Grand Canyon University’s production of Georg Kaiser’s 1918 play Gas I has scored a bull’s eye on a virtual blind spot in my experience. Never having seen productions of Capek’s R.U.R., Cocteau’s The Infernal Machine, or any of the 73 plays Kaiser apparently wrote in addition to Gas I, my…
Samuel Beckett was arguably the most important writer for the theatre of our century. Winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969, Beckett wrote three masterpieces for the stage: Waiting for Godot (1952), Endgame (1957) and Krapp’s Last Tape (1960). Many people would add Happy Days (1961) to this…
True to its title, French director Nicolas Philibert’s documentary In the Land of the Deaf approaches deafness not as a handicap but as the unifying condition of a subculture. It’s a very simple, unaffected piece of filmmaking, smoothly intercutting several unconnected strands of narrative–the marriage of two young people, a…
While Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump racks up the nominations, let’s pause a moment to take a look at the latest project of Zemeckis’ old buddy Bob Gale, his writing partner on Used Cars and the Back to the Future films. Mr. Payback, which Gale wrote and directed for Sony New…
What’s an O.J. junkie to do? That rascally Judge Ito recessed the Simpson trial for four days, and it looked like a long weekend, indeed, until I found myself at Phoenix Theatre’s immensely satisfying production of To Kill a Mockingbird. There is something inherently dramatic about trials: two sides in…
The flawless, if sterile, computer illusions of Jurassic Park condemned stop-motion animation to extinction as a special effect. First developed in the silents by pioneering animator Willis O’Brien, this technique involved the frame-by-frame shooting of articulated puppets to simulate movement when run at regular speed. But it was always too…
Hosanna! Hallelujah! Hooray! The Herberger has a hit! We have been told that by acquiring a major league baseball franchise, Phoenix will become one of America’s premier cities. Until now, sunny Phoenix has languished in the shadows of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, San Diego and Minneapolis–not…
The first movie I ever saw was the epic drama Blood and Sand. Tyrone Power played the dashing Manolete, the greatest bullfighter who ever lived. With the dramatic flourish of a spangled cape, Arizona Theatre Company is presenting the world premiäre of Milcha Sanchez-Scott’s The Old Matador on the main…
Last week I became a member of that select group of people who can claim to have received a telephone call from the Jerky Boys. Lucky me. Also known as Johnny Brennan and Kamal, the two Queens, New York, natives were in town to promote their bold effort to move…
The first film by New Zealander Peter Jackson to gain much notice here was last year’s Dead Alive. This frenzied, farcical splatter parody, about people turned into cannibalistic zombies through the bite of the dreaded Sumatran rat monkey, was like a cinematic coup de grce–it was so revoltingly, yet hilariously,…
The Wolfgang Press Funky Little Demons (4AD) Cranky Little Demons might be a more appropriate description. Showing the equivalent of an extraterrestial’s grasp on what makes music soulful and thus funky, Wolfgang Press spews lyrical references to Motown on the first two cuts and lifts the chorus from the Four…
When art depicts the pornographic, does it cease to be art? If pornography achieves artistic expression, does it cease to be pornography? What about W.H. Auden’s rapturous paeans to buggery, or D.H. Lawrence’s celebration of coitus, or that bawdy unknown ancient poet who wrote Satyricon, in which no perversion was…
At the university, Polonius boasts in Hamlet, he once was accounted a good actor. Hamlet cannot resist asking: “What did you enact?” Polonius brags: “I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed in the Capitol; Brutus killed me.” Hamlet teases him: “It was a brute part of him to kill…
Oh, dear, I’m not supposed to go mad ’til 1800! –Graham Chapman as King George III on Monty Python’s Flying Circus Most Americans know King George III of Britain, if at all, as the guy who taxed our butt-kicking forebears into revolt, and whom they eventually beat. Some may remember…
Richard Linklater’s films, so far, have shown a unity of time so disciplined that it would gladden Aristotle’s heart. The young writer/director’s first feature, Slacker, took place in a day and a night on the streets of Austin, Texas. His second, the ’70s period piece Dazed and Confused, took a…
Except for Roman Polanski’s 1971 adaptation of Macbeth, the new film Death and the Maiden is his only film version of a play. Shakespeare to Ariel Dorfman–what a comedown. Still, Polanski did his best–he gave Dorfman’s dreary, annoyingly earnest revenge melodrama about political torture a smooth, elegant rendering onscreen. The…
In the surprisingly crowded genre of documentaries about filmmakers, director Ray Mller’s The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl is most likely the best I’ve ever seen, because it deals directly with subjects far more important than filmmaking. That grandly contradictory title is not wasted on Riefenstahl–her life really has…
Talk about showmanship! One of the distinctions co-directors Chris LaMont and Steve Bencich are claiming, probably accurately, for their comedy The Best Movie Ever Made is “the largest mime scene in motion-picture history.” Indeed, the all-mime parody of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is one of the highlights of this mlange…
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is arguably Shakespeare’s most exquisitely wrought piece of dramatic construction. Three tales intermingle to weave a magical web of three comic styles. Sophisticated romantic comedy featuring witty ripostes is the manner of the court creatures, ruled by Theseus and his new bride, Hippolyta. The rude mechanicals,…
The Immortals can rest easy. Richard Burbage, David Garrick, Edmund Kean, Sir Henry Irving, the divine Sarah Bernhardt, John Barrymore, Sir John Gielgud, Lord Laurence Olivier, Christopher Plummer, Sir Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, Nicol Williamson, Jonathan Pryce, William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Mel Gibson, Val Kilmer, Ralph Fiennes and, now, even…
Red Rock West, the splendid, tight-as-a-drum feature debut of the young writer/director John Dahl, was a comic thriller about a guy trying to get out of a small town. The hero was a decent, honorable young man who tells a tiny lie to get a job, then realizes with horror…
Nobody’s Fool is to Paul Newman’s career what Scent of a Woman was to Al Pacino’s–generously, a “character study”; more frankly, a blatant vehicle, existing for no reason other than to give a great actor a chance to charm us. It’s a much better, much less addlebrained picture than Scent,…
