10/7-10/31Teresa Widmer loves trash. The local mixed-media artist has collected garbage off the streets for the past 12 years, documenting her finds and recycling them into artistic assemblages that comment on America’s disposable culture. Among her finds: the People magazine cover featuring Liz Taylor’s 1989 wedding to “that construction worker,”…
10/7-10/16Armchair daredevils, wrest yourselves from your Barcaloungers and make tracks to Phoenix International Raceway this weekend for the Richard Petty Driving Experience, which offers average joes the opportunity of a lifetime: to hitch a ride in an honest-to-god stock car. The brain child of the 68-year-old former NASCAR king, Petty’s…
10/6-10/31The three bone-chilling extraterrestrial attractions at Alien Extreme, 4011 South Power Road in Mesa, are like an episode of The X-Files come to life. Wanna-be Mulders and Scullys can poke around inside a government research outpost, a mysterious UFO, and a crash site, looking for ginormous creatures of extraterrestrial origin…
SAT 10/8If you’re a fan of mainstream, steak-and-potatoes Broadway shows — your Phantom, your Rent — then more power to you, frankly. But the latest offering in ASU’s “Beyond Broadway” series brings us something, well, beyond — in a gentle, lovely way. What else would you expect from a troupe…
The road to stardom may be paved with some kind of intentions, but Lisa Murray’s was slick with hand lotion. The Scottsdale publisher’s assistant is now Hollywood-bound, thanks in good part to her recent win on Entertainment Tonight’s “Caress Confidante” contest. (Although her new title suggests a career spent listening…
Sue Chenoweth, 52, starts at one small place, and ends up with painfully intricate paintings that chase through the psyche and surprise even her. The lifelong Phoenician paints in a big, bright studio at Metropolitan Arts Institute (a.k.a. Metro Arts), a charter high school downtown, where she teaches art. Earlier…
Last year’s Katamari Damacy was so quirky, it should have been subtitled “Marketed to Stoners.” Its star, a little green prince, was forced to roll a giant gravity ball to atone for the sins of his father, the King of the Cosmos, who had gotten drunk one day and knocked…
Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection(Universal Studios) Alfred Hitchcock may be the best pop filmmaker in our history, and this gorgeous 14-film set is certainly worthy of the master. Licensing issues kept it from being as “definitive” as the box claims — missing, most notably, are Hitchcock’s classic Cary Grant collaborations…
THU 6Someone in the world has to be selling that avocado-colored ashtray from the ’70s you never knew you always wanted. Or that cheap bust of Sigmund Freud. Or maybe that cute painted-teak coffee table. You just never know what’ll catch your fancy at a yard sale, which is why…
Michael Eastman’s “America” at Bentley Projects: The ambient desolation of Michael Eastman’s photographs of empty streetscapes and seedy interiors seems prophetic in the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s leveling of New Orleans. At least two of the photos in this exhibition were made in the city, pre-storm. His portrait of a…
The Amityville Horror: Special Edition (Columbia/Tristar) Beyond the Gates of Splendor (Fox) The Black Keys Live (Fat Possum) Christmas With SCTV (Sony Music) Count Duckula: The Complete First Season (Koch Vision) Cream: Royal Albert Hall (Warner Strategic Marketing) Drawn Together Uncensored: Season One (Paramount) The Fly and The Fly II:…
Michael Eastman’s “America” at Bentley Projects: The ambient desolation of Michael Eastman’s photographs of empty streetscapes and seedy interiors seems prophetic in the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s leveling of New Orleans. At least two of the photos in this exhibition were made in the city, pre-storm. His portrait of a…
You can’t chuck a Grand Canyon snow globe in the Southwest without hitting a Luis Jimenez sculpture. His biliously colored, Pop Art-goes-Chicano depictions of cowboys, horses, Indians and other iconic figures of the West are a fixture of university concourses and art museum sculpture gardens from Phoenix to Houston. Jimenez…
At first glance, Stella Lai’s paintings look like benign decorations, all delicate flowers, bright colors and pretty Chinese calligraphy. Look closer, and you’ll see her Asian-influenced pieces are actually about how rotten it is being a woman or an animal in her native Hong Kong, where the culture is apparently…
Robots (Fox) The story of a small-town ‘bot (voiced by Ewan McGregor) who bolts for the big city, Robots is the first non-Pixar film to compete with that studio’s razzle and dazzle; the thing’s stunning to look at. (And, frankly, it’s better to stare at than listen to, since listening…
Jim Pederson is a consummate politician: He’s rich, well-connected, and not above pointing fingers at the opposition. He’s also quite dull — or, to be fair, at least unwilling to bite when he’s baited with stupid questions from newspaper reporters. All these skills will come in handy should the former…
Any thing can be anything to anybody, particularly in the case of David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence. If you want to believe that his new film, a loose adaptation of a little-known graphic novel, is a work of damning criticism aimed at the hypocrisy of Americans who believe violence…
Thomas Seyr, the central figure in director Jacques Audiard’s kinetically charged new film The Beat That My Heart Skipped, is a young Frenchman torn between a life of crime and a career as a concert pianist. It’s hardly your usual dilemma — and hardly the usual French film, come to…
Oliver Twist It’s almost impossible to watch Roman Polanski’s rendition of Oliver Twist without drawing parallels between the deprivations endured by the book’s young protagonist and the director’s own brutal boyhood. A Jew raised in Nazi-occupied Poland, Polanski first tackled the Holocaust head-on in his 2002 film The Pianist, but…
Anyone vaguely familiar with the rules of golf knows that you may not improve your lie, ground your club in a sand trap, or — most grievous of all — subtract strokes from your score. This last one apparently never occurred to the makers of a new movie with the…
In 2001, Jonathan Safran Foer made an astounding literary debut. “A Very Rigid Search,” published by The New Yorker, was his hilarious, heartbreaking account of an attempt by a young American man (named, cheekily, Jonathan Safran Foer) to find a Ukrainian woman who had saved his grandfather from the Nazis…
Into the Blue offers precisely what one would expect from the director of Blue Crush and the writer of Torque: beautiful stupidity. Its every frame dripping from a noxious recipe of suntan oil, summertime sweat and salt water, this heist movie (or whatever it is, which isn’t much) delivers a…
