Abel Ferrara’s movies combine self-conscious tawdriness with unconscious tawdriness. He’s fascinated by self-destructive excess, by obsessive, addictive behavior, by characters who willfully wreck themselves with drugs and booze and sexual degradation. Like many filmmakers with an attraction to this subject matter–the early Scorsese, for instance–Ferrara insists that such behavior has…
Abel Ferrara’s movies combine self-conscious tawdriness with unconscious tawdriness. He’s fascinated by self-destructive excess, by obsessive, addictive behavior, by characters who willfully wreck themselves with drugs and booze and sexual degradation. Like many filmmakers with an attraction to this subject matter–the early Scorsese, for instance–Ferrara insists that such behavior has…
Daniel Day-Lewis is one of those rare actors who might be called consummate, yet he is not visibly self-congratulatory while working. He’s created a gallery of characters–the crippled, cosmically outraged Christy Brown in My Left Foot, the tuxedoed waxwork Cyril in A Room With a View, the fairy-tale hero Hawkeye…
Daniel Day-Lewis is one of those rare actors who might be called consummate, yet he is not visibly self-congratulatory while working. He’s created a gallery of characters–the crippled, cosmically outraged Christy Brown in My Left Foot, the tuxedoed waxwork Cyril in A Room With a View, the fairy-tale hero Hawkeye…
Blink is a thriller of that minigenre of disabled-women-in-peril, to which belong Wait Until Dark and last year’s lame Hear No Evil and Richard Fleischer’s hair-raising See No Evil. This time the differently abled damsel in distress is Madeleine Stowe as a Chicago woman, blind since childhood, who receives a…
Blink is a thriller of that minigenre of disabled-women-in-peril, to which belong Wait Until Dark and last year’s lame Hear No Evil and Richard Fleischer’s hair-raising See No Evil. This time the differently abled damsel in distress is Madeleine Stowe as a Chicago woman, blind since childhood, who receives a…
Blink is a thriller of that minigenre of disabled-women-in-peril, to which belong Wait Until Dark and last year’s lame Hear No Evil and Richard Fleischer’s hair-raising See No Evil. This time the differently abled damsel in distress is Madeleine Stowe as a Chicago woman, blind since childhood, who receives a…
Governor Fife Symington’s much-ballyhooed Forestry Summit, which begins today, has taken on the trappings of a true blue-blood affair. Billed as an “excellent opportunity” for Arizona’s citizens to learn about and contribute to the continuing debate on management of the state’s sprawling national forests, the three-day conference at El Zaribah…
Zane Johnston gestures toward the .38-caliber pistol he carries in a worn leather holster on his hip and says, “The Bureau of Rec thinks I carry this for them. But I don’t. I carry it for varmints.” In Johnston’s book, a varmint is only a small notch above the U.S…
On first hearing, the tale sounds like a standard-issue urban legend. Guy goes to Vegas. Guy meets hooker. Guy gets fleeced. But there are elements to this particular version of the old story that saved it from Jan Brunvand’s heap of mythological scraps. (Brunvand, a professor at the University of…
If a part-time Maricopa County judge has his way, chronic shoplifter Rhonda Mecham will have a much harder time satisfying her confessed “habit” in the future. That’s because of an unusual sentencing provision that pro tem Superior Court Judge Joel Thompson says he designed to notify area retailers about Mecham’s…
“It looks like no man’s land here,” says Alisa Gray as she peers through the razor-wire fence at 21st Avenue south of McDowell Road. On one side of the street, storage tanks for an asphalt plant drip and percolate; I-10 whizzes overhead, held up by giant pillars. Beneath the expressway:…
The man in the Mazda RX-7 pulled over to the side of the road and waited. For almost 14 years, John Carpenter had prayed this day wouldn’t come. It was about 6 a.m. on June 1, 1992, in the south Los Angeles suburb of Carson. Carpenter, then 63, had been…
Bob Emerick sat down recently for a heart-to-heart with his 11-year-old daughter, Leslie. “She really wanted to know why I am leaving Arizona,” says Emerick, former director of the now-defunct sex-offender treatment and assessment program at Phoenix Memorial Hospital. “I told her, ‘You know what I do. Part of my…
On January 14, 1990, at about 12:50 a.m., someone bombed Carl Ritter’s car in the driveway of his Tempe home. “It sounded like someone had fired a double-barrel shotgun,” Ritter says. “It woke up the entire neighborhood; people were starting to come out of their houses.” The rear wheels of…
Richard Lessner, the Arizona Republic editorial writer who inflamed Hurricane Andrew survivors in Florida when his victim-bashing column was reprinted there, has resigned under fire. Lessner walked out on Tuesday rather than accept a demotion to religion writer, a position he held when he joined the Republic in 1981, Lessner…
It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. The best if you were selling tickets; the worst if you were buying them. And now, only one question remains. Will film historians of the future refer to this as “The Heaven’s Gate Decade,” “The Ishtar Decade,” or…
How can land in boring, bland downtown be more valuable than prime sites like the Esplanade at 24th Street and Camelback? Is it just that City Hall doesn’t know how to cut a decent deal? That’s the impression given by the prices the city is paying for land for the…
Before Bruce Willis enters the room, a studio publicist announces that Mr. Willis will not discuss anything pertaining to his ex-TV series, Moonlighting, or his personal life. Hmmm. Okay. So, um, Bruce . . . whaddaya think of those Voyager photos of Neptune? Fortunately, the sole job qualification of studio…
When word leaks out that you’re going to be interviewing Mel Gibson and Danny Glover, the stars of Lethal Weapon and its new sequel, called (what else?) Lethal Weapon 2, you can count on getting two reactions. Reaction No. 1 (from females of all ages): “MEL GIBSON?!? Oh, my God!…
If there is a normal career path for Academy Award-winning actresses, Geena Davis certainly isn’t following it. Prior to being Oscarized in March for her performance in The Accidental Tourist as a dog trainer at the Meow Bow Animal Hospital who is in love with a reluctant travel writer, Davis’…
“How much difference is there between `gosh darn’ and `God damn’?” asks D.C. Martin, Grand Canyon College’s chairman of religious studies. “Is it the spelling of the words, or is there a technical difference between the two?” Those were some of the questions that prompted Martin to teach a class…
