If there is a common thread connecting past and present throughout the course of fashion history, it's made of gold. That's the idea behind "Gold Fever," the current exhibit at Phoenix Art Museum's Fashion Design Gallery. Just by a casual flip through the pages of Vogue, dedicated followers of 21st-century...
Woody Allen's latest romp through Old New York combines (among other things) a skirt-chasing insurance investigator with the charm of a rodent, a wisecracking Vassar grad who takes no guff and a nightclub hypnotist in a sequined turban who doubles as a major jewel thief. The year is 1940. The...
Face it, the National Endowment for the Arts isn't leaving many jazz and blues guys all that well-endowed, which, if you make a living wailing onstage about the behemoth in your britches, can be a pretty shameful thing. So, how about corralling more government arts bucks by taxing the film...
These are heady days for Bob Dylan. It seems that everywhere the legendary song-poet turns these days, he's being showered with a new round of industry honors and gushing career overviews. In the last four years, he's received his first-ever Best Album Grammy Award (Time Out of Mind), his first...
Easily the best performance in the last year's wheezy The Legend of Bagger Vance was by the drawly, plainspoken J. Michael Moncrief, a boy with an old man's face, as the local kid who idolized Matt Damon and helped Will Smith caddy. The same character, as an adult, also narrated...
On September 13, at 11:30 a.m., Bryce Zabel was to have met with USA Network executives about a miniseries he was pitching to the cable outlet. Zabel, creator of such television shows as Dark Skies and The Crow: Stairway to Heaven, had the conference on his calendar for weeks. But,...
If there's any justice in moviedom, this summer's feel-good hit will be an unassuming Dutch comedy called Everybody's Famous! Defying long odds, writer-director Dominique Deruddere has taken a couple of shopworn subjects -- the public obsession with celebrity and the ineptitude of amateur criminals -- and parlayed them into an...
Ten years ago, Robert Harris picked up the phone to find on the other end a relative stranger bearing extraordinary news. This man was at a film exchange in Toronto, where movies are housed and rented out to exhibitors, and he was holding in his hands canisters of film containing...
Those expecting Himalaya to focus upon the beloved traveling carnival ride known for its liberal use of Def Leppard ("Do you wanna go faster?") are in for a few surprises. For one, this sensuous, exotic film is more like an issue of National Geographic come to life, rich with cultural...
Carolyn T. Lowery -- African-American neighborhood gadfly, city council candidate and ice pick in the toes of just about every authority -- has a penchant for sometimes spouting outrageous candor. So while others attending a June forum for candidates at the Saint Catherine's School on south Central Avenue aired platitudes...
The publicist asks if I'd like to speak to D.A. Pennebaker to commemorate the 60th birthday of Bob Dylan, which falls on May 24. She asks this because, during the spring of 1965, Pennebaker made a documentary about Dylan's tour of England, Dont Look Back, which captured a drained, cagey...
Home InvasionOwing to the NCAA playoffs and the Academy Awards, Sunday dawns a big TV day for the Flash. All other pursuits are discarded.The Flash is a bit perturbed when one regular hoops-watching pal -- we'll call him Paul -- skips the Flash's gig in favor of another. Paul is...
Gil Cates takes a long, deep breath before answering the question: Is producing the Academy Awards show the ultimate no-win situation? Cates has produced nine of the past 11 Oscar telecasts, and he returns March 25 after a year's layoff; for those scoring at home, Cates is not to blame...
Theater fans like to have it both ways. Sometimes it can be a small, bare-bones, black-box production with no frills to take away from the actor's work and the author's words. Other times it's the big expansive show filled with all the spectacle the stage can hold. Either choice can...
In honor of Mother's Day, here's lunch with the ultimate TV Mom. It's not June Cleaver, not Carol Brady, not the tortured alpha female from Malcolm in the Middle -- no, the honor has to go to the hip, bus-driving, back-up-singing, ostensibly keyboard-tickling matriarch of The Partridge Family.Not that this...
The pile in the road didn't look human. It was a cardboard box, crushed and mangled by Friday evening's rush hour, or a pile of stray clothes, fallen from the turtle shell carrier of a cross-country traveler's car. It didn't seem at all like a man. But it was. He...
Easily the most creepy (and, by far, most interesting) thing about Along Came a Spider, yet another adaptation of one of James Patterson's alleged mystery novels featuring beleaguered Detective Alex Cross, is how much co-star Monica Potter looks, sounds and acts like Julia Roberts. Granted, it's hardly a startling revelation...
It was to have been a routine stop on a routine press tour, yet another town in which the actress was to show up, chit and chat with the local media about her movie, then move on -- the traveling salesman getting the word out, moving The Product. Denver, Dallas,...
Hello, what's this? Why, could it be another cautionary tale from Hollywood about recreational drugs being -- alert the media! -- not particularly good for people? (If only they could try the same with guns. Messrs. Heston and Silver: You awake yet?) Indeed, with Blow, director Ted Demme (Beautiful Girls,...
Ennio Morricone can tell you stories about each of his 400 children -- where they were conceived, what they mean to him, why each one remains so singular and special he cannot and will not choose a favorite. He's proud even of the orphans, the runts, the bastards, the children...
There he is, his eyes and body language as unmistakable as the flattened hat perched perfectly on his head. This little man in the shabby suit looks older than his 66 years -- he looks ageless, actually -- yet he performs physical feats beyond the capability of most people 40...
If fame is fleeting, it also has its own geography. While New York types and theater buffs the world over revere Stephen Schwartz as a superstar, much of the rest of the world has never heard of him. Although he's among the most successful composers working today, and despite a...
