Filmmakers and audiences have been captivated by the idea of dinosaurs since the primeval days of the cinema. Not until Jurassic Park four years ago, however, have the movies made truly convincing dinosaurs. Which is not to say that film dinosaurs prior to Park and to its current sequel, The…
Not only is The Lost World: Jurassic Park the sequel to the most popular movie ever made, but it is also the first film Steven Spielberg has directed since 1993’s Schindler’s List. He has finally won his Oscar and achieved Great Artist status in Hollywood’s pantheon of the Righteous, but…
The Substance of Fire ought to be one of the major critical favorites of 1997. It won’t be, but is worth seeking out while it lingers in town. It’s an adaptation of the acclaimed drama by Jon Robin Baitz about Jewish guilt and familial war. Baitz was 26 when he…
thursday may 22 “Our Future in the Desert: Architectural Explorations”: The Arizona VisionWeavers organization, which seeks to “harmonize commercial and private development with the Sonoran Desert environment by encouraging innovative architectural visions,” sponsors this exhibition of conceptual works about desert habitation and conservation by architects from around the state, including…
Last week, two very different plays about ethnic minority cultures opened at local Equity houses. August Wilson’s brilliant Seven Guitars is a study of 1940s black America haunted by the author’s recent statements against multicultural theater, while Our Lady of the Tortilla is Latino playwright Luis Santiero’s satire of old…
On the festival tour that helped the necrophiliac Kissed net prerelease praise everywhere from the Atlantic Monthly to Newsweek, writer-director Lynne Stopkewich said she thought independent films should be judged by their ingenuity and daring rather than by the size of their budgets. As arts-world stump speeches go, it’s a…
Sidney Lumet has had enough ups and downs in his long, prolific career that it’s never safe to count him out . . . even after two disappointing films in a row, A Stranger Among Us (1992) and Guilty as Sin (1993). Even the greatest directors frequently falter in their…
Okay, metaphor buffs: An “albino alligator” is what the other alligators in a group send out as a sacrificial lamb. Members of a second group of ‘gators attack the albino, and the first group violently finishes off its competition. Once this is explained in the movie Albino Alligator, you know…
In Children of the Revolution, Judy Davis plays Joan Fraser, an Aussie communist who sleeps with Joseph Stalin–their tryst kills him–and, unbeknown to anyone, has his child. Davis takes her character through almost 40 years of agitprop hellfire, and she has scaled her performance big. The movie, however, is rather…
thursday may 15 Seven Guitars: Arizona Theatre Company concludes its 30th-anniversary season with the state premiere of August Wilson’s literary memorial to a fictional, star-crossed bluesman named Floyd “Schoolboy” Barton; San Francisco’s Benny Sato Ambush directed. This week’s performances are at 2 and 8 p.m. Thursday, May 15; 8 p.m…
The Actors Group production of Love! Valour! Compassion!, Terrence McNally’s Tony Award-winning epic about friendship and fealty told by a lot of frequently naked gay men, is a manipulative, richly comedic three-act that probably plays better to a gay crowd than a straight one. Its frequent references to campy old…
In The Fifth Element, the all-knowing, all-powerful Supreme Being of the Universe turns out to be Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), an orange-haired babe in a skimpy, Band-Aid-thin mod outfit who speaks in a kind of Slavic scat and cries a lot. It’s as if the filmmakers started out to make a…
You and I both may have complex feelings about reproductive rights, but the lucky folks to the right and left of us don’t–they’re blessed with absolute, black-and-white knowledge. The movies, with few exceptions, have steered clear of this debate, for the same reason that many of us tend to avoid…
thursday may 8 Spearhead: The militant hip-hop/funk group, led by vocalist and former b-ball player Michael Franti (a real tower of baritone power at six-foot-six), offered up a near-great album in 1994 with its debut, Home. The band’s latest, Chocolate Supa Highway, is a tribute, of sorts, to Bob Marley,…
By almost any measure, “An Excess of Fact,” Lee Friedlander’s photographs of the Sonoran Desert at the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography, is an extraordinary event. It pairs one of the nation’s most distinctive photographers with a subject that’s relatively new to him and consistently elusive to most…
College theater depends heavily on the largess of its audience. It may be fair to expect a workmanlike performance from an Equity player, or to grumble about a crummy community-theater production, but it’s unreasonable to expect greatness from theater-student shows. Student productions–the bulk of whose audiences are usually blood-related–beg our…
For the fourth time in as many years, Arizona Film Society presents the Saguaro Film Festival. As in previous years, this year’s selections are a mixed bag, but a rewarding one–along with the usual batch of slackers-trying-to-get-laid comedies, there are such real gems as an enchanting, imaginative riff on the…
New-to-movies subjects are hard to come by, but Traveller has one: the inbred world of Irish grifters living in the backwoods of the American rural South. Clannish con artists descended from Irish tinkers, they fan out across the countryside pulling bogus home-repair jobs on unsuspecting, mostly elderly folk, and rake…
If you’re hankering to see a movie that sends up swinging ’60s London and Carnaby Street and vintage James Bond movies, don’t bother to check out Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. What the movie mostly sends up is its star and screenwriter, Mike Myers. That’s not all bad: Myers…
thursday may 1 Maricopa County Fair: The 22nd annual event–a cozier, countrier version of Arizona State Fair–winds down with its final days Thursday, May 1, through Sunday, May 4, at the fairgrounds, 19th Avenue and McDowell. Highlights include carnival rides and games on the midway; the Paul Bunyan Lumberjack Show;…
Volcano is set in Los Angeles, and audiences get high watching the city crash and burn. For L.A. haters, Volcano could prove a peak experience. You don’t even have to hate L.A. to enjoy it–love/hate will do. That’s why the film closes with Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.,” a facetious…
Paradise Road opens inside a posh British club in Singapore, February 1942. Beautiful young women dance with their uniformed sweethearts, while Colonel Blimp types and their wives cluck with amusement at the idea of the short, nearsighted Japanese getting the upper hand against the mighty Brits. Then the bombs start…
