Al Singer likes to poke fun at his own habit of running at the mouth. "Ask me what time it is, and I'll tell you how to make a watch," jokes the 73-year-old Singer, a lifelong jazz adherent who moved from Michigan to the Valley 11 years ago. But if...
Oscar-nominated Alfre Woodard chooses to call herself an actor rather than an actress, because "actresses worry about eyelashes and cellulite, and women who are actors worry about the characters we are playing." Adapting that comparison for a discussion of female musicians, let's say that a pop diva is more concerned...
In time, 2001 might well be remembered as the year of the overhyped and undercooked, the year storybook wizards cast spells to eradicate critical good judgment, the year from which there was so much detritus to choose that much of the good stuff makes a best-of list only by default...
Appropriately, A Beautiful Mind does not offer a literal translation of the life of John Forbes Nash Jr., the mathematician whose work on game theories won him a Nobel prize in 1994. The film leaves out significant events, people and places; it amalgamates central figures, disguises prominent locations and hides...
Phoenix police officer Franklin Brown Jr. has returned to the scene of the crime."Right here is where it started," he says, standing on an isolated two-lane road at the city's southwest tip, on Lower Buckeye Road between 91st and 99th avenues. "This is where I got shot." Speaking in the...
When he first auditioned for Any Given Sunday director Oliver Stone to play quarterback Willie Beamen, an embittered bench-warmer prone to fits of vomiting before each snap, Jamie Foxx was sure he'd blown it. Stone, as subtle as an ice pick to the cornea, said as much--loud enough so Foxx,...
In a parody of Sally Field's infamous Oscar acceptance speech, readers of a new book are exclaiming, "I dislike it! I really dislike it!"That's the response from a small band of movie buffs who've taken to the Internet to denounce Oscar Fever, a factually challenged study of the Academy Awards...
On Oscar night, do you ever wonder why you've rarely heard of, much less seen, any of the nominees for Best Foreign Film? Let's be frank. Phoenix is not a hotbed of international cinema. But this weekend, the first Scottsdale International Film Festival provides an opportunity to catch up with...
Early last month, a host of show-biz notables gathered at Radio City Music Hall for a TV tribute to John Lennon. Besides proving that Kevin Spacey can carry a tune (his faithful "Mind Games" was spirited, if a bit jarring), the show was a reminder that the work of a...
Ralphie May, who is white, calls black men "niggers." In his standup act, he uses the word repeatedly; he also riffs on Mexicans, who "see the Virgin Mary in everything," and whose names are easy to remember "because they're on their necklaces." He was raised in the deep South, in...
God works in mysterious ways. How else to explain the sudden appearance of a press release about Elvis on the office bulletin board? Well, maybe the "PLEASE POST THIS ON YOUR BULLETIN BOARD" it requested in polite italics, pulsing with the gentle insistence of ALL CAPS, had something to do...
How many times must I tell you kids Before you shut your yaps? Yes, 'n' how many ways must I say the same thing Before I can get my nap? Yes, 'n' how many times must your parents be called Before they make you cut the crap? The answer, you...
Bob Dylan's last studio album, 1997's Time Out of Mind, was about as much fun as a eulogy. With its songs of remorse and regret, with its plaints of begged-for salvation and yearned-for deliverance, that collection sounded like a last will and testament -- a big adios from the jokerman...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
