In case you were wondering, here’s the most fulfilling way to enjoy the alleged thriller Antitrust.Step One: Go shopping for groceries at your favorite supermarket. Step Two: When the smiling employee asks you whether you prefer paper or plastic, choose paper. Step Three: Seek out the young actor known as…
The history of 3-D in the movies is half a century long now — the first major 3-D feature, Bwana Devil, was released in 1952, and there were experiments with the concept earlier than that. There have been dozens of other attempts scattered throughout the decades since, and although some…
You could call it powerhouse dancing. Or, depending on the piece Ronald K. Brown’s Evidence is performing, you could call it power house dancing. Brown’s choreography blends modern, Senegalese and other African styles, and often, elements of club or house dance. Regardless of how stylized, ethnic or vernacular the spirit…
Anxious about my past-life-regression session, I tried imagining myself to be white, rich, an aristocrat. I asked regression therapist Donald Rice what the chances of something like this were — how many people turn out to have been, in earlier incarnations, influential historical figures or celebrities fallen from our world…
For 17 years, Dorothy Swanson has waged the loneliest battle: keeping good shows on television, a medium that exists as if only to taunt her. You can hear in her voice the strain such a struggle has taken on her. Her voice breaks and softens when she speaks about the…
Thirteen Days is a suspenseful look at the American government in the grip of a crucial, minute-to-minute, real-life crisis that threatens to destroy the country. No, it is not — as the relatively brief time span referenced in the title makes clear — about the recent election struggles . …
At the time, it was meant to be read as a great compliment: Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez create comic books for people who don’t read comic books! A publisher or pitchman couldn’t have come up with a more glorious phrase, one magical sentence that would reel in the literate and…
Valley DJ Z-Trip is effectively at the top of the hip-hop game. He tours incessantly — recently headlining the International B-Boy Battle of the Year in Hanover, Germany — rocks raves in the Far East, and performs in different cities across the United States every weekend. Spin named Z-Trip’s Bombshelter…
Even before the lights dimmed, it was apparent that this was no ordinary movie première. Held in the recreation center — down the path toward the boccie and shuffleboard courts — of the La Posada retirement community in Green Valley, the screening of a documentary about two of La Posada’s…
If there’s a heaven, it surely contains a room with David Ira Goldstein’s name on the door. Goldstein has, with Arizona Theatre Company’s new production of H.M.S. Pinafore, resuscitated Gilbert and Sullivan’s most beguiling operetta without deflating its integrity. The director has done away with the stale, mannered nonsense that…
Women from other countries were everywhere in the packed house — women from Congo, Sudan, Chad, Burkina Faso, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq. The circumstances that had brought them to the Valley, and to the audience of Essential Theatre’s Playback Theatre performance last weekend at PlayWright’s Theatre, were not pleasant.They were there…
If M. Night Shyamalan makes movies to be seen twice, then Joel and Ethan Coen make films to be pawed over a dozen times. O Brother, Where Art Thou?, an opulent and often slapstick updating of Homer’s The Odyssey by way of Preston Sturges, Robert Johnson and Clark Gable, sneaks…
Skeptics will not take easily to the optimism in Thomas Carter’s teen love story Save the Last Dance, and outright cynics may find the whole thing absurd. The notion that a sheltered white girl from shopping-mall country and a knowing black boy from the inner city can dance their way…
For slightly more than a decade, Chinese martial arts films have — directly and indirectly — gained a growing audience in the U.S. Now the genre may find its greatest breakthrough coming from an unlikely source — director Ang Lee, best known for such comedy-dramas of social manners as Sense…
So the feet-dragging commitment phobe who’s been stringing you along for the past seven years finally broke down and popped the question over the holidays? Well, ladies, I personally think you can do better, and that you’re just feeling pressure to conform to a social norm and probably working out…
Presumably, there was a time when the Drepung Loseling Monastery could have assembled a debate team to put Princeton’s to shame. Presumably, because, at its zenith, the Tibetan monastery attracted about 10,000 scholars, making it the largest in the world. And most of those monks, according to Geshe Yeshe of…
“You’re right! I quit!”Until this moment — this shrill outburst that comes out of nowhere and startles both interviewer and subject — Marisa Tomei had been speaking in hushed tones, like someone making funeral arrangements. Every so often, she would punctuate her sentences with giggles — some nervous, some delirious…
The War on Drugs has become this generation’s Vietnam, the unwinnable conflict that will, in the end, destroy the innocent and reward the guilty. That, in a coke vial, is the premise of Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, a film that gives flesh and face to bloodless government statistics and statements seldom…
Finding Forrester is the latest film from Gus Van Sant, one of the true American originals to emerge in the ’80s and ’90s. When Van Sant is at his best, he gives us stories and images we’ve never seen before. Finding Forrester, however, is not Gus Van Sant at his…
The moods of Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me are so artfully mingled that it’s difficult to get a fix on this highly personal independent feature. Set in a quiet little town in upstate New York’s Catskill Mountains, it is at once a drama about the unresolved traumas of…
So where’s the giant fetus?In 1968, we were promised a giant space-fetus floating above our heads this year. It’s not in evidence at this writing, nor is there any sign of the film that ends with the image — the seminal science-fiction movie of its decade and maybe of the…
With its Peace of the Pie program Saturday at Scottsdale Center for the Arts, Desert Dance Theatre celebrates world diversity and peace. The biggest piece of the program is an excerpt from a work the company commissioned from H.T. Chen called Warriors of Light. Of the Shanghai-born Chen, the New…
