Irvin Kershner’s The Empire Strikes Back, the continuation of George Lucas’ Star Wars, is a classic fantasy in its own right. I vastly prefer it to the first film. Its textures are richer, its emotions deeper, and it’s an honest-to-Jedi movie–not a dozen jammed-together entries of a serial. On its…
thursday february 20 Beck: No matter who scores the statuettes at the Grammy Awards on Wednesday, February 26–and the Grammys have historically, and notoriously, gone home in the limos of questionable recipients–Beck (real name: Beck Hansen) remains the big winner in the year in rock. It’s fashionable to link that…
An impressive directorial debut from writer-actor Billy Bob Thornton (who co-wrote and starred in One False Move), Sling Blade is the stark, enveloping tale of Karl, a dimwitted killer released after 25 years in an Arkansas asylum for murdering his mother and her lover. Thornton plays Karl with a guttural…
In Absolute Power, Clint Eastwood plays Luther Whitney, a master thief who burgles on little cat feet. He’s as stealthy as the Pink Panther pilferer, though not nearly as amusing. Luther, you see, is presented to us as an artist. We first see him at the National Gallery dutifully copying…
thursday february 13 Big Jack Johnson and the Oilers: Mississippi Delta bluesman Johnson is that rare artist who evokes the musical voices of others without undermining his own. You’ll hear loving references to “Sittin’ on Top of the World” and “Proud Mary” on his new disc, We Got to Stop…
In 431 B.C., Euripides’ Medea took last place in an annual festival of plays held in honor of the god Dionysus. Although the dramatist usually took top honors in this contest, the judges were loath to give high marks to a play in which a mother kills her own children…
Elmore Leonard’s Touch is identified on the paperback as a mystery and carried in stores next to Leonard’s celebrated crime novels (like Get Shorty). But this wan little book is actually the problem child of Leonard’s oeuvre. It’s about a former Franciscan monk named Juvenal (played in the film by…
As luck would have it, my epiphany about “Art on the Edge of Fashion,” a show of some 30 works by eight artists at ASU’s Nelson Fine Arts Center, came last Saturday night in the museum’s men’s room. I was taking care of some personal business when a woman’s voice…
The last time you looked, the Orpheum Theatre was probably either boarded up or maybe hosting a concert by your favorite rock band, say R.E.M. But last week, after a 12-year-long, $14 million fix-up, the formerly run-down vaudeville house was reopened as a mirror image of its younger self. Its…
On the run from a professional assassin in Shadow Conspiracy, Washington, D.C., insider Charlie Sheen stops to make a furtive cell-phone call right in front of the Lincoln Memorial–out in the open, in front of God and Honest Abe and everyone. It’s a brilliant tactical move, since the Lincoln Memorial…
At a 20-year remove, George Lucas’ Star Wars comes off less as the work of a wizard than as the weird obsessional by-product of an eccentric American primitive. If you’re not a Star Wars fanatic, and you re-see this movie now varnished to a sheen in its self-consciously spiffy new…
thursday february 6 “Art on the Edge of Fashion”: Arizona State University Art Museum curator Heather Lineberry organized this exhibit of unwearable wearables–i.e., clothing as metaphorical medium and jumping-off point for an examination of gender issues and “the nature of identity.” The exhibition, which also includes photos, sculpture, and installation…
There’s nothing worse than bad Shakespeare. A successful mounting of any of the Bard’s plays requires confident acting and a director and cast with a detailed knowledge of the material. Nevertheless, a pair of local stages have been overtaken by comedies of error that provide abundant laughs–both intentional and otherwise–at…
You can bet that at one point or another, some executive wanted the title of this long-awaited nonsequel to A Fish Called Wanda to be A Lemur Called Rollo (for the story does include such a character). While the latter wouldn’t have been the most commercial of titles, neither is…
As with The Crow a few years back, a grim, real-life shadow hangs over Gridlock’d that’s hard to ignore while watching it. Both films are swan songs for stars who died too young and left beautiful corpses: Brandon Lee in the former, and Tupac Shakur in the latter (although Shakur…
thursday january 30 Eugene Chadbourne: “Dr. Chadbourne” is one of the last standing champions of noncommercial alternative music; if gonzo was a sound, it might sound something like his. The absolutely unpredictable and artistically unfettered guitarist has made forays into free jazz, acid rock, avant blues and faux-redneck noise (with…
There are more reasons not to see Shear Madness than there are alternate endings to the play. The device of this senseless shriek fest, which is now playing at Theater League’s New Scottsdale Playhouse, is that it allows its audience to select one of four different wind-ups to its highly…
The first movie Hamlet was played by a woman–Sarah Bernhardt, in a 1900 short of the duel scene. Plainly, Hamlet has been as open to interpretation in the cinema as it has been in the theater. Of the dozens of film versions, ranging from cross-dressing intrigues to psychological case studies…
In Mother, Albert Brooks plays John Henderson, a science-fiction novelist recently divorced from his second wife who decides he can’t risk another relationship until he comes to terms with his mother. So he does the logical thing: He moves in with her. He hauls out of her garage all his…
Playwright Herb Gardner managed to immortalize retirement-age concerns on the American stage with his 1986 Tony Award-winning I’m Not Rappaport, and now his film version–which he also directed–comes along to try to reclaim geriatric humor from the Grumpy Old Men gang. Of course, one of those grumpy old men, Walter…
Hamlet (Kenneth Branagh) is Prince of Denmark. After his father (Brian Blessed) dies, his uncle Claudius (Derek Jacobi) takes the throne and marries Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude (Julie Christie). When the late king’s ghost reveals he was murdered by Claudius, Hamlet must decide which course of action to take. Meanwhile, he…
thursday january 23 Tricky: The so-called “majesty of trip-hop” is an aural explorer, and he seems to have found the Northwest Passage connecting the strange-bedfellow forms of rap and new age–though not the new age of Windham Hill, not by a long shot. As the London-based musician/producer says, referencing the…
