Lovely magic, this. An enchanting family classic. If you believe in magic, you’ll love Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. And if you don’t, you will, and you will. True, the hype has been a bit much. And, yes, a mad, desperate world choked with reproduction and reprobation could hardly…
It takes a nimble mind to mix light and dark, to wed humor with treachery, and in Novocaine newcomer David Atkins is not always up to the task. Neither is Steve Martin, who wants to be taken seriously while reserving the right to produce the occasional sick yuk. If you…
Consider the career options for a person with Legg-Calf Perthese disease. This rare form of arthritis affects the ball-and-socket joints of the hips, resulting in an inability to put any weight on your legs for anything but the briefest periods of time. Surely, work as a dancer and choreographer doesn’t…
The fliers for the art show “Quixotic,” which opens this Sunday, thoughtfully provide a definition of the show’s title, to aid the less-bookish of us: “adj. Extravagantly chivalrous or romantic; visionary; impractical.” The dictionary adds a term, as well: “idealistic.” It’s those qualities that curator Matt Dickson says drive the…
An artist usually has to be stone cold dead before his work is ever shown in the Musée du Louvre in Paris. Photographer Joel-Peter Witkin, however, has managed to escape the bureaucratic guillotine and now stands among the handful of living artists whose work has been deemed important enough to…
Despite its somewhat labored Actors Theatre of Phoenix production, there’s plenty to recommend Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing. There’s the richness of its writing, the allure of its subject, and the astonishing range of emotions its people endure. This is the kind of play that used to be dubbed “a…
Natalie Merchant finished recording her third solo album, Motherland, on September 9, so by no means should anyone listen to the disc’s first song, “This House Is On Fire,” and think it has anything to do with hijacked airplanes, collapsed skyscrapers and the thousands buried beneath the rubble. The song…
A hazy nightclub is the typical weekend environment for Sistah Blue, the tireless leading ladies of the Valley’s blues scene. But come Sunday, the five sistahs will be doing their thing in the shade of mesquite trees and surrounded by cactuses. The show is part of the ongoing Music in…
If you’re a college freshman, don’t read this. Just grab your newfound peers and go see Richard Linklater’s new movie, Waking Life, then head off to one of those ethereal late-night dining establishments for which you’ll desperately pine once the real world gets a hold of you. Discuss. For others,…
It doesn’t take much probing beneath the thin surface to see Shallow Hal as an apologia of sorts from Bobby and Peter Farrelly. The brothers are known for making movies full of jokes about midgets, retarded people, albinos, the handicapped and so on, but always with the caveat that the…
The heroine of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s bold and bracing new comedy, Amélie, is Amélie Poulain, a doe-eyed crusader with the face of a porcelain doll and a sleek helmet of jet-black hair. From her high perch in Montmartre, where she works as a cafe waitress, Amélie secretly resolves to emancipate all…
The Disappearance of Baron Dixon, which is a local indie film — or, more evocatively, a “mockumentary” — has some fine moments. There’s the scene in which a stripped-down Barbie and Ken, a distinctly lascivious cast to their fixed plastic smiles, are blasted with the pop-pop-pop of an urban redneck’s…
There cannot be man, woman, child or beast alive who does not know that on November 6, Fox will debut its new series 24. Long before the fall season was to begin, it had already been appointed the most anticipated and beloved show of the year–by critics who had seen…
Joel and Ethan Coen’s periodic genuflections to classic Hollywood are inevitably accompanied by a knowing wink from one brother and a wry smile from the other. These devoted movie buffs’ versions of vintage gangster pictures (Miller’s Crossing) or the populist comedies of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges (The Hudsucker Proxy)…
As the year winds down, breathlessly and apprehensively, the most anxiously awaited releases left on the schedule offer nothing less than whimsy and reveries. We’ve had enough of the real world, for now, so we look forward to leaving it behind and joining the company of Harry Potter, Frodo Baggins…
Rob Becker does one thing, mostly, and he does it very well: Defending the Caveman, the longest-running solo play in Broadway history. Becker has taken shtick — a standup act about the sexes, with men cast as hunters and women as gatherers — and made it a phenomenon; 10 years…
A warm embrace of paradox is at the heart of Día de los Muertos, the Mexican Day of the Dead that has its origins in indigenous celebrations of life in death — and death in life.”If I had to boil it down to one phrase,” says Mesa artist Zarco Guerrero…
There’s an unfortunate timeliness to Orson Welles’ adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, with its deadly attacks on America and its evacuation of New York City. It doesn’t take much effort to find parallels between the catastrophes of September 11 and the infamous 1938 radio broadcast, with its…
On November 4, some 1,800 television personalities–actors, writers, producers, show-runners, network executives–will, finally, parade into a Los Angeles theater to award their peers and themselves for a job well done. They will, at long last, hand out the golden statues known as Emmy, just as it has been done every…
No one has more to say about life than someone who hasn’t lived it yet. While pop culture’s juvenile slaves would shout down this concept to their last breaths — jeans slung at half-mast, navel rings linked in passionate solidarity — there’s only so much material to be strip-mined from…
The beautiful little conceit at the heart of Brad Anderson’s Happy Accidents is that audiences will sit still once more for the crackpot notion of time travel — and in a movie that’s not science fiction. To his credit, and with an implied bow to Back to the Future and…
