Someone sent me a Ladmo Bag. It arrived just as I was sitting down to my monthly poker game with a pair of bitter characters I’ve known since high school. Our game usually dissolves quickly into mean-spirited hollering and insults, but on this day, prompted by the arrival of this…
Garry Shandling does not have a face for the big screen. He has a mug that seems to spread to the edges of the theater; it’s like an approaching storm front, a sky full of billowing clouds roaring in from the north. And it’s a face built for two emotions:…
In the closing years of the 20th century, lowbrow white America finally learned to enjoy an ironic laugh at itself, led by Hollywood’s cheerful mockery of the culturally challenged working class. Outside the system, John Waters had this stuff pegged from the get-go, but the American grotesqueries of the original,…
The first thought you have while watching The Next Best Thing is, “Was Madonna always this bad an actress?” It’s a question that soon fades from consciousness to be replaced by, “Was Rupert Everett always this bad an actor?” and, “Was John Schlesinger always this bad a director?” Because the…
The pun “You Gotta Have Art,” as true as it is glib, is the theme of this year’s Scottsdale Arts Festival, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday, March 10; the same hours Saturday, March 11; and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday, March…
They gathered as they do each week at this time, to relax, unwind and cast off the cares of another busy week. They mill about, cheerfully renewing old acquaintances and making new ones while sampling bonbons and other delicacies made especially for them. They need this time for themselves; you…
When fine woodworker Steve Makin became sufficiently frustrated by the lack of gallery and museum exhibition opportunities available to Arizona woodworkers, he decided to do something about it. The most recent fruits of Makin’s persistence can be seen in “Makin Furniture,” an exhibition of fine wood furniture and functional objects…
We tumbled out into the chilly courtyard of ASU’s Galvin Playhouse, my friends, colleagues and I, where we were quickly joined by the audience for the school’s current horror, a bald misrepresentation of the all-time worst Shakespeare comedy in the Bard’s canon. It was intermission, and my companions’ faces were…
Ah, boxing. Beating and being beaten about the head and torso until one of two bruised and bloodied humans drops. Clever sport, tops even American football for sheer poetic elegance. So it’s not surprising — and this is only half sarcastic — that so many fine films have been made…
If you think the prevailing attitude toward sex in the United States is often somewhat backward, consider that of late-1960s Ireland, as depicted in Agnes Browne, the new movie directed by Anjelica Huston. When asked by her best friend Marion (Marion O’Dwyer) if she misses “it,” the recently widowed Agnes…
Willie Morris’ autobiographical novel, My Dog Skip, is a nearly perfect piece of bedtime reading for kids and their parents. Each chapter is virtually a self-contained anecdote, the descriptions of World War II-era Mississippi are lush and dreamlike, and the escapades of the central canine character, depicted as smarter, faster,…
A couple of years ago, a drunk started a fight with me in a bar in Tempe. The next day, I gleefully told my martial arts teacher about how I’d used a pair of joint locks to subdue the guy. Rather than shake my hand and promote me to a…
Return with us now to those fabulous days of yesteryear, back to a time when America was not going to let a little thing like World War II get in the way of everyday life on the home front. The 1940s were a time when the American public got the…
A hunger for the exotic is usually what stirs artists to jump past the humdrum of the “new and improved” to the rarer thrill of things “never before felt or seen.” But as the Phoenix Art Museum’s “Taos Artists and Their Patrons, 1898-1950” suggests, that hunger isn’t confined to the…
I had high hopes for Guillermo Reyes’ Men on the Verge of a His-panic Breakdown. The show has the reputation of being very hip, and PlayWright’s Theatre, where Men on the Verge is playing, has — in its first full season — proven itself a reliable source of arty entertainment…
Calling the subject matter of Errol Morris’ latest documentary, Mr. Death, “unpleasant” is like referring to the lavatory on a tuna boat as “lightly scented.” The director who brought us the zany Americana of Fast, Cheap & Out of Control and the lukewarm Stephen Hawking snoozer A Brief History of…
It’s hard to blame Kirk Douglas for choosing Diamonds as a comeback film, after fighting back from a devastating stroke almost four years ago. Certainly no one can fault him for wanting to act again, to prove he’s still got it. However, the question is this: Can the movie that…
Moviegoers, rejoice! The first fun movie of the year has arrived. Oh, Leo’s little seaside adventure was pretty to look at, but the attempts at depth were a real bummer. And let’s not even talk about Scream 3. Even the first one was highly overrated, and it’s been downhill from…
“You can be in little small studio thinking only la cucaracha will listen, and it can go all over the world,” says Charo of her acclaimed 1994 album Guitar Passion. Or, rather, “enthuses” Charo. Or, “gushes” Charo. By phone from Los Angeles, she describes performing recently for an international convention…
So, let me get this straight. Even after three major film festivals in February — four, if you count the ongoing Spike & Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation at Centerpoint (see Repertory Film) — you’re still hungry for more film-festival action? Well, okay, but you’ll have to hit…
As a result of having recently witnessed Phoenix Theatre’s production of Tintypes, I am much too ill to write a theater review this week. Instead, I am submitting the notes I made while watching this program, a musical revue about turn-of-the-19th-century America, which should (despite several lively performances by some…
Film director Agnieszka Holland is the daughter of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, but she was raised in communist Poland in an atmosphere of state-imposed atheism. If those bona fides don’t qualify her to make a two-hour movie about the timeless tug of war between faith and reason,…
