Summer comes with the cultural expectation that the farther you travel, the better the art gets. Mexico City, New York, Europe and Asia prove that equation. But cultural tourism in Phoenix’s west side remains a mystifying exception.That’s partly why “Three Generations of Great Masters of Mexican Painting,” at ASU West,…
First it was competition from the new sports arena downtown. Then it was the general lack of cultural sophistication that reportedly plagues all Phoenicians. Lately, it’s been the “risky” material chosen by artistic directors.Every season, our local theater companies offer a different reason for their diminishing returns. And several local…
Merchant/Ivory Productions has long been America’s quintessential purveyor of classy “literary” films. At its best, the team of director James Ivory and Ismail Merchant has given us A Room With a View (1986) and The Remains of the Day (1993); at its worst, Slaves of New York (1989) and Jefferson…
For a moment or two, David Lowery — front man for the band Cracker, and before that, beloved college-radio revolutionary sweethearts Camper Van Beethoven — found himself enjoying the book. He laughed in the right places, winced in the appropriate spots and thought, for a moment, the book wasn’t half…
Scottsdale gallery owners don’t often coo about competitors the way they do about Kraig Foote. They say he’s a quiet saint in a racket filled with gossipy sinners. “He really is pretty special,” says Lisa Sette, who owns the Lisa Sette Gallery a few doors away from Foote’s Art One…
The moody, feverish images that fill Running Free are so exquisite they almost make up for the film’s disastrous auditory misstep: the decision to cast Lukas Haas as the voice of Lucky, the chestnut foal that narrates this unusual adventure story. A cross between Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout and Jean-Jacques Annaud’s…
I’ve heard ex-smokers talk about the after-dinner jones, how they hunger for that ritual cigarette, the sweet inhalation of tar and nicotine that tops off a great meal in a way nothing else can. So they settle for the other half of their ritual, a fine brandy or the slight…
There pretty much couldn’t be a cooler show-business story than the amazing tale of Wallace and Ladmo. Think about it: a cheapo local kids’ TV program that somehow lasted for a solid three and a half decades. Few, if any, similar shows ever came close to that kind of longevity…
So why ain’t this guy a star? David Shepherd Grossman has been the definition of a working musician for going on 20 years now. The guy literally plays 30 shows a month; there’s hardly a night of the week you can’t catch him gigging somewhere around the Valley. His song…
Michael Moore often worries about being seen–and worse, dismissed–as the plump, ball-cap-wearing windbag who barges into company headquarters, demands to see the chairman of the board, then gets kicked out or even arrested. He frets about being reduced to a stuntman of shtick, Captain Ambush, the guy called upon whenever…
The Boomer-inspired version of entertainment, in which a portion of pop culture is regurgitated in two tidy hours, has run amok. This scary subgenre has resulted in no fewer than six network specials about the making of The Brady Bunch, and a slew of musical revues that attempt to recap…
Early on in Mission: Impossible 2 (or M:I-2, as the confident Paramount now calls it), hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) complains to his boss about his new assignment: “It’s going to be difficult.””It’s not mission difficult, Mr. Hunt,” the boss icily replies, “it’s mission impossible. “Difficult’ should be a walk…
Shanghai Noon is hardly as enervating as its trailer, which has such dreary sight gags and woeful jokes that it begs you to stay far away from any theater in which this film is screening. (Sample: A horse that stays by sitting . . . just like a dog.)But don’t…
“Industrial-strength boredom” is a vicious term to unload on anybody — friend, foe or former actress. Considering the lingering discomfort it inspires, one must beware of its impact, even around a seemingly invulnerable producer returning to the screen to melt our hearts in yet another variation on the emotional doppelgänger…
Hey! What’re you doing sitting there at home watching TV, when you could go to the library and . . . watch TV? Tempe Public Library is hosting a bimonthly program that presents the “White House Millennium Lectures,” a series on videotape of talks on a wide array of subjects…
You’ve got to hand it to Variety. Very often, while critics walk on eggshells around cultural generalities, the show-business trade publication cuts through it with an admirable bluntness. Here’s what the paper had to say about producer Ken Gentry’s new traveling version of the Frank Wildhorn musical The Civil War:…
The following is a list of women who have been raped, mutilated, tortured, enslaved, crippled, or murdered–and quite often, all of the above. In some cases, these women have also suffered miscarriages, been rendered infertile, contracted horrific diseases, and gone insane. Some of them have even been killed twice, perhaps…
I expected to be wowed by Michael Grady’s new play, one of two programs by local playwrights to première here this week. I’ve never seen a Grady play that I didn’t enjoy, and The Arizona Project — which winds up Actors Theatre of Phoenix’s 15th season — is one I’ve…
Dinosaurs used to be cool. In 1969, if you had asked me what I thought was the best movie ever made, I would likely have told you that it was Valley of Gwangi, in which a group of cowboys find a gully full of leftover dinosaurs, animated by Ray Harryhausen,…
Despite the title East Is East, the big message of this flavorful domestic memoir is really that West is West. In the tug of war between East and West for a soul, East, the film suggests, may hold out for a while through a combination of nostalgia, pride, national resentment…
When stars get popular enough (or win enough Oscars), they begin to get to call their own shots. Thus we have The Big Kahuna, the debut release of Kevin Spacey’s production company. Kahuna also marks the film debut of stage director John Swanbeck and screenwriter Roger Rueff. And, boy, can…
Woody Allen is back on screen in Small Time Crooks, a bittersweet comedy that in many ways could have been lifted straight from the ’30s. For the most part, it’s Woody Allen Lite, which is not at all a bad thing. While one doesn’t want to penalize Allen for his…
