Back in the day, when I was 17, I loved the Arizona State Fair — hanging out waiting for Tesla to come on stage, riding the Zipper on lunch money I’d starved myself for five days to accumulate. It wasn’t until we’d flipped around in the tiny cage and passed…
The sky to the north flashed with white lightning as I pulled off the 101 onto McDowell and turned into the rutted driveway. It was after 10 on a school night, so parking was easy and the crowd was sparse. The perfect time to check out Arizona’s Original Scream Park.Scaring…
It has often been written of Chris Guest–or, if you prefer, Fifth Baron Christopher Haden-Guest, son of diplomat Peter Haden-Guest, who could once vote in Parliament–that he has the demeanor of cold stone and the temperament of the dead. He possesses, one often hears, an impenetrable façade, that of the…
Western tradition, in all its romanticized glory, has always appealed most intensely to the urban dwellers of the East Coast. From their cries of gold on the leftmost shore, through pulp magazines, to serialized television shows and onto New York fashion runways, the West has always been about the ideal…
If I am ever forced at samurai swordpoint to come up with solid truisms about art at the beginning of the second millennium, I would have to say there are but two I could bet on to save my life. The first is that the genuinely beautiful will never go…
Grace and Glorie
To put it mildly, it is uncomfortable and embarrassing to have one’s cynical ass whipped by a huge, hulking Hallmark card, and this is exactly the sensation one takes away from Mimi Leder’s Pay It Forward. Not that the near-total emotional submission isn’t preceded by a knock-down, drag-out battle for…
The setting of Stephen Daldry’s uplifting comedy Billy Elliot, which is about a working-class boy who wants to be a ballet dancer, is a beleaguered coal-mining town in the north of England, circa 1984. A coat of grime covers the squat brick row houses, laundry flaps sadly in the breeze…
The first thing to know about The Legend of Drunken Master is that there is no Legend of Drunken Master, not really. Miramax/Dimension’s new Jackie Chan release is a repackaging of the star’s 1994 Drunken Master II.This is not inherently a bad thing. Nearly all Jackie Chan buffs — count…
Onscreen, the giant lips appear and begin to sing a catalogue of monster-movie references. In front of the screen, illuminated by hand-held lights from the audience, stands an incredibly thin, pale young woman — she looks like a more spectral Winona Ryder. She begins to sing along with the lips…
Many a tear is shed on the docks of the Old World as loved ones board ships for the new. Spurred on by the hope of a land of equal opportunity, most find only hostility and prejudice. But are these the mean streets of New York in the 1860s, or…
Poor hapless Renfield, wonderfully played by poor hapless Dwight Frye, climbs into the carriage that picks him up at the Borgo Pass. The ride is rough, so the real estate agent leans out of the window to complain to the driver. Then he freezes. Are his eyes deceiving him –…
A cold breeze blows through an open window, and a football game silently unfolds on the television screen. The old man sitting on the couch regards the game with mild interest, though not long ago, football was his passion, a way of pocketing a little scratch during those long stretches…
Unless you’re a scratch-music aficionado, you’ve probably never heard of DJ Focus. He doesn’t battle, doesn’t rock house parties, have a weekly residency or play raves. Although he regularly releases records, his material is less an expression of personal creativity than a tool for other DJs to use and learn…
Western tradition, in all its romanticized glory, has always appealed most intensely to the urban dwellers of the East Coast. From their cries of gold on the leftmost shore, through pulp magazines, to serialized television shows and onto New York fashion runways, the West has always been about the ideal…
A few years ago, I visited the home of a local museum curator. He took me on a tour of his private collection, a series of dreary sculptures and oversize canvases and a scary assemblage made from old mascara brushes and plastic Dairy Queen spoons that he swore represented the…
Twenty bars in, you couldn’t help but smirk. Or I couldn’t, anyway. The overture to Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville), with which Arizona Opera kicked off its season last weekend, was executed with lightness and verve under the baton of Kirk Muspratt. The Tucson audience sat…
Richard Gere, as Dallas gynecologist Sullivan Travis, has never been more likable onscreen, perhaps because he’s never been more human, more vulnerable, more there. After so many years of so many duds, after so many years of playing ladies’ man to little girls (and the recent Autumn in New York…
Too often baseball players are reduced to statistics, hollow numbers that resonate with the fetishist who drifts off to sleep counting home runs and career batting averages. Baseball demands such precision: It’s a team sport, yes, but ultimately it’s man against man, record against record, history against history. Look no…
There’s no getting around it: The Contender is the most offensive movie of the year. It pretends to be high-minded even while it slings mud and semen at the audience in its attempt to make its bludgeoning point, which is: If a woman wants to ascend to one of the…
You won’t see some Hollywood actor in bad makeup doing kung fu in slow motion. There will not be even one kid called “Grasshopper.” Don’t expect discussions of snatching a pebble from anyone’s hand. And there will be no ear-shattering Bruce Lee-style vocalizations. All that stuff is fine for the…
For just about a half-century now, The Everly Brothers have been making gorgeous music together. First singing together as little kids on their parents’ “down-home music” radio show in Shenandoah, Iowa, these brothers were seasoned professionals long before they were teenagers. Don sang the leads while his slightly younger brother…
