Even students of English history may have trouble sorting out the palace intrigues and intragovernmental conspiracies that fill Elizabeth, the handsome new production about Queen Elizabeth I’s ascension to the British throne in 1558. With the bewitching Australian actress Cate Blanchett (last year’s Oscar and Lucinda) in the title role,…
Surprise and pleasure come wrapped together in A Bug’s Life. This big adventure about tiny critters is the latest piece of robust whimsy from Pixar, the computer animation studio that broke into features with the 1995 smash Toy Story. It should prove irresistible to children. Toy Story opened up the…
Holed up with his Sidney Bechet records, old flannel shirts and a dog-eared copy of War and Peace, Woody Allen has made a second career of shunning fad, fashion and fame–and of ostensibly keeping to himself in the most populous city in the United States. No nouveau-grooveau glitz or designer…
There’s art in them thar hills. For the second year in a row, Sonoran Art League sponsors “Hidden in the Hills,” a studio tour and sale showcasing some of the northeast Valley’s best painters and sculptors. From 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, November 21; and the same hours Sunday,…
thursday november 19 The 10th annual cultural shindig celebrating Phoenix’s relationship with its sister city of Grenoble, France, French Week ’98, continues Thursday, November 19; Friday, November 20; Saturday, November 21; and Sunday, November 22, at various locations. This week’s highlights include the dinner-theater event An Evening With Nostradamus, at…
Flannery O’Connor once said, “Everywhere I go, I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.” The same might be said for publishers and Hollywood types. Enter one gloriously gammed horror-movie queen. Another wanna-be author riding the coattails of her…
Names like “A Puncher’s Paradise,” “Reluctant Mount,” “Last Drop” and “Lickin’ Clean” leave little doubt that you’re in the company of men who wear chaps. No, this isn’t theme night at the local gay bar. This is the Cowboy Artists of America annual bunkhouse of fun at the Phoenix Art…
These days, the best way to get a laugh in the theater is to hum the theme song from Laverne and Shirley. But references to my favorite sitcoms were still not enough to mask my discomfort while I watched talented people wrestle bad material to the ground. In Mixed Company’s…
The first time we see Ray Joshua, the young black hero of director Marc Levin’s impressive feature debut Slam, we get a vivid taste of the conflicting forces that rule him. His olive-drab pants, so hip-hop baggy that you could fit two rail-thin Rays inside, are stuffed with bags of…
First, a disclaimer: Having missed last year’s I Know What You Did Last Summer, I deliberately put off seeing it until after viewing its sequel, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. That way I could view part two without prejudice, as well as be able to judge whether…
Well, now we know why the term “bored to death” was invented. Meet Joe Black takes an interesting idea–Death assumes human form and comes to Earth to learn about human existence–and reduces it to a flat, uninspired, interminably slow movie. Not only slow but long: a full three hours. Produced…
There used to be a problem with punk rockers not respecting their elders. But for one of the finest punker outfits in the state, it’s no problem–they don’t have any elders. One Foot in the Grave surely must be the greatest punk band ever to emerge from a retirement community…
Spike Jones died in 1965, but his orchestrations, which included sneezing, belching in tune, controlled hiccups and asthmatic wheezing, have not been forgotten. The guy who introduced such musical instruments as car horns, cannons, doorbells, water-filled balloons, anvils and flushing toilets will be paid homage this Saturday at the Sundome…
thursday november 12 Phoenix College’s theater-arts department continues its season with The Imaginary Invalid (Le Malade imaginaire), the last comic masterpiece of the great French dramatist Moliere, freely adapted by its director, Larry Soller. It’s the story of Argan, who is sure that he’s gravely ill, and who is encouraged…
Anyone who’s seen choreographer David Rousseve’s dances broadcast on PBS or live in Arizona in the past several years knows he likes to populate the stage like it’s a small town. As he did in Urban Scenes/Creole Dreams at Gammage in 1994 and, more recently, in Dry Each Other’s Tears…
For filmmaker Todd Solondz, it’s always midnight in suburbia. Life is lonely, and the natives can be hostile. In his daring second film, Happiness, the darkness engulfs victims of all ages: a boy in the throes of impending adolescence, three New Jersey sisters tormented by sex and love, an obscene…
Fifteen minutes into Velvet Goldmine, director Todd Haynes’ love letter to England’s glam-rock scene of the late Sixties/early Seventies, the film has already promised to be many things: a missing-person mystery; a meticulous period piece; an essay on sexually liberated dandyism; a quasi-musical; a portrait of the Machiavellian as an…
Before Universal released Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil in 1958, it added some new scenes, and fiddled with the editing and the soundtrack–all without the director’s consent or cooperation. Crushed after screening a pre-debut cut of the film, Welles fired off a 58-page memo to the studio, detailing his objections,…
Trey Parker’s Cannibal! The Musical is, I think, the best live-action American movie musical of the ’90s. But such praise may actually be too faint–the film is better than most of the animated ones, too. I couldn’t remember three notes of any of the songs from Hercules or Mulan, but…
With apologies to James Brown, Henry Rollins is truly the hardest-working man in show business. The guy has never met a spare moment that he couldn’t fill–between recording and tours with the Rollins Band, he heads up the 2.13.61 publishing house, and has released some dozen of his own books…
thursday november 5 In Mixed Company kicks off its fifth season with the Southwest premiere of Someone’s Knocking, “an odd little comedy that takes an absurdist look at an agoraphobic American housewife . . . whose marriage and life change radically when Opportunity literally knocks on the door.” The company’s…
Just what do these guys think they are doing? That’s the question that Penn & Teller bring to mind. Is it comedy, magic or performance art? Are they there to entertain or to make fools of the crowd? Are they cheerful hustlers or maybe agents of some dark force? If…
