Southwest Survey: The new Zagat guide to Southwestern restaurants is out, covering Arizona and New Mexico. The Valley section is reasonably thorough, but not always on target. Zagat doesn't employ its own critics. Instead, the guides rely on the recommendations of locals who eat out frequently, and an editor who...
You ordinarily wouldn't consider a cheese-loving Yorkshire inventor named Wallace and his mute dog, Gromit, the stuff of cinematic stardom. But in Toonland, where cults and corporations rise from the zany fiction of talking crickets, mice, ducks, moose, flying squirrels, the Simpsons and their heavy-metal cousins Beavis and Butt-head, just...
Disney Studios has nearly monopolized feature animation for almost 60 years now, only occasionally encountering successful forays by others into its animation realm. Now Twentieth Century Fox and its Phoenix-based Fox Animation studios are going up against the giant mouse with Anastasia; too bad this first effort isn't better. During...
Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee has carved out a niche as our leading director of comedies of manners. His first three films--Pushing Hands (1992), The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994)--combined humor with pathos to shed light on modern Chinese and Chinese-American family conflicts. The news that he...
Howard and Emily's wedding is the talk of Greenleaf, Indiana, a small town idyllic enough to repel Norman Rockwell. The town has waited three years for the couple to make it official--and slimmed-down Emily (Joan Cusack) has waited three long years for Howard (Kevin Kline) to consummate their relationship. She's...
Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights opens with a sinuous, breathlessly extended tracking shot that swoops us into a San Fernando Valley disco and then does a curlicue around a succession of faces. Popping out like jack-o'-lanterns in the discotheque's low light, they have the look of trashy royalty--exalted and...
Given our now fixed image of the press as ruthless invaders of privacy who hounded Princess Di into a premature grave, it hardly seems possible that once upon a time journalists and photographers actually worked in tandem to keep a celebrity's Satyricon private life out of their pages. And no...
Having been fixated all his life with both movies and insects, Mimic director Guillermo Del Toro recently offered his expert opinion on the subject of bugs, especially huge bugs, in the movies. "There are only two giant-insect movies that are really good," he said, modestly excepting Mimic, of course. "Them!...
The cops in Cop Land carry on like a bunch of goombahs. On the take from the Mob, they mimic the Mob. The fuzzy line dividing cops and crooks is the subject of many a strong police movie, but Cop Land goes a step further--it says there is no line...
And Justice for Fife New Times' online publication, phoenixnewtimes.com, is conducting a survey of views on Governor J. Fife Symington III's guilt or innocence. If the jury currently deliberating sees it anything like our Web-heads, the Fifester is a quiverin' bunny in a kennel of Rottweilers. (Note: The poll is...
When you talk about Phoenix to people from other states, they mention the heat, the mistreatment of prisoners in Joe Arpaio's gulag, and, maybe, the Suns. But it's rare to hear anyone mention that Phoenix has produced one of the greatest fighters in the history of boxing. Michael Carbajal's impact...
Not only is The Lost World: Jurassic Park the sequel to the most popular movie ever made, but it is also the first film Steven Spielberg has directed since 1993's Schindler's List. He has finally won his Oscar and achieved Great Artist status in Hollywood's pantheon of the Righteous, but...
I cracked a 40 of King Kobra, opened the curtains a bit, and took a seat. My trailer park's domestic-theater show had just begun, and my neighbor, Meth-Head Red, was in rare form. His lime-green La-Z-Boy, which usually sits in front of Red's TV, now lay on its side in...
Okay, metaphor buffs: An "albino alligator" is what the other alligators in a group send out as a sacrificial lamb. Members of a second group of 'gators attack the albino, and the first group violently finishes off its competition. Once this is explained in the movie Albino Alligator, you know...
Johnston, managing partner of the law firm of Johnston Maynard Grant and Parker, usually appears in venues classier than the cramped justice courtroom where he sought a restraining order against his ex-wife, Polly Parker-Johnston. Johnston claimed that Parker was stalking and threatening him. Parker denied Johnston's charges, and said he...
thursday april 17 Arizona Science Center: Check out the grand new facility at 600 East Washington--a construction that soars on wings of concrete--in its first full week of business. The programs "Arizona Skies," "PlanetQuest" and "Sun, Earth, Stars" are featured in the center's planetarium through Friday, May 30. The Oscar-nominated...
Filmmakers and audiences have been captivated by the idea of dinosaurs since the primeval days of the cinema. Not until Jurassic Park four years ago, however, have the movies made truly convincing dinosaurs. Which is not to say that film dinosaurs prior to Park and to its current sequel, The...
And the Winner Is . . . : In the movie business, it's the Oscar. In the recording business, it's the Grammy. And in the restaurant business, it's the James Beard Award. Right now, the firm of Deloitte & Touche is tabulating the results of the first round of balloting...
Das Boot, the 1981 German nautical spectacular, is now being rereleased as an extended three-and-a-half-hour director's cut. With an hour of new footage drawn from a six-hour German-TV version, the movie now plays more gracefully and clearly. If 60 more minutes of underwater rocking and rolling from depth charges and...
Goodbye, Deli: This week's search for locally genuine deli fare (see page 79) came up more or less empty. In the past, though, I've been able to console myself after other futile missions. That's because I always believed that, at least back in New York, the deli culture I grew...
Chris Collingwood remembers thinking it was the dumbest thing he'd ever heard. He and new pal Adam Schlesinger were looking for a band name to hang on the serious, introspective songs they'd penned together as serious, introspective college students. As they discussed various monikers, Schlesinger's mom overheard and had a...
In the summer of 1993, Motorola's Scottsdale-based Government Systems Technology Group treated its employees to an in-house video. Along with campy old Motorola commercials and marketplace updates, the reel profiled Doris Gray, an African-American senior contracts manager. Gray, Motorolans learned, is an art collector, philanthropist and businesswoman with a "dizzying...
