In the archetypal dead-end town of Lawford, New Hampshire, cold-eyed men looking for trouble prowl the streets in four-by-fours with chrome spotlights and loaded gun racks. The gloomy barrooms are not gathering places so much as solitary confinement cells, and the most popular local sport is macho posturing. In wintry…
For better or worse, the father figure in Larry Clark’s ironically titled Another Day in Paradise turns out to be Mel, a foul-mouthed, 40-year-old junkie wearing a devil-red tennis shirt. His notion of good counsel is showing his surrogate son how to disable the burglar alarm at a medical clinic…
Those of us who believe that had Beavis and Butt-Head and the South Park gang never made the scene, American culture would be worse off, not better, owe Spike & Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation a debt of gratitude. The 1999 edition of this cult-fave fest, conceived by…
The Best Actor nomination which Nick Nolte garnered last week for his superb star turn in Paul Schrader’s Affliction (see page 63 for review) is a boon not only to his career, but to the career of Mel Weiser. The Valley-based writer’s new tome Nick Nolte: Caught in the Act…
thursday february 18 Karate demonstrations, children’s singing and dancing groups, strolling clowns, face painters, live music and radio remotes, a carnival midway with 25 rides and 20 games; arts-and-crafts exhibits; and photo opportunities with a live 400-pound tiger, along with an international food festival and beer garden, are among the…
In the opening image of a documentary video, Meryl Tankard dances sinuously, sweatily, whipping her hair in front of the camera. “Dance really should be the ultimate form of expression,” she says when she finally catches her breath. “I wanted to act, to paint, to design. But then I thought,…
In Hungary, the Holocaust lasted only for a year. But the word only is deceptive in this context. The Nazis, who entered the country in March of 1944, had been in the genocide business for a few years by then, and they’d gotten good at it. They were efficient, and…
Short of nuclear holocaust, a major sale at Kmart, or a confirmed Clint Eastwood sighting back in rural Iowa, there’s probably no way to keep the movie version of Message in a Bottle from overwhelming the tender emotions of the hearts-and-flowers crowd. After all, this relentless assault on the tear…
“When I was in film school, I was the guy who was gonna resurrect screwball comedy,” says filmmaker James Moll. It was an odd ambition for the man who would go on to make his feature directorial debut with The Last Days, a documentary about five Jewish survivors of the…
You don’t have to travel to a coast anymore to experience the wonder of the Magic Kingdom. Disneyland has dropped its own little mecca right here in the desert–Club Disney. With a location in Chandler and another one opening Saturday, February 13, in Glendale, parents across the Valley have few…
That corner of Civic Center Plaza next to the Scottsdale Center for the Arts has been under construction forever. But now, where once there stood a discount movie theater, is the Gerard L. Cafesjian Pavilion of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. It’s no coincidence that opening day falls on…
Thursday February 11 The area dance music weekly Kind celebrates six months with guest DJ Lady Kier of Deee-Lite fame. The songstress turned mixologist captured a worldwide audience with the early ’90s hit “Groove Is in the Heart,” and has remained a dance-culture icon throughout the decade. Her latest project…
There’s a character in Pearl Cleage’s Blues for an Alabama Sky who repeatedly shouts “Let the good times roll!” throughout the more-than-90-minute-long first act. That line became my mantra as well, at a matinee performance of Arizona Theatre Company’s production of this show last Sunday. By the time intermission rolled…
Audiences for Actors Theatre of Phoenix’s newest catastrophe may exit the theater feeling they’ve missed something more than a good time. Gunmetal Blues is so fast-paced that it’s tough to keep up with its cartload of clues and myriad references to old movies. Unfortunately, the show’s breakneck pacing doesn’t disguise…
Between the current nostalgia for platform shoes and the epidemic of midlife crisis that has so many baby boomers in its grip, director Brian Gibson’s Still Crazy just might be able to find an audience among the disturbed, the deafened, and the disenchanted. It is, after all, the comic tale…
Last week a friend gave me a long distance phone number and insisted that I call it. It turned out to be the recorded information line for a movie theater in the presumably Mayberryesque town of Graham, North Carolina (my friend’s wife had found the number after hearing about the…
The new Mel Gibson vehicle Payback is arguably the first major-studio release this year to have even a modicum of aesthetic ambition. For his directorial debut, Brian Helgeland–who won an Oscar for his screenplay for 1997’s L.A. Confidential (co-written with director Curtis Hanson)–has chosen to adapt The Hunter, the first…
thursday february 4 Probably the single greatest American contribution to the canon of world opera, George Gershwin’s 1935 Porgy and Bess, is presented in a full concert version by Phoenix Symphony, with the ASU Choral Union and several distinguished soloists: James Butler as Porgy, Priscilla Baskerville as Bess, Theresa Hamm-Smith…
In his latest monologue, It’s a Slippery Slope, Spalding Gray says, “I always expected that one day all the people that were booking me in theaters, as well as the audience, would say, ‘Well, enough of that guy’s story. On to the next.'” Such a thought is classic Spalding Gray,…
It was 1986 when four women joined forces in New York to perform a cappella music of the medieval era. Naming themselves after an unsigned document, dated around A.D. 1200, describing musical practices at the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Anonymous 4 seemed unlikely to attain popular success. Considering that their…
I have a recurring nightmare: I’m seated in a crowded theater where, up on the stage, a little girl is singing about poverty while flash pots burst gaily all around her. A helicopter suddenly appears, and the child grabs the landing gear and is lifted off the stage just as…
Elevate The Jerry Springer Show a notch or two–in other words, dispense with the one-legged serial killers who are having sex with their blind mothers, and other such nonsense–and you’ve got Willard Carroll’s Playing by Heart. Too harsh a judgment, some will say. After all, this well-meaning, relentlessly sincere ensemble…
