The Galapagos tortoise lumbers along slowly in its outdoor enclosure at the Phoenix Zoo, plodding in the general direction of its less flamboyantly active companion. As I approach the concrete wall for a look, the enormous reptile pauses, and with stately deliberateness cranks its head around to peer at me…
One True Thing, directed by Carl Franklin, is trying to be the Terms of Endearment of the Nineties. Scripted by Karen Croner from the 1995 Anna Quindlen novel of the same name, One True Thing pushes the same high-gloss homilies about making peace with your family, and it caps everything…
The title Post Coitum derives, presumably, from the ancient Latin aphorism “post coitum omne animal triste”–every creature is sad after sex. The creature with which this French film concerns itself is Diane, a married, 40ish book editor played by Brigitte RoYan, who also co-wrote and directed. This attractive woman’s midlife…
A leg brace, a debilitating disease, sexual frustration, and Jackie Kennedy hair–breathes there a movie actress anywhere who could resist such fare? They’re as seductive as Richard III’s hump to the stage actor. Joanna Going straps it on–the leg brace, not the hump–and has a ball as the delicate heroine…
Jackie Chan’s American fans–and I include myself among them–have suffered through a nervous 1998 so far. The momentum the star earned with the 1996 release of Rumble in the Bronx has seemed to dissipate steadily: An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, the first American production to employ Chan since…
Anybody who doubts the phallocentric theory of history need only hear the tale of the Athenian General Alcibiades (circa 450-404 B.C.)–as it is told, at least, by Alan J.M. Haffa, Ph.D., Director of Classical Studies at Phoenix College. Whitewashed as a character in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, Alcibiades was, in…
thursday september 17 Those of us who feel inadequate should take heart to learn that even the Grand Canyon wasn’t always so honkin’ grand. Historian Stephen J. Pyne is scheduled to talk about his new book How the Canyon Became Grand: A Short History, which combines “environmental, social intellectual, political…
I once interviewed a film actress who was attempting a comeback with her own television show. “I always tell people that I do this for the art, for the love of the craft, all that hogwash,” she told me. “The truth is, I started practicing my acceptance speech when I…
The heroine of The Governess is a young Jewish woman–a “Jewess,” in the parlance of 1840s London, in which the first scenes of the film are set. I thought that this drama, the feature debut of the young writer-director Sandra Goldbacher, might explore a chapter in Britain’s long, abysmal, and…
Men don’t get it. Moms don’t get it. Sometimes, even your roommate or best friend doesn’t get it. But if you bray and carp and vent long enough, someone will listen, someone will begin to understand the precious particulars of a young woman’s sexuality. Whether they’re interested or not. That’s…
The opening credits of Simon Birch assert that it was “suggested” by John Irving’s popular 1989 novel A Prayer for Owen Meany. Actually, it’s a thin but relatively faithful adaptation of the first few chapters of Irving’s comic ramble through the nature of religious faith, predestination, and heroism. Screenwriter Mark…
Matt Damon, the blond matinee idol, has apparently become Hollywood’s idea of a deep thinker. After playing a math whiz in last year’s Good Will Hunting, he’s now been reinvented as a poker genius in John Dahl’s Rounders. So anybody who had doubts about the second coming of Albert Einstein…
Despite what the show’s title might lead you to believe, not all of the works included in the exhibition “You Draw Like a Girl,” currently on view at Arizona State University’s Downtown Center Galleria, are drawings, nor are all of the participants female. According to Sherrie Medina, participating artist and…
thursday september 10 Short-story writer Ruben Mendoza, author of Loteria & Other Stories, reads from and signs his work at 7 p.m. Thursday, September 10, at the Tempe Square location of Changing Hands Bookstore, 6428 South McClintock in Tempe. Admission is free. 730-0205. Glendale Public Library hosts “Hypnotic Nights and…
John O’Neal knows that the road from political activism to the stage of the Kennedy Center is a long one. O’Neal is artistic director of Junebug Productions, a troupe he rescued from the dying embers of the Free Southern Theater, a cultural arm of the civil rights movement that he…
You don’t often notice the effect that a museum’s architecture has on exhibitions–the way the surroundings bolster some shows and diminish others. But it’s difficult to miss the boost that the Phoenix Art Museum’s 1998 Triennial gets from the museum’s hangarlike Steele Gallery. From the moment Carlos Mollura’s giant, black…
Shane, the teenage hero of Mark Christopher’s 54, wears the petulant expression of a Raphaelite cherub, and he comes complete with a halo of curly blond hair. He’s played by a pretty newcomer with the exotic name of Ryan Phillippe, but there’s nothing exotic about the voice that comes out…
In the pecking order of tragic black musicians, Frankie Lymon can’t hold a votive candle to, say, Charlie Parker or Billie Holiday. But now, like that pair, the late doo-wopper has got his own movie–or, rather, he’s got his own space in a movie that, for better or worse, is…
In the bluish-green depths of the ocean, we see the deck of a sunken ship. Out of the murk, two pinpoints of light approach–humans, lured to this wreck by irresistible curiosity. It’s the beginning of a James Cameron movie, but it’s not that James Cameron movie. It’s the first shot…
Largely associated with the cinder block and milk crate set and families expert in child mass-production, the drive-in movie theater really is about a piece of 20th-century Americana that is quickly dissolving. Many drive-ins of yore are now Kmarts, apartment complexes and even trailer parks. Conceived by an entrepreneur named…
thursday september 3 The art show of heretofore unseen works titled “The Secret Art of Dr. Seuss” is, for those of us who adore the late doctor’s mad and wise poetic and artistic vision, far more seductive than Andrew Wyeth’s Helga stuff. Wilde-Meyer hosts the show, which includes “secret images…
Most trials don’t have the sort of high theatrics that TV and movie courtroom dramas do. Even the criminal trial of O.J. Simpson, for all its bizarre spectacle, was never rocked by any testimony from the defendant. But attorney Daniel M. Petrocelli is coming to the Valley to talk about…
