For the first time in the seven years I’ve attended Planet Earth Theatre, I was not ushered to my seat by a drooling, incense-burning harpy. I was not panhandled in the lobby nor handed a program riddled with typos. More important, I was not made to sit through two hours…
If ever there was an Op-Ed movie–a movie destined to be written about in an “elevated” realm beyond just the movie pages–it’s Primary Colors. Thanks to Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones, the Hollywood/Washington nexus has lifted this new Mike Nichols picture, based on the 1996 best seller by Joe Klein,…
The American reissues of Jackie Chan films have met with declining box-office success since Chan burst onto the scene in 1996 with Rumble in the Bronx. With any luck, the latest Chan opus to be recut and redubbed for Americans, the year-old Mr. Nice Guy, should reverse the trend. No…
Though her contemporaries often compared Virginia Woolf’s nonlinear, almost cubist narratives to the cinema’s then-burgeoning use of montage, close-ups, flashbacks, tracking shots and rapid cuts, the strength of Woolf’s novels lay in the rhythm of her arresting style, and in her heroines’ poignant melancholia, which insidiously seeps through the reader’s…
Thursday March 19 Ever seen Santo, the masked superhero-wrestler from Mexican fantasy-horror films? Imagine four Santos playing frenzied Dick Dale/Ventures-style surf-guitar rock, and you’ve got a good picture of Los Straitjackets. Touring in support of its excellent Upstart CD Viva! Los Straitjackets!–supposedly what Quentin Tarantino cried to the band from…
Steven Tyler of Aerosmith claimed that when he saw Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap, it hit too close to home–he found it tragic. Waiting for Guffman, co-written and directed by and starring Spinal Tap’s Christopher Guest, has found a similar place in the hearts of theater people–particularly those who’ve…
The white-guy-as-victim school of thought has been heard everywhere including the Supreme Court, but rarely with as much gusto as in the rantings of comedian Bobby Slayton, the self-billed “Pit Bull of Comedy,” who has made a career out of butchering sacred cows, and who plays the Improv this weekend…
Actors Theatre of Phoenix’s claim that its new play is “the biggest downtown Phoenix event preceding the opening of Bank One Ballpark” seems like something of an overstatement. Still, I’m hard-pressed to think of anything happening downtown that’s more stimulating than Below the Belt, Richard Dresser’s demented comedy about big…
It’s no longer enough that several legitimate stages are regularly afflicted with bad theater. Now it’s tailing us to the places where we go to eat and shop, as well. Just a week or so ago at a local mall, a man dressed as a taco followed me to my…
One of the half-dozen main characters in Tom DiCillo’s ensemble comedy The Real Blonde is obsessed with finding a literal specimen of the title rara avis, a bona fide, not-out-of-the-bottle goldilocks. Exactly what gives rise to this fetish–what would make such a woman more appealing than a rinse-job blonde–isn’t dramatized…
thursday march 12 “Spiritscapes”: Cynthia Woody Gallery, 4151 North Marshall Way in Scottsdale, presents this display of the collage-style works of Benedictine monk turned artist Jerome Tupa. “If you’ve ever contemplated the lay of the land,” remarks the artist, “this exhibit talks to the lay of the spirit, produced in…
When he wrote Moon Over Buffalo, Ken Ludwig must have been counting on an audience that hadn’t seen the dozen or so funnier plays and movies that have been hung on similar show-biz hooks. And Phoenix Theatre seems to be hoping its ticketholders won’t be distracted by the shuddering sense…
Jeff Bridges is so euphorically wacked as a social dropout in The Big Lebowski that you get a contact high just looking at him. Padding around Venice, California, in a tee shirt barely covering his midriff bulge, he’s like a beach bum who bowls instead of surfs. His perverse nickname–“The…
A movie starring Paul Newman, Susan Sarandon, Gene Hackman, James Garner and Stockard Channing ought to be a whole lot better than Robert Benton’s Twilight. It’s one of those “autumnal” movies about a private detective who is too old for the game but still goes through the motions. Benton, in…
Belgian director Alain Berliner’s first feature film, Ma Vie en Rose (My Life in Pink), won the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, but, even so, it only nibbles around the edges of its unusual topic. It tells the story of Ludovic (Georges Du Fresne), a young boy who considers himself a…
thursday march 5 Robert Schimmel: The Phoenix-based comic, currently touring in support of his ironically titled CD Robert Schimmel Comes Clean, talks frankly about sex and other social taboos, in the tradition of Carlin, Pryor and Bruce. He performs at 8 p.m. Thursday, March 5; 8 and 10 p.m. Friday,…
Hindsight through pop filters makes ’60s and ’70s sexual decadence seem like mere reductive nostalgia to a godless, TV-weaned generation–especially if one ignores the bra smoke of feminist politics and the embryonic gay-rights movement. The power of mass media dictates that recent history gets defined by way of pop-culture icons…
The smallish audience with whom I saw Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction: The Stage Production seemed, on the whole, to enjoy it. I say this in the interest of fairness, before I confess that I fled the theater after the second act–the end of the “Gold Watch” segment. The show made…
In the past, I’ve carped about Arizona Jewish Theatre Company’s lamentable productions and its less-than-kosher choice of material. But the company more than makes up for past indiscretions with its current staging of Jonathan Tolins’ modern morality play The Twilight of the Golds. Unlike AJTC’s usual lite fare, Twilight is…
The science-fiction works of the late, great Philip K. Dick haven’t been served particularly well onscreen. The most recent adaptation, Screamers, was junk; Total Recall had its moments but was less ingenious by half than the short story it was based upon. Blade Runner, of course, was brilliant, but in…
Back in the ’60s and ’70s, when its animation unit was in the doldrums, the Disney studio made a number of live-action “family” comedies (No Deposit, No Return and Freaky Friday, for instance) that were, within their limited ambitions, genuinely funny. The studio’s latest film, Krippendorf’s Tribe, is very much…
thursday february 26 Phoenix Art and Antique Show: A dizzying array of bric-a-brac, objets, macguffins and other assorted knickknacks from 43 galleries around the U.S. and Europe is exhibited and sold for the benefit of Phoenix Art Museum in this inaugural event. The goodies on display include American furniture, porcelain,…
