To mock Nell would be neither difficult nor entirely unwarranted--what's bad in this movie is so irritatingly God-awful that you may want to scream. But what's good in it is good enough to make up for some of the sentiment and cheesy didacticism. Jodie Foster plays the title character, a...
For music that only gets hauled out once a year, Christmas albums sure have a way of branding themselves into our collective psyche. For many of us, it's just not Christmas without a certain familiar, seasonal album crackling in the background like a yule log on the fire. So what...
Vince Neil is a man who's had some good times. He was the front man for one of the biggest bands of the Eighties, pop-metal superstuds Motley Crue. The Crue sold tons of albums, Vince married a statuesque ex-stripper named Sharisse, made tons of money, and partied like there was...
What's funny? High-density theories on the nature of humor have clogged the arteries of many a fathead. Henri Bergson thought humor resulted when human behavior began to resemble the predictable repetition of machines, while Sigmund Freud saw humor as sublimated aggression. Of course, Henri and Siggie were infamous for their...
IT IS 1975. Sixteen years after it first appeared in France, the legendary book Hollywood Babylon rolls off the presses in its first authorized U.S. edition. While the rest of the nation gasps over Kenneth Anger's juicy compendium of Tinseltown tattle, Phoenix yawns. For starters, we'd seen it all in...
The notion of an exquisite young woman becoming emotionally and/or sexually fixated on a paunchy, balding, poorly dressed older man is one that has a certain special appeal for the average movie critic. This may have more than a little to do with why Red, the third film in Krzysztof...
Just when you thought there was no possible musical configuration left after grunge-goth-speed-death-metal-neo-punk-post-New Wave-bubblegum-pop-etc., along comes homo-core. Specifically, along comes Pansy Division. Jon Ginoli, Chris Freeman and Danny Panic are the self-proclaimed Pansies, three San Franciscans whose music is from the late-Seventies, early-Eighties melodic punk school and whose lyrics celebrate,...
Up on a shelf in the living room of Dave Cook's small Tempe apartment, next to a large, plastic crow wearing a felt beret, there are two Pringles cartons, each held together with packing tape. Why does this man have two Pringles cartons held together with packing tape on his...
"Can Broadway be saved?" was the question on the cover of New York magazine last week. Inside, Michael Goldstein prescribed a 12-step program to restore the flagship of the American theatre to its former glory. First, he says, Broadway must admit it's got a problem. If you were one of...
You've got your Old Hollywood. And then you've got your Incipient Forest Lawn. Somewhere in between, you've got the stellar feeding trough known as Chasen's restaurant, the 58-year-old Tinseltown phenomenon that will slam its reservation book shut for the final time this Saturday night. For anyone even remotely acquainted with...
Set in 1979, Strawberry and Chocolate is a small, idyllic comedy about the political re-education of a young, conservative, staunchly Communist student by a gay, liberal, intellectual artist. It would seem an unlikely film to come out of Cuba, yet it's that country's entry for the foreign-language Oscar this year...
Despite insistence from some commentators that it was worthy of an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, Hoop Dreams failed even to cinch a nod in the Best Documentary category. Veteran Oscar buffs won't be too surprised at this. Again and again, those rare documentaries that demonstrate anything resembling wide popular...
Santos Jaco, a small man barely five feet, four inches tall, stands on his toes and peeks over the shoulder of a bearded norteamericano wearing a Maya-style woven pullover. Jaco is trying to see a detailed charcoal drawing hanging on the gallery wall. The drawing depicts corpses, men and women,...
On March 31, 55 years ago, the golden age of the American musical was born. It is easy to imagine the shiver the audience must have experienced on that opening night, when the houselights went down and, without an overture, the curtain rose on a farmhouse and a windmill etched...
Long before Spike Lee and John Singleton made their first films, African-American cinema had had a 50-year history as an alternative genre that few people, even film buffs, knew about. Made independently by African-American directors for African-American audiences, "race films" flourished from after World War I until the late 1940s,...
There's not a bat in sight in the world premiäre of Arizona Theatre Company's compelling new version of Dracula, currently stalking Herberger Theater Center. But bats are about the only thing missing from Steven Dietz's faithful rendition of Bram Stoker's 1897 tale of horror. ATC commissioned Dietz, author of this...
Liam Neeson is a fine big slab of testosterone, a competent actor and a reasonably likable screen presence. He's not, however, a movie star. He may be paid like a movie star, he may be given starring roles, but the excitement, the sense of intimacy that a true movie star...
I came home one night last week and there were two German girls in my house. One was sleeping on the living-room couch. The other was in the backyard drinking one of my Rolling Rocks. And when I say German girls, I mean as in "from Germany." Monika and Katrin,...
Oyster Grill, 455 North Third Street (Arizona Center), Phoenix, 252-6767. Hours: Lunch and Dinner, 11 a.m. to 1 a.m., seven days a week. Most people in the Valley have moved here from someplace else. And sometimes they have a hard time letting go of the past. Why else would they...
"Billy Crystal? I crap bigger than that." So remarked the ever-gracious Jack Palance while accepting an Oscar for City Slickers, a film Crystal had written and produced. The thing is, Palance was right--but at least in City Slickers, the disparity between the two men had made some comic sense. In...
Country living is often idealized in the movies, but director Michael Blakemore's Country Life is about the price of the so-called simple life. The setting is Australia in 1919--just as the lads are returning from the Great War--and cinematographer Stephen Windon captures the outback in ravishing, warm yellows. The rewards...
Sporting some of the most lackluster acting this Valley has seen in a long time, the current play by Phoenix Theatre has proven that a wonderful story and a well-crafted script cannot save poor execution onstage. PT's second production of this season, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, turns into...
