-together. It seems at first that we’re about to be shown the story of this pair (Richard Benjamin and Julia Louis-Dreyfus). But before long, we realize that neither of them is…
thursday december 25 Salvation Army Christmas Dinner: If you’re using this publication for warmth as well as reading material, you may want to drop by this free, open-to-the-public repast in Exhibit Halls A and B at Phoenix Civic Plaza, Second Street and Adams, from noon to 2 p.m. Thursday, December…
You ordinarily wouldn’t consider a cheese-loving Yorkshire inventor named Wallace and his mute dog, Gromit, the stuff of cinematic stardom. But in Toonland, where cults and corporations rise from the zany fiction of talking crickets, mice, ducks, moose, flying squirrels, the Simpsons and their heavy-metal cousins Beavis and Butt-head, just…
At first glance, the lineup of this season’s holiday plays looks encouraging. In tandem with the usual sackful of Christmas Carols that gets trotted out every December, several small local companies are presenting alternative–sometimes even outrageous-sounding–holiday fare. About a third of the dozen Christmas plays treading the boards this month…
Explained Biblically, the sinking of R.M.S. Titanic 400 miles off the southern coast of Newfoundland in 1912 is an act of divine one-upmanship. The White Star Line’s 46,328-ton “ship of dreams” was struck down on its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, because mere mortals should not presume to blithely conquer…
Macaulay Culkin’s replacement in the new Home Alone 3 owns a pet rat. If Mouse Hunt, the DreamWorks attempt at a holiday family comedy, hits it big, members of the Home Alone bunch may kick themselves. Why try to package a skin-crawly brat as America’s darling, when you can just…
Now that the Japanese Tora-san series–with 50-some entries in 30 years–has presumably drawn to a close, following the death of star Kiyoshi Atsumi last year, the James Bond films constitute the longest-running continuous series around. They’ve had their ups and downs, but something about the Bond formula has proved enduring…
thursday december 18 Baby, It’s Bright Outside: Fiesta of Light; Ahwatukee-Foothills Festival of Lights; ZooLights; “Wild Winter Nights”: The City of Phoenix’s free Fiesta continues nightly, through Thursday, January 1, 1998, in the area surrounding Symphony Hall Terrace, Second Street and Adams (534-3378). Phoenix’s other major display, Ahwatukee’s bounteous, white-lights-only…
Remember that attraction at Disneyland that features a creaky, prosthetic Abe Lincoln who talks about his life and rattles off an animatronic Emancipation Proclamation? That’s what Ben Tyler’s Goldwater: Mr. Conservative could easily have been. But thanks to some unsentimental writing, this 90-minute, one-man commemoration of Arizona’s best-known former senator…
Steven Spielberg’s Amistad is being given the Big Picture treatment–Schindler’s List Big, not Jurassic Park Big. Last week’s Newsweek featured the film on its cover, calling it “Spielberg’s controversial new movie,” even though it had not yet been released and the only “controversy” was a legal one about alleged cribbing…
Wes Craven’s Scream, which opened almost exactly a year ago, was the surprise hit of an overcrowded Christmas season. In part, its success was a triumph of counterprogramming: In a glut of classy Oscar contenders, Scream was the only teen-horror film. And it was helped by the relatively lackluster response…
Incongruous amid the cotton fields of Avondale, just off Interstate 10, there rises a huge, imposing structure that seems simultaneously futuristic, retro and decrepit. It’s the ruin of an abandoned horse-racing grandstand, glowering down on a track long since overgrown. A real estate white elephant, it’s nonetheless an atmospheric spot…
thursday december 11 Baby, It’s Bright Outside: Fiesta of Light; Ahwatukee-Foothills Festival of Lights; ZooLights; “Wild Winter Nights”: The City of Phoenix’s free Fiesta continues nightly, through Thursday, January 1, 1998, in the area surrounding Symphony Hall Terrace, Second Street and Adams (534-3378). Phoenix’s other major display, Ahwatukee’s bounteous, white-lights-only…
Despite the reputations of Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, it’s doubtful that Arthur Miller ever really topped his first major play, 1947’s All My Sons. With the possible exception of his 1964 Incident at Vichy–another neglected work–Miller hasn’t marshaled so much power with so little windiness. The current…
George Lucas ignited the modern cinematic special-effects explosion with his Star Wars movies; his trailblazing Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) in San Rafael, California, has continuously redefined the limits of fx technology, from inventing fabulous dreamscapes for the second Star Wars trilogy to devising miraculous digital fixes for non-special-effects movies…
A team of Russia-based international bad guys wants to knock off someone at the very top of the U.S. government. Who you gonna call? The Jackal. As personified by Bruce Willis, this assassin di tutti assassins is a rather tightlipped psychopath with an alarming collection of multicolored hair pieces. Willis’…
thursday december 4 Baby, It’s Bright Outside: Fiesta of Light; Ahwatukee-Foothills Festival of Lights; “Wild Winter Nights”: Phoenix’s free Fiesta continues nightly, through Thursday, January 1, 1998, in the area surrounding Symphony Hall Terrace, Second Street and Adams (534-3378). Phoenix’s other major display, Ahwatukee’s bounteous, white-lights-only bonanza, can be viewed…
Athol Fugard has written some of the most important plays of our time. His Master Harold . . . and the boys and My Children! My Africa! have presented hard evidence of how South African politics have pried apart the lives of its people. But with the end of apartheid,…
You can’t exactly call Alien Resurrection a pleasurable experience, but, then again, you wouldn’t say that about its predecessors, either. Directed by the Frenchman Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who previously co-directed with Marc Caro Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, this fourth installment in the Alien onslaught is once again designed…
First, The Heiress was unofficially remade as Washington Square, then Ace in the Hole as Mad City, and The Day of the Jackal as The Jackal. But now we get The Absent-Minded Professor, all dressed up in new threads, as Flubber. In this frenzy of plundering the past, is nothing…
In John Berendt’s beguiling travel-cum-true-crime book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the people of Savannah, Georgia, (in Berendt’s words) “flourished like hothouse plants tended by an indulgent gardener. The ordinary became extraordinary. Eccentrics thrived. Every nuance and quirk of personality achieved greater brilliance in that lush enclosure…
