When Scottsdale began talking about developing a new downtown transit center several years ago, urban-design junkies had plenty of cause to roll their eyes and mutter, “Here comes more Frontiertown.” The doodads the city had added to its downtown streets in the early 1990s had only bolstered its reputation for…
Before Billy Connolly has said hello or shaken your hand, before you’ve even stepped into his hotel room, he’s already effusively telling you about something BRRRILLIANT he’s just seen on TV. This particular BRRRILLIANT program was about a Hells Angels convention in rural Alberta, Canada, and how the townies were…
Jerry Fletcher, the hero of Conspiracy Theory, is a comic, glamorous variation on Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Like Travis, he’s a New York cabby obsessed with protecting a woman from the world’s hidden malignancies. Unlike Travis, Jerry snaps when he achieves sanity. Mel Gibson has been almost too willing…
Mrs. Brown (a Cannes hit and Miramax release) is dignified to the dead max–brownish-gray in mood and look and spirit. It’s based on the true story of the platonic but controversial bond between Queen Victoria (Judi Dench) and a Highlander named John Brown (Billy Connolly), who had been the devoted…
thursday august 7 “Crossing the Frontier” and “Canyonland Visions”: The former exhibit, sponsored by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is subtitled “Photographs of the Developing West, 1849 to the Present,” though “Photographs of the Despoiling West” might be more accurate. The show comprises more than 200 shots, vintage…
British filmmaker Peter Greenaway sits near a window in the dining room of a Hollywood hotel; he indicates a man walking down the sidewalk outside. He’s about to explain his use of multiple imagery in his new film, The Pillow Book–distinguishing it from the conventional notion of the split screen…
John Leguizamo is lithe and full of juice–he’s like the shy boy who suddenly discovers he can dance and can’t keep still. Given his need to express himself physically, it’s a sad irony his breakthrough may come in Spawn, in which he’s wearing the makeup equivalent of a cement overcoat…
It’s no secret that the “new” Jackie Chan releases in the U.S. aren’t really new at all. In fact, they’re not even showing up in chronological order: While New Line is issuing Chan’s more current stuff in order, Miramax is putting out the star’s relatively recent back catalogue out of…
thursday july 31 “The Great Dinosaur Extinction”: The installation focuses on various theories about why the great beasts perished, and features the remains of a number of rare ones–including the large predator Acrocanthosaurus; the only complete skeleton of a Pachycephalosaurus ever found; and, naturally, a T. rex or two. The…
Not long into a tour of Sky Harbor International Airport’s Terminal Four (T-4), Lennee Eller changes from the curator of the airport’s art program into a disconsolate housekeeper. She can’t believe the dust accumulating in the display cases; the chocolate, chewing gum and worse ground into the carpet nearby; the…
Not satisfied with the president you have? Here’s Harrison Ford’s James Marshall in Air Force One: Vietnam war hero, straight as a ramrod, devoted husband and father. We first see him delivering a speech before a roomful of Russian dignitaries. Departing from the prepared, wishy-washy text, Mr. President fire-breathes his…
Who is it that forbids me/darkness, and who would give me eyes again? –The Oedipus of Seneca, Act V Spalding Gray is about as economy-minded a showman as you could find. Not only does he require nothing more for his act than a table and chair, a mike, a spiral-bound…
At first glance, the new Japanese comedy Shall We Dance? appears to be an Asian remake of the Australian hit Strictly Ballroom–but, in fact, the similarities are only surface-deep (and just barely that). Part of the difference is rooted in the cultural gap between the two countries, but wider yet…
thursday july 24 “Canyonland Visions” and “Crossing the Frontier”: The former installation, organized by Fort Worth, Texas’ Amon Carter Museum, features 117 paintings and photos of the Colorado Plateau region dating from the mid-19th century to the late 20th, including 46 recently rediscovered and never-before-displayed watercolors by Prussia-born adventurer/naturalist Heinrich…
Gay jokes are nothing new to comedian Scott Thompson. After all, he’s gay and he tells jokes. But Thompson, a charter member of TV’s Kids in the Hall and a part-time player on HBO’s The Larry Sanders Show, sometimes tells gay jokes that aren’t very funny, at least not to…
What must those poor guys in Insane Clown Posse be thinking? After all, the sad white rap act only made a recording that included profanity, and still it got drop-kicked off panicky, Disney-owned Hollywood Records, a label whose greatest catalogue asset is Queen. Martin Lawrence, on the other hand, got…
thursday july 17 “Canyonland Visions” and “Crossing the Frontier”: The former exhibit, organized by Fort Worth, Texas’ Amon Carter Museum, features 117 paintings and photos of the Colorado Plateau region dating from the mid-19th century to the late 20th, including 46 recently rediscovered and never-before-displayed watercolors by Prussia-born adventurer/naturalist Heinrich…
In 1978, the building at the southeast corner of Scottsdale Road and Shea Boulevard was known as the Windmill Dinner Theatre. The name quickly paints the picture: rubber chicken followed by broad bedroom farce. The snowbird audience members laugh dutifully through act one and spend act two nodding into their…
A lot of ink has been shed in the press lately about the “seriousness” of the new Robert Zemeckis film Contact, starring Jodie Foster as an astronomer who receives humankind’s first extraterrestrial message. Forrest Gump made Zemeckis a guru; now he’s being primed as a philosopher king. Is it rude…
thursday july 10 “Lilith Fair” featuring Sarah McLachlan, Jewel, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Paula Cole, and Suzanne Vega: Among the stampede of summer package tours is this caravan of topflight female singers/songwriters, ranging widely in style from the ethereal angst of Canada’s McLachlan to the East Coast country of Carpenter to…
The special effects in the sci-fi comedy Men in Black are an orgy of animatronics, mechanical effects, practical effects, miniatures, computer enhancements, makeup–the whole shebang. The film’s mishmash of tones, from goofball to horrific, is equally all over the map. It has its cartoonish side, but it also has its…
Several times during the kid movie Wild America, the three teen-heartthrob heroes cruise down the road to the strains of “Born to Be Wild.” Disgrace, you say, to put the Easy Rider anthem through one more commercial indignity–yuppie car ads in the ’80s, and now a pulse-raiser for the Tiger…
