In the Valley, a car lover’s paradise, it’s easy to become jaded — impressive automobiles are everywhere you look. After all, we’re almost used to seeing Ferraris and Lamborghinis, and we’ve even spotted such rarities as a futuristic Smart car stopped at a light on McDowell, and a McLaren F1…
I can’t help thinking about empire lately, as in the end of. Only that’s not Nero fiddling. It sounds more like the Charlie Daniels Band. In July, I went to see “The Surrealist Revolution” at the Pompidou Center in Paris, and I thought about how Surrealism often has been written…
Spike Lee’s adaptation of David Benioff’s 2001 novel The 25th Hour hews closely to the original tale, which the author has adapted in screenplay form: Montgomery Brogan, a working-class white boy who dreamed of being a New York City firefighter ’til he fell into a soft pile of easy money…
Those who seek a polar opposite to Michael Caine’s kind-but-firm patriarch Dr. Wilbur Larch in The Cider House Rules will find it in Jim Broadbent’s horrid, one-eyed headmaster, Wackford Squeers, in the new adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby. Author John Irving cribbed extensively from Charles Dickens to create his delightful (and…
“Cops die daily and they die bad,” barks manic police Lieutenant Henry Oak (Ray Liotta) to undercover narcotics officer Nick Tellis (Jason Patric), revealing both his hardened ‘tude and a little confusion when it comes to adverbs. Welcome to Narc, Paramount Pictures’ bid for a gritty, post-Training Day dirty-cop thriller,…
It’s been a rough couple of years for Marky Ramone. First, the former Ramones drummer lost his bandmate (and our favorite punk rock front man) Joey Ramone to cancer. Then, just three short weeks after the legendary band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, his dear…
Brando and the Black Rebels. Pink Lady Stephanie Zinone and her “Cool Rider.” Pee-wee Herman and his big, brave adventure. The bike kicks up such romantic images of speed, adventure and freedom . . . is it any wonder the public is stoked for spokes? Thanks to an ever-revving enthusiasm…
The heck with the New Year what you need, according to Cynthia Peden, is a new moon. Her start-up business, Moon Money, will bring you heaps of dough and other goodies, if only you believe. Cynthia made me promise I wouldn’t reveal Moon Money’s mystical secret, but she swears that…
According to various unreliable sources on the Internet, Just Married co-stars Ashton Kutcher (forever to be known as the star of Dude, Where’s My Car?) and Brittany Murphy (who wears way too much scary makeup even when she isn’t playing mental patients who’ll never tell) are now actually planning to…
I deplore The Fantasticks. Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s hyper-popular, record-breaking chamber musical is on my short list of shows I wish had never been written — just below Cats and a few notches up from anything adapted from a Disney cartoon. I’ve endured this show numerous times over the…
If you read last month’s Art in America, you know that Studio LoDo (along with a lot of other deserving art spaces in the Scottsdale/Phoenix/Tempe megalopolitan area) is now officially “on the map.” Those of you who’ve been to this warehouse space with a loading-dock entrance don’t need to wonder…
Rats! Barry Paceley’s got them, but like the guy with the proverbial pile of lemons, Paceley has made lemonade — which, as residents of the tony Arcadia neighborhood know, is a roof rat’s favorite beverage. It’s been a year since Paceley and his fellow Arcadians went public about their ongoing…
It’s easy to presume that About Schmidt isn’t much of a movie, since its protagonist, Warren Schmidt, isn’t much of anything. He’s portrayed by Jack Nicholson, but the actor is actually someone who looks like he used to be Jack Nicholson. This Warren, this rinky-dink actuary banished to the wasteland…
There have been other films dealing with the Jewish ghettos during the Nazi occupation of Poland — some very good — but The Pianist, the latest feature from Roman Polanski, may be the best. Of course, it starts out with a huge advantage: The 69-year-old Polanski is probably the only…
People in show biz do very weird things to prove their credibility. Starlets pose for skin mags, actors start rock bands, rockers become sitcoms, rappers become tombstones and, now, in a heartwarming feature called Evelyn, James Bond wants us to believe he’s an Everyman. The lovely thing is, it works…
Francis Ford Coppola dreamed of doing an accurate Pinocchio film, but legal battles took that away from him. Walt Disney’s version is a classic, but omits a huge amount of material from the original book and Disneyfies what remains. And others have tried, over the years, though it’s best to…
You might be tempted to feel a touch of pity for World Wrestling Entertainment honcho Vince McMahon. About the same time his lame football league bit the dust, the wrestling tycoon got spanked in a British courtroom by the World Wildlife Fund regarding his corporate acronym. McMahon complied by renaming…
As a teenager in Haiti, Edouard Duval-Carrié spent a lot of time hanging around artists. “I was fascinated by what they were doing,” Duval says now. “Things have gone not very well since, but there was a period in Haiti when art was quite glorious.” The lost promise that Duval…
Lee Blumberg swears that the way we’re brought into the world can affect every minute of the rest of our lives. That’s why she’s crusading for hypnobirthing, a drug-free, painless means of popping out babies. Recently appointed by the Pennsylvania-based Prenatal Parenting Institute as Arizona’s official hypnobirthing practitioner, Blumberg is…
As Black Theatre Troupe deserts its longtime home, the dilapidated downtown Helen K. Mason Center, for the polished Herberger Stage West, the 33-year-old company has found a marketing niche. Dinah Was, Oliver Goldstick’s biography of blues singer Dinah Washington, is the latest in a string of tune-filled profiles of ill-fated…
Everything about Catch Me If You Can, the loosely based-on-fact tale of a teenager who swindled millions while posing as, among other things, a Pan Am pilot, a doctor and a lawyer, is breezy and easy to swallow. Its maker, Steven Spielberg, hasn’t had so much fun in two decades,…
Al Capone himself probably couldn’t kill Chicago. The bawdy Kander and Ebb musical has been charming theater audiences since 1975 with its gleefully jaundiced view of life, and Rob Marshall’s inventive movie version likely will win a lot of new friends for the stage-struck murderess Roxie Hart, her sharpie lawyer…
