thursday december 18 Baby, It’s Bright Outside: Fiesta of Light; Ahwatukee-Foothills Festival of Lights; ZooLights; “Wild Winter Nights”: The City of Phoenix’s free Fiesta continues nightly, through Thursday, January 1, 1998, in the area surrounding Symphony Hall Terrace, Second Street and Adams (534-3378). Phoenix’s other major display, Ahwatukee’s bounteous, white-lights-only…
Remember that attraction at Disneyland that features a creaky, prosthetic Abe Lincoln who talks about his life and rattles off an animatronic Emancipation Proclamation? That’s what Ben Tyler’s Goldwater: Mr. Conservative could easily have been. But thanks to some unsentimental writing, this 90-minute, one-man commemoration of Arizona’s best-known former senator…
Steven Spielberg’s Amistad is being given the Big Picture treatment–Schindler’s List Big, not Jurassic Park Big. Last week’s Newsweek featured the film on its cover, calling it “Spielberg’s controversial new movie,” even though it had not yet been released and the only “controversy” was a legal one about alleged cribbing…
Wes Craven’s Scream, which opened almost exactly a year ago, was the surprise hit of an overcrowded Christmas season. In part, its success was a triumph of counterprogramming: In a glut of classy Oscar contenders, Scream was the only teen-horror film. And it was helped by the relatively lackluster response…
Incongruous amid the cotton fields of Avondale, just off Interstate 10, there rises a huge, imposing structure that seems simultaneously futuristic, retro and decrepit. It’s the ruin of an abandoned horse-racing grandstand, glowering down on a track long since overgrown. A real estate white elephant, it’s nonetheless an atmospheric spot…
thursday december 11 Baby, It’s Bright Outside: Fiesta of Light; Ahwatukee-Foothills Festival of Lights; ZooLights; “Wild Winter Nights”: The City of Phoenix’s free Fiesta continues nightly, through Thursday, January 1, 1998, in the area surrounding Symphony Hall Terrace, Second Street and Adams (534-3378). Phoenix’s other major display, Ahwatukee’s bounteous, white-lights-only…
Despite the reputations of Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, it’s doubtful that Arthur Miller ever really topped his first major play, 1947’s All My Sons. With the possible exception of his 1964 Incident at Vichy–another neglected work–Miller hasn’t marshaled so much power with so little windiness. The current…
George Lucas ignited the modern cinematic special-effects explosion with his Star Wars movies; his trailblazing Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) in San Rafael, California, has continuously redefined the limits of fx technology, from inventing fabulous dreamscapes for the second Star Wars trilogy to devising miraculous digital fixes for non-special-effects movies…
A team of Russia-based international bad guys wants to knock off someone at the very top of the U.S. government. Who you gonna call? The Jackal. As personified by Bruce Willis, this assassin di tutti assassins is a rather tightlipped psychopath with an alarming collection of multicolored hair pieces. Willis’…
thursday december 4 Baby, It’s Bright Outside: Fiesta of Light; Ahwatukee-Foothills Festival of Lights; “Wild Winter Nights”: Phoenix’s free Fiesta continues nightly, through Thursday, January 1, 1998, in the area surrounding Symphony Hall Terrace, Second Street and Adams (534-3378). Phoenix’s other major display, Ahwatukee’s bounteous, white-lights-only bonanza, can be viewed…
Athol Fugard has written some of the most important plays of our time. His Master Harold . . . and the boys and My Children! My Africa! have presented hard evidence of how South African politics have pried apart the lives of its people. But with the end of apartheid,…
You can’t exactly call Alien Resurrection a pleasurable experience, but, then again, you wouldn’t say that about its predecessors, either. Directed by the Frenchman Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who previously co-directed with Marc Caro Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children, this fourth installment in the Alien onslaught is once again designed…
First, The Heiress was unofficially remade as Washington Square, then Ace in the Hole as Mad City, and The Day of the Jackal as The Jackal. But now we get The Absent-Minded Professor, all dressed up in new threads, as Flubber. In this frenzy of plundering the past, is nothing…
In John Berendt’s beguiling travel-cum-true-crime book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the people of Savannah, Georgia, (in Berendt’s words) “flourished like hothouse plants tended by an indulgent gardener. The ordinary became extraordinary. Eccentrics thrived. Every nuance and quirk of personality achieved greater brilliance in that lush enclosure…
thursday november 27 The Ben Folds Five: The piano-bass-drums trio from Chapel Hill, North Carolina–so named because “it sounds better than the Ben Folds Three,” says baby-grand man Folds–plows a deep furrow about midway between roots and alt. In fact, the BFF sounds a bit like a Gen X version…
The Ensemble Theatre’s production of Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story is the sort of theater we see precious little of these days: a spare, uncluttered production that emphasizes a well-written story and some good, solid acting. This small, unpretentious company was founded last year by Arizona State University theater alumni,…
Among this month’s local events commemorating the 50th anniversary of the State of Israel is a pair of thoughtful, Jewish-themed theater productions. Both detail the Nazi oppression of the Jews during World War II, and both are presented by companies funding the shows either with grant money from Jewish organizations…
Weed is a documentary chronicle of the “8th Annual Cannabis Cup & Hemp Expo,” a competition among the marijuana coffee houses in that fabled civil-libertarian utopia known as Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Thousands of potheads from all around the world–but mostly Americans–pay a small fee for the privilege of sampling the…
Ignorance is bliss and success and virtue. The spoils of life go not to the planners but to those who are too dim to know the risks they’re taking. That very American notion was the theme of Forrest Gump; less cosmically–but also much less pretentiously–it’s the gag engine behind the…
Disney Studios has nearly monopolized feature animation for almost 60 years now, only occasionally encountering successful forays by others into its animation realm. Now Twentieth Century Fox and its Phoenix-based Fox Animation studios are going up against the giant mouse with Anastasia; too bad this first effort isn’t better. During…
John Grisham’s The Rainmaker lulls you into the mindset you get while reading a best seller at the beach. What a sad thing to say about a Francis Ford Coppola movie! Rather than heighten your awareness the way The Conversation or The Godfather did, The Rainmaker makes you feel lazy…
thursday november 20 The Food Chain: Though Nicky Silver is one of America’s more promising comic playwrights, his writing sometimes straddles the line that divides standup patter from subtler characterization; there’s surely no little connection between that and men having an en masse attraction to Silver’s humor that mostly eludes…
