Mancuso's, 6166 North Scottsdale Road (The Borgata), Scottsdale, 948-9988. Hours: Dinner, 5 to 10 p.m., seven days a week. Arizona has its share of ancient wonders: the Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, Meteor Crater. I suppose you could add Mancuso's to the list. After all, it's nearly as old. When...
Do we really need to see the great Kevin Spacey fuming and fussing in one of those we-do-things-my-way-or-we-don't-do-them-at-all roles? In The Negotiator, he's playing Chris Sabian, an expert hostage negotiator for the Chicago police, whose job it is to talk down Samuel L. Jackson's Danny Roman, another police expert who...
The luncheon appears to be nothing special, just another stop on the rubber-chicken circuit for some of the state's true power brokers--the heads of Arizona's utility companies. But for Paul Newman, it's like entering the lion's den. At the annual gathering of the Arizona Utility Investors Association, Newman, a Democrat,...
Spike and Mike's Classic Festival of Animation is the other yearly film anthology from the same two Californians--Spike Decker and Mike Gribble--who concoct Spike & Mike's Festival of Sick and Twisted Animation. Like Sick and Twisted, their annual blowout of scatology, sacrilege and sensationalistic sex, the Classic festival is a...
A pungent, ardent yearning permeated the big theater at George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch one balmy evening in July. It felt like artistic homesickness. Walter Murch--the renowned film editor and sound designer--was making an audacious presentation to a few dozen filmmakers, journalists, broadcasters and trusted friends. George Lucas himself took time...
One of the few seemingly spontaneous bursts of energy at this year's Oscar ceremony was provided by motor-mouthing Dutch director Mike van Diem, who seemed genuinely surprised to have won the award for Best Foreign Film for his debut feature, Character. If the commercial popularity and Oscar sweep for Titanic...
Public-address announcer Jeff Munn skitters down the stairs to his press-box seat high above Sun Devil Stadium. His heart still pounds after his frenzied drive from downtown Phoenix, where 30 minutes earlier he finished announcing the Arizona Diamondbacks baseball game that had gone 12 innings. Munn slips out of his...
In 1978, RSO Records was the most successful record label on planet Earth. From Christmas of 1977 to May 20 the following year, the Robert Stigwood-owned label maintained a 21-week stranglehold on the top position of Billboard's Hot 100 singles chart. No other record label has ever managed to score...
. . . but when worlds collide, said George Pal to his bride, I'm gonna give you some terrible thrills . . . --The Rocky Horror Picture Show Nowhere in the press materials for Deep Impact can I find any reference to Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer's novel When Worlds...
Picture the setup for a girl-on-girl tryst in a porn nugget titled Hot Seats released last summer on VCA video: Horny babes on mountain bikes traversing the hills outside of Los Angeles, clad in tight bike shorts, nipple-enhancing jerseys and enough makeup to challenge any Spice Girl. Two of them...
The Horse Whisperer, the latest film from Robert Redford--and the first of his directorial efforts in which he also stars--could almost serve as a compendium of Redford's best and worst tendencies. It features his eye for gorgeous, pictorial vistas, his straightforward narrative approach and, most important, his understanding of actors...
And the Nominees Are . . . : In the movie business, it's the Oscar. In the recording industry, it's the Grammy. In the restaurant world, it's the James Beard Awards. Right now, the firm of Deloitte & Touche is tabulating results from the first round of balloting. A few...
The flimsiest hustle in movie promotion today--one perpetrated by film festivals and their camp followers--is that independent movies are starved for mainstream attention. The truth is, they often have an open field in big-city media. Major studios are usually unable to deliver a finished print of a would-be blockbuster until...
thursday may 7 One of the state's largest amateur sporting events, the 1998 Arizona Special Olympics Summer Games showcases the athletic prowess of some 2,000 developmentally disabled adults and children in a variety of Olympic-style competitions, held on Arizona State University campus in Tempe, mostly in and around Sun Angel...
You're not likely to come out of the bone-chilling documentary Waco: The Rules of Engagement with the belief that David Koresh was angelic, or that he had no hand in the deaths of his Branch Davidian followers in Waco, Texas, in April of 1993. But, if you assumed that the...
About a year ago, Julia Roberts was a guest on Bravo's Inside the Actors Studio. Near the end of the show, craggy host James Lipton put her through his standard 20 Questions routine, profound stuff like, "What's your favorite curse word?" When Lipton asked Roberts what she eventually hoped to...
In a world where Hanson outsells Fugazi and "girl power" conjures images of the Spice Girls rather than Bikini Kill, there's a smug sense of satisfaction when entertainment institutions unwittingly recognize anyone from the indie-ground. Nearly a year ago, Elliott Smith was on the front porch of Revolver HQ, playing...
When guitarist Steve Larson celebrated his departure from Dead Hot Workshop last June by setting fire to his guitar at a Gibson's farewell gig, many assumed that the veteran Tempe band's future had likewise been reduced to a pile of smoldering ash. After nine years of ups and downs, a...
Danger, Will Robinson! Sensors detect boomer-TV redux once again. This time the victim is Lost in Space, Irwin Allen's enjoyably absurd sci-fi TV fantasy which ran from 1965 to 1968 on CBS, before ABC's Batman trounced it in the ratings. Grown-ups are likely to cringe at the prospect of sitting...
Though her contemporaries often compared Virginia Woolf's nonlinear, almost cubist narratives to the cinema's then-burgeoning use of montage, close-ups, flashbacks, tracking shots and rapid cuts, the strength of Woolf's novels lay in the rhythm of her arresting style, and in her heroines' poignant melancholia, which insidiously seeps through the reader's...
Thursday March 19 Ever seen Santo, the masked superhero-wrestler from Mexican fantasy-horror films? Imagine four Santos playing frenzied Dick Dale/Ventures-style surf-guitar rock, and you've got a good picture of Los Straitjackets. Touring in support of its excellent Upstart CD Viva! Los Straitjackets!--supposedly what Quentin Tarantino cried to the band from...
Set in 19th-century Australia, this tale of two gamblers--Oscar, a failed minister, and Lucinda, a glass-works owner--is too wispy to be an art thing and too heavy to be a toy. Its key symbol is a tiny glass teardrop. The "Prince Rupert drop" cannot be smashed with a sledgehammer but...
