When Paul Thomas Anderson’s second feature, Boogie Nights, was released in 1997, critics and film industry types fell over themselves to designate Anderson the next big thing, an auteur in the footsteps of Scorsese and Coppola. His film turned Mark Wahlberg from a has-been underwear model and rapper into a…
“Feast your eyes, glut your soul, on my accursed ugliness!” So howled Erik, the disfigured denizen of the catacombs beneath the Paris Opera, when the heroine Christine Daae couldn’t resist snatching away his mask, in Gaston Leroux’s Le Fantome de l’Opera, the penny dreadful that served as the basis for…
Daah . . . daaaah . . . daaaaah . . . DAH-DUM!! (boom-boom boom-boom boom-boom boom-boom) . . . Yeah, get used to it. Just as the recent new year’s celebration got us plenty sick of the Artist Who Back When He Still Had Some Vestige of Sanity Was…
Let’s hear it for sports movies! The most avid sports fan can occasionally be bored by lackluster games, but even the casual spectator can appreciate what the big screen can do for an athletic contest, even one played by actors rather than athletes: the closer-than-life close-ups, the dramatic use of…
East Valley party-heads have the Fiesta Bowl Block Party (see Snafu 2000). For the downtowners, there’s the City of Phoenix’s big and controversial Phoenix Celebration 2000, slated from 4 p.m. Friday, December 31, through 1 a.m. Saturday, January 1, 2000, or through the End of Civilization As We Know It,…
It’s the 29th time around for the Valley’s own football classic, the Fiesta Bowl, and as usual it’s the pretext for a slate of fun stuff around the Valley, including the East Valley’s major New Year’s celebration. Here are a few of the weekend’s other diversions: Downtown Scottsdale’s Fiesta Bowl…
Writer-director Anthony Minghella has chosen to follow up his Oscar-laden The English Patient with another literary adaptation — this time, of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. Highsmith is best known to film buffs as the author of Strangers on a Train, the basis for one of Alfred Hitchcock’s best…
Ah, what a miracle that Andy Kaufman was. So sublime his wit, so pioneering his spirit. Astonishing! A hero to be loved, adored and emulated by all artists and performers for the rest of eternity. An opener of doors; a smasher down of barriers; a glorious, luminous, intrepid spirit without…
During my pre-matinee nap last Sunday afternoon, my Jewish playwright friend left me a voice mail message: “Hey, I’m in town, let’s get together for lunch. But don’t try to drag me to the theater, I saw The California Kid yesterday and I’m still recovering. What a bag of crap…
The last half-decade has been very good to Jane Austen: Besides Ang Lee’s estimable 1995 version of Sense and Sensibility, we’ve been given film or TV adaptations of Emma, Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice, not to mention Clueless, Amy Heckerling’s remarkably apt updating of Emma. Now Miramax and the BBC…
I sincerely hope that Jodie Foster gets a chance to relax and unwind this holiday season, because the lady has obviously worked like a horse to instill her latest role with humanity and significance. As intrepid British widow Anna Leonowens, in the huge and poetic new Anna and the King,…
At first glance, Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother seems uncharacteristically grim for a filmmaker with such a demonic sense of humor. Within 10 minutes, the heroine’s 17-year-old son is hit and killed by a car, which propels her and the events of the film into motion. In the next…
Every year at this time, the media devote some of their attention to the subject of where one can go to gawk at the most elaborately decorated homes in the Valley. Why should we be any different? My own favorite, year in and year out, has been the row of…
I stand before the racks of merchandise, overwhelmed by the endless possibilities: aisles of enticing edibles followed by rows of delightful diversions and festive finery. But where to begin when holiday shopping for the most discriminating and highly exacting name on my list? No, it’s not my husband. It’s my…
Ride With the Devil
Directed by Ang Lee; with Skeet Ulrich, Tobey Maguire and Jewel.
Rated R.
Among my more annoying flaws, friends tell me, is an unnatural affection for Christmas. I’m one of those fellows who spends the day after Thanksgiving searching for the perfect spruce pine. My holiday shopping is completed long before Halloween, and I begin playing my huge collection of Christmas records sometime…
The Cider House Rules
Directed by Lasse Hallström; with Tobey Maguire, Michael Caine and Charlize Theron.
Rated PG-13.
Tumbleweeds
Directed by Gavin O’Connor; with Janet McTeer and Kimberly J. Brown.
Rated PG-13.
The writer of a full-page rave of David Shepherd Grossman’s 10-CD boxed set in the October issue of Songwriter’s Monthly grumbles that New Times didn’t return the writer’s calls while he was writing the story. Since no one from this publication had any comment in that article, let this one…
When you hear, “I’m crossover, man, Southern rock and . . . ,” or, “My thang is kinda that hiphopnewgrungefunky-type jazz thang, y’know? . . .” or, “Uh, I do strictly blues,” it’s a fair bet you’re being snowed. A good musician won’t lay style on you. He’ll just say,…
In a performance space as intimate as PlayWright’s Theatre, you can name the moment when a play has grabbed its audience. That moment came during opening night of Theatre Maxim’s Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, when actor April Umbrianna blurted out her character’s horrible secret. The smallish audience froze…
Forty years ago, a sculptor could stop almost any American museum crowd in its tracks by erecting an abstract tower of metal. But as times have changed, sculptural works in fabricated steel have steadily lost that allure. They haven’t suffered the infamy of collapsing on and killing college students for…
