The beauty of This Is Spinal Tap, Rob Reiner’s first and best work as a director, was that it simultaneously zapped the pretensions both of a species of pop music and of a species of cinema. Heavy metal got an affectionate working over from the film, a sham documentary supposedly…
“Fish Out Of Water,” Mesa Southwest Museum’s summer art show, is about the closest I’ve gotten to baiting a hook in 30 years. That’s when my father gave up trying to convert me to the church of fishing–and also gave up dragging me, kicking and screaming, on family fishing expeditions…
“You either go mad or you learn about metaphors.” Allie Light, who made this remark, has done both. Years after being hospitalized for extreme depression, the San Francisco woman became a filmmaker. Her latest is Dialogues With Madwomen, and in addition to directing this unconventional and touching documentary, she is…
Over at Disney, they’ve been brushing up on their Shakespeare the last few years. Think about it–The Little Mermaid had characters named Ariel and Sebastian, as in The Tempest, and Aladdin had a trouble-making, tale-carrying villain named Iago. Even in the Gallic Beauty and the Beast, the brute Gaston’s toadying…
If there was one legendary figure of the Old West who could unambiguously be called a good guy–and there probably wasn’t–Wyatt Earp is surely not the fellow. This sometime lawman, sometime criminal wasn’t actually despicable, like Billy the Kid (although reports suggest Earp had less charm). He was a person…
I am obliged to consider . . . that the assertion that men are turned into wolves and back to themselves again is false, otherwise we must also believe in all the other things that over so many generations we have discovered to be fabulous. –Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia…
After seeing the works on paper in the latest group show being hosted by MARS Gallery, a snide adage pops to mind: “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” Imported from Richmond, Virginia’s 1708 Gallery, a well-established artists’ cooperative, the current show at MARS (Phoenix’s own 15-year-old co-op) boasts…
The title of Widows’ Peak, a comic mystery set in Ireland in the 1920s, refers to a sort of colony of happy widows. It’s a high hill which overlooks the town of Kilshannon, and upon which, by some vaguely explained decree of antiquity, only widows are permitted to live. Presiding…
Valley Art Theatre in Tempe opens the Second Annual Gay and Lesbian Film Festival on Friday. The festival consists of four features and a collection of shorts, all of which are more intriguing than anything new you’re likely to see at the multiplexes this summer. Here, briefly reviewed, are this…
In Lips Together, Teeth Apart, Terrence McNally’s 1991 play staged by Arizona Theatre Company, we’re treated to the spectacle of a weekend with two upscale couples at an expensive Fire Island beach house sipping their bloody marys out on the deck while hating themselves and each other. This is not…
The central character of the Mexican horror movie Cronos is a kindly old man named Jess Gris, the proprietor of a Mexico City curio shop. The luckless Jess finds, amid the dusty bric-a-brac of his shop, a little metal gadget in the shape of a scarab, built by a 16th-century…
Indians in the movies go back about as far as movies themselves. While there’s been enough consciousness-raising in recent decades that only the most naive audience members could still believe that the movie Indians–both noble and savage–we’ve all been brought up on are accurate reflections of real Native Americans, the…
Italy’s Venice Biennale is considered the oldest, largest and most important art party in the world–and Phoenix has just received its engraved invitation to attend. The person who has bagged the invite for the Valley of the Sun is Marilyn Zeitlin, director of the Arizona State University Art Museum. Zeitlin…
Nonthreatening gentleness and prettiness have made Keanu Reeves a teen heartthrob, and the hint of exoticism in his looks has made him a figure of glamour for some adults, as well. If he were a sizzling good actor, he’d have the world at his feet. But alas, poor fellow, he…
“That Fred Flintstone–what an actor!” enthuses a morgue attendant in the Ron Howard comedy Night Shift. I’ve never particularly agreed. Although I dutifully watched, as a kid, Hanna-Barbera’s endlessly rerun cartoon series, which turned humankind’s prehistoric past into a 50s-style, suburban tract-house wonderland, I found it unsophisticated even then–my cartoon…
Some musicals beg you to like them. They brandish their sincerity as a weapon–you’re hit over the head, grabbed by the throat and throttled. If you try to resist, well, you’re the kind of dour-hearted drudge who ought to stick to Eugene O’Neill revivals. But even those who have really…
It isn’t often that I show any prescience, but I had a rare burst a couple of years ago, when I reviewed House Party 2, a Kid N Play vehicle. It was a mostly lousy little picture, and I said so, but I mentioned a grinning, rubber-faced kid named Martin…
Almost everyone who’s at all interested in show business knows that Brandon Lee, the star of The Crow, was killed last year in a shooting accident on the set of that film. It’s hard to imagine a movie worth dying for–The Crow certainly isn’t, striking though much of it is–but…
Uma Thurman’s distinctive physical traits–uncommon beauty and gangliness–uniquely suit her to the role of Sissy Hankshaw, the heroine of Gus Van Sant’s new film, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, adapted by Van Sant from Tom Robbins’ enduring late-hippie-era novel of 1976. Sissy’s distinctive physical traits–her beauty and her abnormally long…
Mention the word “graffiti” and most people will go ballistic. What scrolls up on the average man-on-the-street’s mental monitor are visions of once-virgin buildings, fences and even freeway overpass signs scarred by the unsightly spray-can “tagging” of godless vandals. Tucson’s Sixth Congress Gallery’s current show, “Spraycan Art,” gives us a…
After the rigors of his last film, Malcolm X, director Spike Lee apparently decided to try something in a slightly lighter vein. The change suits him. His latest, an easygoing, nostalgic comedy titled Crooklyn, lacks the flashy, daring visual rhetoric that has characterized Lee’s past work. But it also lacks…
After Roman Polanski’s last film as director, a halfhearted, soddenly wistful attempt at a romantic thriller called Frantic, his new film Bitter Moon is most encouraging, because it’s heartless and nasty. Polanski will probably never recapture the innovative subtleties of his early works, like Knife in the Water and Cul-De-Sac…
