The Family Man offers but a slight variation on the threadbare holiday theme of what life might have been like had Our Hero followed a different path — or never been born. Not only is it a redo of It’s a Wonderful Life — complete with an angel (played by…
Here you will find the ingredients required to spin an audience into throes of fuzzy warmheartedness — the hope, the compassion, the joie de vivre — all blended with the skill of a consummate confectioner. Much like a box of sweets with a convenient guide inside the lid, there are…
Fair warning: Enough time has passed that it’s okay to discuss the ending of writer-director M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable. Those who’ve not yet seen the film and intend to might want to keep on moving. Or perhaps not: To reveal the ending, all 180 or so seconds of it, is…
It’s no wonder that actress Cathy Dresbach looked disappointed during her second night curtain call for In Mixed Company’s The Mineola Twins. Although she’d delivered a fine performance in a splendid production, much of Paula Vogel’s knotty dialogue had fallen, that night, on deaf ears. The audience had responded tentatively…
What Women Want could be the first movie to win a Clio Award for Advertisement of the Year. No fewer than two dozen products receive prominent placement in the film, from Federal Express to Foster’s Lager to Cutty Sark to L’eggs pantyhose to US Airways. After a while, you begin…
There tend to be two poles when it comes to making semi-autobiographical movies about one’s childhood, and both are designed to make the viewer cry. There’s the “Those were the good old days” approach (see My Dog Skip or Stand by Me), usually depicting the time in a young boy’s…
“See, there’s this pre-Columbian emperor who’s a spoiled brat, and he gets turned into a llama, and he meets this peasant, and the two of them become buddies and save this little village . . .”It takes nothing away from The Emperor’s New Groove, Disney’s delightful new animated feature, to…
A mixture along these lines, with a strong dash of Mannheim Steamroller’s Christmas records, gives some idea of the flavor of Trans-Siberian Orchestra, which performs this Sunday at the Web Theatre. The entertainingly over-the-top symphonic-rock ensemble, which has nothing whatsoever to do with Siberia or with railroads, is a project…
You may have noticed some nuts around the Valley in the last weeks. No, I don’t mean the election protesters. I mean The Nutcrackers. Ballet & Friends in Scottsdale and Ballet Etudes in Chandler wrapped up their wonderful productions recently. That makes two down and one to go, with the…
This is a city of ghosts. Like an ancient necropolis unearthed from beneath the desert, Phoenix is a place of the dead. You see them caught in mid-scream in front of the bronze dome of the State Capitol, wandering eyeless across the dirt mounds of Pueblo Grande on Washington Street…
Children of Eden
Day One: It was just part of the job, just another movie on another afternoon. This one promised to be no more special than any other, save for the casting of Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe. Proof of Life was the movie during which they fell in love, or whatever…
About halfway through the megabudget mountain-climbing adventure Vertical Limit, even the most rugged, thrill-hungry disaster-movie fans may find themselves going numb. Not from the howling weather on the icy faces of K2, in the Himalayas, where the action supposedly takes place. Not from oxygen deprivation. Not even from stretches of…
As Harvey Korman is dying in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater at the end of Blazing Saddles, he still has time to wonder aloud, of Douglas Fairbanks Sr., “How did he do such amazing stunts . . . with such little feet?”More to the point: How did he do them…
I’m the man of this house! . . . until you get home. What I say goes around here! . . . right out the window. This excerpt is characteristic of “The Man Song,” a much-requested radio hit by comic Sean Morey, who plays a two-night stand at the Tempe…
Christmastime is here, but for the first time, Charlie Brown’s father will not be around to watch his depressed, round-headed child celebrate the holiday. He will not be in front of the television next week to watch his little boy seek psychiatric help from a nickel-grubbing girl who diagnoses her…
In 102 Dalmatians, a new brood of puppies is born, one of which, Oddball, doesn’t develop spots. The resulting feelings of inadequacy are such that the poor thing runs away from home and hides in a cave, gets bitten by a bat and turns into a slavering mad dog. Cruella…
Late in the 19th century, Marius Petipa choreographed a confectionery story ballet on Tchaikovsky’s music based on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s tale The Nutcracker. Russian choreographer George Balanchine’s version has been enchanting children and adults since 1954. Yet he is one Russian not represented in the Nutcrackers around the Valley this holiday…
Philip Curtis, the Scottsdale painter who died November 12 at age 93, would have loved the Phoenix Art Museum’s farewell to him last week. He always liked a good party. And this one included some of his favorite things: a few hundred of his closest friends praising him and his…
In our daily physical world, “Sustained,” the new installation by Gene Cooper, is located at the Lisa Sette Gallery in downtown Scottsdale. The installation also exists in the cyberworld of technology and virtual reality, over a tangled web of fiber-optic cables. And on yet another level, the work exists literally…
Despite the recent collapse of several small theaters, new playhouses are springing up like Christmas tree lots. Would that these companies were offering something other than a handful of interesting performances in shows no discerning playgoer will want to see.Hidden away in a tiny, unmarked storefront, D and D and…
At first glance, the new Japanese import Non-Stop seems to be a crude knockoff of German director Tom Tykwer’s wonderful Run Lola Run, but Non-Stop was released in Japan (under the title Dangan Runner) in 1996, two years before Lola was shot. Could Tykwer have seen the film at a…
