Question: What do you get when you combine a lot of talented actors with a couple of lousy scripts? Answer: Shows like those currently on display at Phoenix Theatre and Arizona Jewish Theatre Company. These programs — PT’s Twigs and AJTC’s The Gift Horse — sag under the weight of…
Luc Besson, director of La Femme Nikita, The Professional and The Fifth Element, is not the first name that would leap to mind to helm a biopic of Joan of Arc. Sure, he’s French, and, sure, most of his films have women/girls as protagonist or savior; but this is a…
In the eyes of the general public, Michael Mann is still best-known for Miami Vice. He has received a great deal of critical acclaim for films about serial killers, Mohicans and bank robbers. So who would have guessed that his most engrossing and suspenseful film to date would be a…
Much like the religion that has swirled around the Star Wars trilogy for twentysome years, the fanaticism evidenced among American fans of Japanese anime remains a mystery to some of us. Writer-director Hayao Miyazaki’s megahit Princess Mononoke does very little to cast light on this obsession: More’s the pity, since…
After an impressive poetry reading last year, the YMCA Writer’s Voice of downtown Phoenix invited East Coast poet Joshua Beckman back to the Valley, this time with an offer to act as the program’s writer in residence for the fall. He accepted, and this Tuesday, Beckman will read from and…
Former Phoenix Sun Wayman Tisdale is the headliner at this year’s Cool Desert Jazz Festival. Now a full-time “smooth jazz” bassist, touring behind his Atlantic Records debut, Decisions, the 12-year veteran of the NBA tops the marquee at the fifth annual concert, on Saturday, November 13, at Estrella Mountain Ranch,…
Would that some of our more established theater companies could harness the energy bursting from the makeshift stage at Planet Earth Theatre these days. In the best “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show!” tradition, a group of young amateurs has pooled its talents and its affection for campy old…
The first rule of Being John Malkovich is you do not look at the poster for Being John Malkovich! Sorry to crib from that inferior tale of incredible shrinking men (throw a rock at any multiplex marquee this season — please! — and you’ll hit several), but really, avoid that…
And now . . . a G-rated movie from David Lynch! No, Lynch hasn’t lost his mind. He hasn’t gone soft in the head. And he hasn’t sold out to the smiley-faced bean counters at Disney. While the notion of America’s King of Weird — the man who brought us…
Actor Frank Whaley has appeared in more than 30 movies, including Swimming With Sharks and Pulp Fiction. But none of them cuts as close to the bone, I suspect, as Whaley’s debut in the writer-director ranks, Joe the King. Set in the ’70s and carefully described by its maker as…
Dance lovers with eclectic appetites can gorge on three very different dance performances in the Valley this weekend. The tops in jazz dance, ballet and the Brazilian martial arts/dance form Capoeira could all be on your plate. River North Dance Company takes its name from a tony Chicago neighborhood bordering…
Way out west where the avenues are numbered in the triple digits, there sits ASU’s Sundome Center for the Performing Arts. Through the years, this massive performance space, located in the heart of the retirement community of Sun City West, has played host to any number of bus-and-truck productions of…
It hasn’t always been easy to pare Claude Monet’s artistic achievements from his popularity. In the later half of his life (1840 to 1926), his paintings sold so well that the writer Emile Zola suggested that he might be unloading too many unfinished works that were barely dry. More recently,…
“That reminds me of the movies Marty made about New York,” stammered Lou Reed somewhere in the mid-’80s. “All those frank and brutal movies that are so brillyunt.” It was a clumsy, rhyme-impaired album track (“Doing the Things That We Want To” from New Sensations), but, as has often been…
Horned, fanged, cat-eyed and pointy-eared, the colossal green head glowered down on both lanes of I-10. Tempe Diablo Stadium, over the parking lot of which the Dante-esque visage floated, had never seemed so aptly named. “I don’t think this is the home of the Anaheim Angels today,” remarked the publicist…
Ira Glass has a story to tell you. Actually, he has lifetimes’ worth of stories to tell you. And there are a lot of people who enjoy hearing them. Beginning on Chicago’s public radio outlet in late 1995, This American Life is now heard on more than 350 stations. The…
Viewing Monet paintings on the Internet is sort of like watching Lawrence of Arabia on the TV at a Tempe sports bar. The medium is tragically inappropriate for displaying works of such subtlety and texture. On the Phoenix Art Museum’s Web site, for instance, impressionistic brush strokes and computer monitor…
What a relief finally to see a perfect production of The Baltimore Waltz. I’ve witnessed four near-miss interpretations of this difficult play by other companies, but the Actors Theatre of Phoenix production currently at the Herberger is so well-realized that I discovered elements I didn’t realize I was missing when…
In a decade that has seen the mass market of the cellular phone and the emergence of the Internet, it’s hardly surprising that more artists than ever are turning to technology for expression. This new breed of artists comprises computer geeks, electrical engineers and quantum physicists. Two of these science…
If you aren’t wowed by Black Theatre Troupe’s production of Willie and Esther, don’t blame the actors. The pair of talented performers who traverse Thom Gilseth’s vivid set give us their all, but ultimately they can’t overcome flabby writing and misguided direction. Willie and Esther is a comedy with a…
David Fincher needs a hug, the poor bastard. Or possibly a diaper change. Ever since 1992, when he ruined the Alien series with the excrescence of his pointless, senseless third installment, he’s been making the same bratty, obnoxious movie over and over again: gloom, doom, indestructible protagonist, bureaucratic evil, quasi-religious…
The everyman hero of the horror movie Bats, a small-town Texas sheriff played by Lou Diamond Phillips, is given an odd character trait. After he and some other people have barricaded themselves into a school building and are awaiting attack by a flock of mutant killer bats terrorizing his little…
