A middle-aged man enters the living room of his opulent Manhattan apartment. He is followed by a beautiful young woman. They discuss his wife, who isn’t home; they share witty banter about the park where the man has apparently just picked up the woman. After a while, the woman declares…
The flimsiest hustle in movie promotion today–one perpetrated by film festivals and their camp followers–is that independent movies are starved for mainstream attention. The truth is, they often have an open field in big-city media. Major studios are usually unable to deliver a finished print of a would-be blockbuster until…
Most disaster movies would be a lot better with more disaster and less “human drama.” In Deep Impact, the impending obliteration of much of the Earth by a pair of comets is merely the side show. The main event is all that goopy human-interest stuff–the daughter who reunites with her…
. . . but when worlds collide, said George Pal to his bride, I’m gonna give you some terrible thrills . . . –The Rocky Horror Picture Show Nowhere in the press materials for Deep Impact can I find any reference to Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer’s novel When Worlds…
Wanna see something really scary? You’re sure to find creep-outs aplenty at the 1998 World Horror Convention. It may be a toss-up, however, whether they’re among the panel discussions, celebrity appearances, and artwork, jewelry, books and videos for sale, or among the drooly grue-fans who turn out for the festivities…
Every schoolkid knows the story: A princess gets herself turned into a swan by an evil magician; a prince falls in love with her, and, after the prince’s house is trashed, the pair hurl themselves to their deaths in honor of their doomed love. We may recall the plot line…
thursday may 7 One of the state’s largest amateur sporting events, the 1998 Arizona Special Olympics Summer Games showcases the athletic prowess of some 2,000 developmentally disabled adults and children in a variety of Olympic-style competitions, held on Arizona State University campus in Tempe, mostly in and around Sun Angel…
In the production notes for Spike Lee’s new movie, He Got Game, the filmmaker is quoted as saying, “I don’t think I’ve ever done a film that is just about one thing. . . .” That’s true: Usually he’s able to cram in two or three things. In He Got…
Is the opposite of offhand onhand? If so, The Spanish Prisoner is the most onhand movie since Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. The writer/director, David Mamet, delights in his own supposed cleverness; he wants you to scratch your head while he manipulates your brain. Campbell Scott plays a researcher in…
thursday april 30 The title character of The Tale of Teeka is a goose–Maurice, the narrator of Michel Marc Bouchard’s children’s play, presented by the French-Canadian troupe Les Deux Mondes, tells the tragic story of his relationship with the bird. The play, presented in association with the Governor’s Call to…
Many bibliophiles regard chains like Bookstar, Borders and Barnes & Noble as the Great Satan. They are put off by the supermarketlike layout, the uninspired service and the rows and rows given over to romance and self-help dreck–and even more, one suspects, to the lack of quaint atmosphere. If you…
It’s film-festival season in the Valley. Last week was the outdoor short-film blowout at Arizona State University, and coming up mid-May, the awe-inspiring 75th-anniversary celebration tour of Warner Bros. classics comes to town. This week, it’s Arizona Film Society’s shoestring Saguaro Film Festival. Now celebrating its fifth year, the plucky…
It’s no secret that the identity of “Arizona” or “Southwest” art has been changing for some time now. As the urban forces that molded the cultures of other international cities have begun to affect our own, the art being made here has become as varied and complex as the works…
Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel Les Miserables, which he began in 1845, runs in most editions to around 1,500 pages. The latest film version–there have been five other adaptations for movies or television–runs a bit under two and a half hours. It’s an expert piece of pruning–entire continents of plot and…
I waited to see Personals until a couple of weeks before it closed, and ended up wishing I’d gone sooner. I’d grown weary of the standard fare presented by Theater League, a company that each month dusts off another musty musical (this season alone it’s done Hello, Dolly!, Jesus Christ…
New Times film critic Peter Rainer was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, the Columbia University School of Journalism in New York announced last week. He was the only film critic among hundreds of book, theater, television, dance, architecture and movie critics nominated by their publications to…
In writer-director James Toback’s quicksilver sex comedy Two Girls and a Guy, Robert Downey Jr. plays Blake Allen, a struggling New York actor who lives in a spacious loft in SoHo he probably can’t afford. He’s a pampered prince who has worked out for himself a cozy romantic subterfuge: He…
Gwyneth Paltrow gets another chance to show off her letter-perfect English accent in Sliding Doors, an engaging romantic comedy which employs a rather novel narrative device: After introducing the main characters and setting up the basic story, the film splits into two separate but parallel plot lines. It’s a twist…
thursday april 23 Food and music–Ida Guillory has mastered both, which means she’s mastered at least two of the best things in this life. Better known as Queen Ida of Queen Ida and the Zydeco Band, the Grammy Award-winning accordionist holds a Creole cooking demonstration and buffet dinner at 6…
Look up the term “orphan train” in five encyclopedias, and you can draw five blanks. It’s one of the great, little-told stories of American history: the vast westward diaspora, from 1854 to 1929, of homeless children from the big cities of the Northeast, most of them the offspring of poor…
The drive-in may have become as rare a bird as the whooping crane in our home-entertainment era, but, provided your tastes run to the artsy or academic, it’s still possible to enjoy movies outside, at least for one night. Arizona State University’s second annual Short Film and Video Festival–which kicks…
It’s tough to miss the new mural wrapping the Mercer Mortuary building, on the southwest corner of 16th Street and Thomas Road. Its big, stylized figures and scenes in bold colors radiate just the sort of up-with-people exuberance you’d hope to find in a neighborhood that has been fighting crime…
