Crispin Glover is not a kook. Never mind the time he almost beheaded David Letterman with a platform-heeled karate kick. And forget the rumors that he hangs upside down from high-rise apartment balconies to relax. We won’t discuss Glover’s collection of doll eyes neatly arranged according to size, or his…
The most obnoxious man alive suddenly, for a rare moment, is calm and contemplative. “I don’t know,” says Howard Stern, his familiar voice unfamiliarly soft. “I don’t know why.” Those are words Howard Stern doesn’t say very often. He, after all, knows everything, and he’ll remind you of that on…
thursday march 6 Cactus League Baseball: The boys of spring are back for this year’s slate of preseason games, which continues daily, through Friday, March 28, at stadia Valleywide. On Thursday, March 6, the Oakland A’s play the Chicago Cubs, the Milwaukee Brewers take on the San Diego Padres, the…
In the two decades since Eraserhead, David Lynch has established himself as American cinema’s premier surrealist, our own Wizard of Weird. Although his first two Hollywood projects–The Elephant Man (1980) and Dune (1984)–had little room for the sort of spooky shit at which he excels, his style found its greatest…
The ingredients are familiar: Donnie Brasco stars Al Pacino as a Mafia soldier and Johnny Depp as an FBI undercover agent who infiltrates the mob. But there’s a twist. Based on a true story, the film is a grunt’s-eye view of the Mafia, and it’s not remotely “operatic” or Scorsese-ish…
Marvin’s Room, starring Diane Keaton and Meryl Streep as sisters who reunite uneasily for the first time in 20 years, is one of those movies about people who confront the choices they’ve made and become better people for it. Adapted by the late Scott McPherson from his popular 1992 play…
thursday february 27 Cactus League Baseball: The boys of spring are back for this year’s slate of preseason games, which opens with a couple of charity matches on Thursday, February 27: The Seattle Mariners take on the San Diego Padres in a benefit for the Peoria Diamond Club at 1:05…
Michael Grady is a playwright/actor/director who not only turns out fine work, but is content to stay in Phoenix putting out for a theater audience that’s still developing a taste for new plays. Lured here in the late ’80s by Actors Theatre of Phoenix, Grady has remained, appearing in lead…
If all you knew about lesbians was what you saw in movies made by lesbians, you’d have a pretty dreary picture of the lifestyle. Most of us know a lesbian or three who actually has a sense of humor, whose idea of socializing extends beyond sitting in a semicircle with…
John Singleton’s new film, Rosewood, chronicles a shocking and little-known incident in the history of American racism–the destruction of the title village and massacre of many of its black residents by a white mob. A moderately prosperous hamlet in the pine forests of western Florida, Rosewood came under attack in…
Irvin Kershner’s The Empire Strikes Back, the continuation of George Lucas’ Star Wars, is a classic fantasy in its own right. I vastly prefer it to the first film. Its textures are richer, its emotions deeper, and it’s an honest-to-Jedi movie–not a dozen jammed-together entries of a serial. On its…
thursday february 20 Beck: No matter who scores the statuettes at the Grammy Awards on Wednesday, February 26–and the Grammys have historically, and notoriously, gone home in the limos of questionable recipients–Beck (real name: Beck Hansen) remains the big winner in the year in rock. It’s fashionable to link that…
An impressive directorial debut from writer-actor Billy Bob Thornton (who co-wrote and starred in One False Move), Sling Blade is the stark, enveloping tale of Karl, a dimwitted killer released after 25 years in an Arkansas asylum for murdering his mother and her lover. Thornton plays Karl with a guttural…
In Absolute Power, Clint Eastwood plays Luther Whitney, a master thief who burgles on little cat feet. He’s as stealthy as the Pink Panther pilferer, though not nearly as amusing. Luther, you see, is presented to us as an artist. We first see him at the National Gallery dutifully copying…
thursday february 13 Big Jack Johnson and the Oilers: Mississippi Delta bluesman Johnson is that rare artist who evokes the musical voices of others without undermining his own. You’ll hear loving references to “Sittin’ on Top of the World” and “Proud Mary” on his new disc, We Got to Stop…
In 431 B.C., Euripides’ Medea took last place in an annual festival of plays held in honor of the god Dionysus. Although the dramatist usually took top honors in this contest, the judges were loath to give high marks to a play in which a mother kills her own children…
Elmore Leonard’s Touch is identified on the paperback as a mystery and carried in stores next to Leonard’s celebrated crime novels (like Get Shorty). But this wan little book is actually the problem child of Leonard’s oeuvre. It’s about a former Franciscan monk named Juvenal (played in the film by…
As luck would have it, my epiphany about “Art on the Edge of Fashion,” a show of some 30 works by eight artists at ASU’s Nelson Fine Arts Center, came last Saturday night in the museum’s men’s room. I was taking care of some personal business when a woman’s voice…
The last time you looked, the Orpheum Theatre was probably either boarded up or maybe hosting a concert by your favorite rock band, say R.E.M. But last week, after a 12-year-long, $14 million fix-up, the formerly run-down vaudeville house was reopened as a mirror image of its younger self. Its…
On the run from a professional assassin in Shadow Conspiracy, Washington, D.C., insider Charlie Sheen stops to make a furtive cell-phone call right in front of the Lincoln Memorial–out in the open, in front of God and Honest Abe and everyone. It’s a brilliant tactical move, since the Lincoln Memorial…
At a 20-year remove, George Lucas’ Star Wars comes off less as the work of a wizard than as the weird obsessional by-product of an eccentric American primitive. If you’re not a Star Wars fanatic, and you re-see this movie now varnished to a sheen in its self-consciously spiffy new…
thursday february 6 “Art on the Edge of Fashion”: Arizona State University Art Museum curator Heather Lineberry organized this exhibit of unwearable wearables–i.e., clothing as metaphorical medium and jumping-off point for an examination of gender issues and “the nature of identity.” The exhibition, which also includes photos, sculpture, and installation…
