The Pink Cat slumps on a folding chair in a makeshift dressing room at Phoenix Civic Plaza. The small cuts beneath his eyes sting, his hands ache, his arms throb. But Scott Walker's pride hurts worse than his body. He heard the boos and the derisive meows from the small...
With the exception of the Western, the vampire movie may just be the most durable of all genres. It's produced everything from cinematic masterpieces like Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr (1932) and F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) to indelible pop-culture classics like Tod Browning's Dracula (1931) to lesser interpretations without number. Just...
Even before she became very ill, Esther Perla was taking una de gato twice a day. Without it, she thinks, things would have gone downhill much faster. For this she thanks her mother, a part-time distributor and full-time believer in the curative powers of herbs and natural products like garlic...
Anna Ott was a youngster whose troubles nestled into the souls of friends and strangers alike. At the age of 2, her arms and legs were amputated that she might survive a rare and pernicious disease. In this precarious state, 5-year-old Anna did not even have the comfort of her...
Zona Rosa, Crown Sterling Suites, 2630 East Camelback, Phoenix, 954-9258. Hours: Lunch and Dinner, Sunday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. The line separating highbrow from lowbrow is a lot less rigid than we think. Take Shakespeare. In Elizabethan England and...
Fences and guard dogs surround Jerry Span's house on Fillmore Street, an effort to keep the rotting, increasingly destitute neighborhood that surrounds him at bay. The house has been sheathed in scaffolding as Span tries to restore what was once his family's grand downtown home, a place were he, his...
Fences and guard dogs surround Jerry Span's house on Fillmore Street, an effort to keep the rotting, increasingly destitute neighborhood that surrounds him at bay. The house has been sheathed in scaffolding as Span tries to restore what was once his family's grand downtown home, a place were he, his...
This year's Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, Belle Epoque, is set "somewhere in Spain"--somewhere rural and sun-dappled and placidly lovely--in 1931. It wasn't such a beautiful epoch elsewhere in Spain that year, what with the mad, factional contentions by which the Second Republic was beginning its brief existence before...
This year's Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, Belle Epoque, is set "somewhere in Spain"--somewhere rural and sun-dappled and placidly lovely--in 1931. It wasn't such a beautiful epoch elsewhere in Spain that year, what with the mad, factional contentions by which the Second Republic was beginning its brief existence before...
This year's Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, Belle Epoque, is set "somewhere in Spain"--somewhere rural and sun-dappled and placidly lovely--in 1931. It wasn't such a beautiful epoch elsewhere in Spain that year, what with the mad, factional contentions by which the Second Republic was beginning its brief existence before...
This year's Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, Belle Epoque, is set "somewhere in Spain"--somewhere rural and sun-dappled and placidly lovely--in 1931. It wasn't such a beautiful epoch elsewhere in Spain that year, what with the mad, factional contentions by which the Second Republic was beginning its brief existence before...
The central character of the Mexican horror movie Cronos is a kindly old man named Jess Gris, the proprietor of a Mexico City curio shop. The luckless Jess finds, amid the dusty bric-a-brac of his shop, a little metal gadget in the shape of a scarab, built by a 16th-century...
After Roman Polanski's last film as director, a halfhearted, soddenly wistful attempt at a romantic thriller called Frantic, his new film Bitter Moon is most encouraging, because it's heartless and nasty. Polanski will probably never recapture the innovative subtleties of his early works, like Knife in the Water and Cul-De-Sac...
After a long film-festival drought, the Valley seems to be on the verge of a deluge. Although shaky promotional resources resulted in a disappointing turnout for last fall's First Annual Equinox film festival at Herberger Theater Center, its producers have gamely promised a second annual effort this fall, at a...
The pantheon of major Texas blues guitarists would have to include the late, flamboyant Stevie Ray Vaughan, the brilliant albino Johnny Winter--and a quiet, 71-year-old jazzman named Herb Ellis. The aging Texan is a major link between the parallel developments of jazz and blues, as well as one of the...
Ever get that, you know, not-so-fresh feeling about an artist? It's probably because you're associating that artist's music with a separate, unpleasant experience. For instance, I know this gentleman who has a deep-rooted resentment of Henry Mancini, simply because someone threw up on him in a car when "Moon River"...
Christophe Leininger and his opponent waltz sideways across the mat, like white-jacketed dancing bears, each one pawing at the sleeves and lapels of the other's judo uniform, searching for a good grip and a moment's imbalance. It's late June, in a run-down, old Mesa gymnasium where the judo event of...
At the beginning of Forrest Gump, a tiny white feather flits in the breeze above Savannah, Georgia. As the credits end, the feather comes to rest on the ground, between the sneaker-shod feet of the title character, who's waiting at a bus stop. This sequence illustrates the theme of the...
If there was one legendary figure of the Old West who could unambiguously be called a good guy--and there probably wasn't--Wyatt Earp is surely not the fellow. This sometime lawman, sometime criminal wasn't actually despicable, like Billy the Kid (although reports suggest Earp had less charm). He was a person...
Euro Blast: Bodies at rest tend to remain at rest, and mine is no exception. So whenever I get the urge to drive beyond the Broadway curve to Mesa, I generally lie down until the feeling passes. But a trip to Euro Cafe made me glad I fought through inertia...
The chairs in the dirt yard are draped with children openly eyeing me. They are too young and innocent to bother masking their curiosity. When their mother talks, they are quiet. "I don't raise my kids that the police are some kind of Officer Friendly. I tell these children the...
In an odd coincidence, two major films of the early '70s are being rereleased this week, both in restored "director's cuts." Both are worth checking out, especially if you've never seen them on the big screen--and if you haven't, it's fair in both cases to say you haven't seen them...
