Teacher, teacher, I declare--I see Monica Lewinsky's underwear! Actually, the panties in question don't belong to Lewinsky; they're owned by drag queen Celia Putty, a performer at Wink's, a Valley gay bar. But that doesn't stop 30 Glendale Community College students and their instructor from roaring as the "semen"-caked intern...
This mystery begins with the five known, credible witnesses to a car crash. The scene was north Phoenix. The time was 1:43 in the morning. Robert Nettles was on his back patio, facing Cactus Road, when he heard the chilling scream of tires on pavement. Nettles told police he looked...
Even students of English history may have trouble sorting out the palace intrigues and intragovernmental conspiracies that fill Elizabeth, the handsome new production about Queen Elizabeth I's ascension to the British throne in 1558. With the bewitching Australian actress Cate Blanchett (last year's Oscar and Lucinda) in the title role,...
Thursday December 24 Since Christmas Eve is generally a day of ease and relaxation, when we do all those little things that we've been meaning to get around to the rest of the year, why not stop by the Burton Barr Central Library Thursday, December 24, both to catch up...
The past year has been filled with good films . . . interesting films . . . worthwhile films. In fact, there were many that I think of as being wonderful or droll or whatever. But 1998 failed to produce a single film to which the term "great" might be...
Fifteen minutes into Velvet Goldmine, director Todd Haynes' love letter to England's glam-rock scene of the late Sixties/early Seventies, the film has already promised to be many things: a missing-person mystery; a meticulous period piece; an essay on sexually liberated dandyism; a quasi-musical; a portrait of the Machiavellian as an...
Belle and Sebastian The Boy With the Arab Strap (Jeepster/Matador) Goth can be a many-sided gloom. At its silliest, it's too much eyeliner on a suburban kid playing make-believe with death and destruction. At the other end are fashion nonspecific soundtracks of honest human entropy: the artist-as-fuck-up documents like Big...
It comes as no surprise to learn that Paul Devlin, the producer, director and editor of SlamNation, is an Emmy winner for his work on TV sports shows like NBC and CBS Olympic coverage and Extreme Games 101 on ESPN2. SlamNation is a documentary chronicle of the 1996 National Poetry...
When you are young, you need your father. When you are old, you need your sons. --Vietnamese proverb This much about Loi Nguyen's last hours may be recounted with reasonable certainty: The 17-year-old awoke on September 24 at his parents' home near 19th Avenue and Dunlap in Phoenix. It was...
Checking the vital signs for guitar-based rock has long been an ongoing preoccupation for critics. Still, you knew something was a bit different this year when new releases by Hole, Marilyn Manson and even the sample-heavy Garbage were judged not merely for their musical merits but for their potential to...
There are three reasons one might want to brave the August heat and go to the Phoenix Zoo this weekend, when the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile pulls in. One is to participate in the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile Talent Search, a national hunt for a new moppet between the ages of 3...
Montana Grill & Bread Company, 3717 East Indian School Road, Phoenix, 553-8553. Hours: breakfast, lunch and dinner, Monday through Saturday, 6:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. Can we talk? It's time we had a discussion about grills. It seems that just about every new restaurant in town calls itself a "grill."...
"I'm here every day," the guy says. "Well, every day except Sunday. Sunday is for family and God." The guy is Mexican, handsome, in his 30s, with a mustache and a smile like sunlight. He has a taco stand on Van Buren near 17th Avenue. The stand has been there...
Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita still has the power to scare off people. Proof is the book's new movie adaptation, directed by Adrian Lyne and scripted by Stephen Schiff and starring Jeremy Irons as the passionate pedophile Humbert Humbert, a man entranced by nymphets. Completed more than two years ago, the movie...
Jamie Lee Curtis is the most obvious graduate of Slasher U to cross over into big-time stardom--she's back, in Halloween: H20, for the class reunion. But she's not alone. Some major, no kidding, Oscar-winning, A-list stars have also matriculated the world of disreputable, low-budget slice-and-dice movies. Here's a brief compendium:...
The first weekend of the theater season looked like show business as usual. Phoenix Theatre was kicking off its 78th year with another tried-and-true musical; Theater Works was tackling a show beyond its limited means; and Planet Earth was providing its usual quirky, black-box alternative to both of the above...
thursday august 27 The soul sisters of the '70s trio LaBelle--Nona Hendryx, Sarah Dash and Patti LaBelle--looked like they'd just beamed down from the planet Mongo in the "Lady Marmalade" days, but weren't they great days? Twenty-odd years later, the solo LaBelle (real name: Patricia Holt) still has the pipes--an...
No Mere Mr. Nice Guy The article on Travis Lee ("St. Travis at the Bat," Michael Kiefer, September 3) was awesome. I never knew how "nice" a guy Travis was. I had seen him play many games, but had only seen the baseball player side of Travis, not the man...
BFA Blues Your article ("I Was Sick . . . and Ye Visited Me Not," Terry Greene Sterling, August 6) is continuing proof that the Baptist Foundation of Arizona is not a charitable foundation and should have that status revoked by the state and be forced to pay taxes to...
Although some highbrow critics have scoffed at them over the years as aesthetic wanna-bes, riding the coattails of artists like Henry James and E.M. Forster to the illusion of stature, the producer-director team of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory has had a long a career in the arthouses. In the...
Where do racist white gangs allow black people to be members? In Arizona, according to a news release by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. At least that's what the Reverend Oscar Tillman, president of the Arizona NAACP, was saying at the news conference he called last...
In 1974, Robert Towne was seething on the lot where his most famous script, Chinatown, was being shot. When I interviewed him at the time, he was appalled at director Roman Polanski's heavy hand, particularly Polanski's ending where Evelyn Mulwray, the Faye Dunaway character, gets killed. Twenty-three years later, I...
