Early on in Six Days, Seven Nights, Harrison Ford’s drunken beach pilot Quinn Harris offers some advice to Anne Heche’s vacationing Robin Monroe. He warns that people often go to isolated island paradises looking for romance. But if you don’t bring it with you, he says, you ain’t gonna find…
The X-Files is a movie that answers questions. . . . No, wait a minute: The X-Files is a movie that asks questions. . . . The X-Files is a movie that makes me wanna ask some questions, like . . . what the hell does “Fight the future” mean?…
In 1993, the acclaimed husband-and-wife documentary team of Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker released The War Room, an intimate study of the first Clinton/Gore campaign. That done, they turned their cameras on the mounting of a less successful comedy: Ken Ludwig’s Broadway farce Moon Over Buffalo, which opened at the…
Thursday June 18 Those Czars of Rock ‘n’ Roll, that Politburo of Pop, those Bolsheviks of Boogie The Red Elvises hail from the former Soviet Union and bill themselves as “the legendary legends of Siberian surf music and the highest-payed [sic] wedding band of the Kamchatka Peninsula.” The L.A.-based act,…
Summer. ‘Tis the season of iced tea by the tankard and bikinis and baseball, of soaring electric bills and movies with numbers after the titles–and of reruns. NBC is making a game attempt to market its off-season with the line “If you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you.” But…
Smoking fine cigars was long the province of the overprivileged. Now, although you won’t find many food stamp recipients puffing on Cubanas, it’s no longer reserved for the high and mighty or those who aspire to such. In the late ’90s, cigars have become as vital a fashion accessory as…
If it isn’t surprising that this theater season began and ended with Neil Simon plays, it’s at least comforting that both of them–if not the half-dozen other Simon comedies foisted on us in between–were adequately executed. Arizona Jewish Theatre Company’s Broadway Bound wraps up a season that began last September…
Though Lilies was shot in Quebec with a French-Canadian cast, the actors don’t speak French. Based on the play Les Feluettes ou la Repetition d’un Drame Romantique (The Lilies, or the Revival of a Romantic Drama) by Michel Marc Bouchard, the script was adapted into English by Inda Gaboriau, probably…
A bird’s-eye view of the Brooklyn bridge opened John Badham’s Saturday Night Fever in 1977, when disco was in full swing. It was the route the working-class hero took to travel from where he lived and worked to the disco in Manhattan where he danced and partied. Then the titles…
Popularly known as a “dude ranch,” Merv Griffin’s Wickenburg Inn will cater more to the “dude-ettes” on the weekend of Friday, June 26, through Sunday, June 28, when the inn hosts its first-ever summer “Cowgirl Camp,” a wild-West weekend for women of all ages. Just how wild does the West…
There’s a group of people who salivate at the thought of coming to the desert wasteland we Arizonans call home, a segment of the population that would sell its eyeteeth to be where you’re sitting right now. And no, we don’t mean the country’s retirees, half of whom seem to…
thursday june 11 Bay Area soul diva E.C. Scott belts out straightforward, deliciously lewd blues tunes, many self-written, with authority, a gospel backbone and a contemporary groove. Touring behind her splendid new Blind Pig CD Hard Act to Follow–which includes 10 of her own songs, plus a snaky cover of…
The Truman Show, starring Jim Carrey, is the Zeitgeist movie of the hour. How could it not be? It’s all about the omnipotence of television and how our lives seem scripted by some unseen force–a TV producer, perhaps? Zeitgeist movies, almost by definition, get written about not only by film…
Since The Kingston Trio has been hitting America’s highways–including a certain fabled stretch that passes through the great desert southwest–for four decades, what headline act could be more appropriate for Flagstaff’s Route 66 Celebration? Touring an average of 28 weeks a year, the Trio still makes a joyful acoustic noise…
thursday june 4 Touring in a VW van in the company of her cat, Tosca, Seattle-based thrush Jill Cohn plays two free shows this week in the Valley. Supported by her delicate piano playing, Cohn’s Lilith Fair-bait voice–soft yet rich and soulful–is a great vehicle for the self-composed laments of…
A twitch, a scratch, maybe a yawn–that’s the extent of the activity you’re likely to see at the zoo from those among God’s creatures that don’t keep bankers’ hours. For adults, that’s just the way things are, but for kids from grades four to eight, there is an alternative during…
Would that every local theater company could afford nine-month rehearsal periods for each of its shows. Then maybe every production would be as noteworthy as In Mixed Company’s Out Cry, now playing at downtown’s Third Street Theatre. Director David Barker, who’s known for making difficult theater accessible to non-theater audiences,…
Be nice to your mailman. That’s the cautionary message of the Norwegian film Junk Mail. Near the beginning of this hilariously clammy comedy-thriller, the–for lack of a better term–hero, an Oslo mail carrier named Roy (Robert Skjaerstad), is filling the boxes in an apartment building when a middle-aged man who’s…
Some 30 years after “Mrs. Robinson,” no one wonders, in cheery Simon-and-Garfunkel tones, “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?” Everyone knows that, when his time came, the Yankee Clipper quietly limped down from the pinstriped Olympus of his day, married and divorced a tragic beauty and slipped into a life…
According to the movies, Godzilla takes its name from a legendary Japanese sea monster. But according to the man who made those movies, the name’s source was more mundane. Tomoyuki Tanaka, producer of the classic Godzilla films, claims that back in the 1950s, there was a fat, hulking press agent…
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson’s staggering, semifictional account of “a savage journey to the heart of the American Dream,” has proved difficult to translate to the screen. After more than a quarter century–and 20 scripts–since the book’s 1971 publication, Thompson’s countercultural touchstone has finally assumed filmic…
The “Size Does Matter” marketing campaign for Godzilla is far more ingenious than the movie. It’s also highly annoying–and somewhat misleading. After all, as the ads for a new film called Plump Fiction remind us, “Width matters, too.” Perhaps the best thing about the ballyhooed arrival of Godzilla is that…
