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…
thursday july 3 Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus: The 127th-anniversary edition of the Greatest Show on Earth features ringmaster Eric Michael; Zusha, Queen of the Nile, billed as the world’s only performing hippopotamus; master clown David Larible; second-generation animal trainer Mark Oliver Gebel; the debut of the Golden…
To get into a good-lovin’ mood before each date, a college housemate of mine croaked along to Van Morrison’s “Tupelo Honey” while blasting it through his stereo. My fondness for the song survived. So as the end credits for Ulee’s Gold unrolled against the robust lyricism of Morrison belting out…
The family film Shiloh slipped unheralded into town and is likely to slip back out quickly, since, peculiarly, it’s also being released on video this week. In one medium or the other, it’s worth catching–it being one of the few current movies for kids that doesn’t seem engineered to make…
Bring earplugs to Batman & Robin. A pair of noseplugs wouldn’t hurt, either. The fourth installment in the Batman franchise is one long, head-splitting exercise in clueless cacophony that makes you feel as though you’re being held hostage in some haywire Planet Hollywood while sonic booms pummel your auditory canal…
The title of John Woo’s Face/Off is meant to be taken literally. John Travolta and Nicolas Cage play adversaries who swap faces. Here’s how: FBI agent Sean Archer (Travolta) has been single-mindedly tracking terrorist nut Castor Troy (Cage) ever since Castor’s botched assassination attempt six years earlier, in which he…
Face/Off, director John Woo’s new action film with John Travolta and Nicolas Cage, is Paramount’s big summer hope. Five years ago, when Warner Bros. offered Woo the project, he passed on it–he didn’t want to do science fiction, preferring something more emotional, he says. Later, producer Michael Douglas brought it…
thursday june 26 OZZfest ’97 featuring Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath, Marilyn Manson, Pantera, Type O Negative, Fear Factory, Machine Head, and Powerman 5000: Longtime followers of the metal godfather will get a blast from the past as Ozzy reunites for the first time in years with Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi…
Ron Carlson steps to the lectern at Changing Hands Bookstore. The podium sits beside the store’s “writing” section, next to the books designed to instruct and inspire budding authors. Copies of Carlson’s own new volume, The Hotel Eden Stories (Norton), are stacked nearby. The new book is a collection of…
Nothing against My Best Friend’s Wedding, but it’s a sign of just how vacuous things have become in Hollywood when folks start getting excited about a movie with a handful of partially engaging characters, a fairly intriguing story line and a smattering of clever remarks. Look, that’s what movies are…
thursday june 19 subUrbia: Tucson’s upstart Upstairs Theatre Company, which features several Valley expatriates, travels north for this revival of a January ’96 production of the Eric Bogosian play in the Old Pueblo. The work revolves around three guys in their early 20s who replay a communal past while bumming…
There was an angry one in Boston harbor, a Mad one in Alice’s wonderland. Now comes the Tempe Tea Party–a diverse assembly of artworks related to tea. It is the third such bash hosted by the Tempe Arts Center in the past six years. Its cups, saucers, jewelry, books, sculpture…
In a season of lumbering, big-screen circuses, Rough Magic provides a rowdy, creative side show. It’s the kind of haywire high-wire act that suspends the laws of science and grows more involving and comical with every artful near-fall. It’s about magic as both illusion and genuine miracle, and it shuffles…
First, the good news: Unlike most action-film sequels, Speed 2: Cruise Control is not a mere retread of the original. Now the bad news: Better it had been. Director Jan De Bont made a dazzling debut with the 1994 Speed. His riveting direction of action triumphed over a hackneyed, illogical…
thursday june 12 Love! Valour! Compassion! Benefit Screening: The recently released film version of playwright Terrence McNally’s dish-heavy dramedy about a summer of love and affection among a group of gay friends was directed by Joe Mantello, who helmed the original, Tony-winning off-Broadway production (and who, incidentally, received his own…
The exhilarating, bird-flipping British film Brassed Off is about the systematic destruction of the coal-mining industry in northern England by the Thatcher government in the last decade. It’s set in the fictitious Yorkshire town of Grimley, where a profitable pit is on the verge of closure. Though there is still…
It’s not completely fair to say that the string of hits produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer from 1983 through 1996 are stylistically interchangeable. But it’s not too far off: A homogeneous, auteurial touch runs from Flashdance (1983) through Top Gun (1986), Beverly Hills Cop II (1987) and Days…
thursday june 5 Royal Palms Grand Reopening: The Camelback Corridor resort, a formerly funky if somewhat faded dowager that’s had a Phoenix-style face-lift, gets back in circulation with a fund-raising bash featuring grounds tours, entertainment, a “culinary show house” and more. The party’s scheduled for 6 to 10 p.m. Thursday,…
