Given the recent increase of ugly–and often violent–anti-Mexican sentiment in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement, it took a lot of huevos for Scottsdale Center for the Arts to mount “Cruzando Fronteras/Crossing Borders.” The center should be saluted for its brave farsightedness in exhibiting what has turned…
Somebody thought it was a good idea for a play. Four guys sit around and say what’s on their minds, sexual betrayal is discovered, somebody ends up getting shot. I don’t know. Maybe there’s an idea in there somewhere. But these are about the most boring four men to be…
:The Seagull, as staged by Arizona Theatre Company, treats Anton Chekhov’s play about love, art and lost youth with the utmost respect. But not with passion, or tenderness, or intelligence, or even the tongue-in-cheek humor that would have breathed some life into the classic. The play doesn’t quite make it…
John Guare’s acclaimed play Six Degrees of Separation would not, at first glance, seem like a very promising candidate for movie adaptation. It’s stagebound, not because it’s confined to one setting–it isn’t–but because of its presentational style. Much of the story is relayed directly to the audience by the actors…
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf was an exotic sight to Broadway theatregoers of 1976: Onstage were black women speaking and dancing to the words of a contemporary, black, feminist writer, Ntozake Shange, and her black, women characters weren’t matriarchs, whores, domestics, Pinkie in…
The appeal of D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’ documentary The War Room is that it’s a buddy picture. The stars–and that’s how they’re presented, as stars rather than as documentary subjects–are James Carville and George Stephanopoulos, widely regarded as the true architects of Bill Clinton’s victory in the most recent…
@body:After seeing the work in “South of the Border: Mexico in the American Imagination” at Phoenix Art Museum, if I knew nothing about Mexican art history, I would have to conclude that all American artists who traveled to Mexico between 1914 and 1947 were required to undergo frontal lobotomies before…
@body:After seeing the work in “South of the Border: Mexico in the American Imagination” at Phoenix Art Museum, if I knew nothing about Mexican art history, I would have to conclude that all American artists who traveled to Mexico between 1914 and 1947 were required to undergo frontal lobotomies before…
@body:After seeing the work in “South of the Border: Mexico in the American Imagination” at Phoenix Art Museum, if I knew nothing about Mexican art history, I would have to conclude that all American artists who traveled to Mexico between 1914 and 1947 were required to undergo frontal lobotomies before…
Abel Ferrara’s movies combine self-conscious tawdriness with unconscious tawdriness. He’s fascinated by self-destructive excess, by obsessive, addictive behavior, by characters who willfully wreck themselves with drugs and booze and sexual degradation. Like many filmmakers with an attraction to this subject matter–the early Scorsese, for instance–Ferrara insists that such behavior has…
Daniel Day-Lewis is one of those rare actors who might be called consummate, yet he is not visibly self-congratulatory while working. He’s created a gallery of characters–the crippled, cosmically outraged Christy Brown in My Left Foot, the tuxedoed waxwork Cyril in A Room With a View, the fairy-tale hero Hawkeye…
Abel Ferrara’s movies combine self-conscious tawdriness with unconscious tawdriness. He’s fascinated by self-destructive excess, by obsessive, addictive behavior, by characters who willfully wreck themselves with drugs and booze and sexual degradation. Like many filmmakers with an attraction to this subject matter–the early Scorsese, for instance–Ferrara insists that such behavior has…
Abel Ferrara’s movies combine self-conscious tawdriness with unconscious tawdriness. He’s fascinated by self-destructive excess, by obsessive, addictive behavior, by characters who willfully wreck themselves with drugs and booze and sexual degradation. Like many filmmakers with an attraction to this subject matter–the early Scorsese, for instance–Ferrara insists that such behavior has…
Daniel Day-Lewis is one of those rare actors who might be called consummate, yet he is not visibly self-congratulatory while working. He’s created a gallery of characters–the crippled, cosmically outraged Christy Brown in My Left Foot, the tuxedoed waxwork Cyril in A Room With a View, the fairy-tale hero Hawkeye…
Daniel Day-Lewis is one of those rare actors who might be called consummate, yet he is not visibly self-congratulatory while working. He’s created a gallery of characters–the crippled, cosmically outraged Christy Brown in My Left Foot, the tuxedoed waxwork Cyril in A Room With a View, the fairy-tale hero Hawkeye…
Blink is a thriller of that minigenre of disabled-women-in-peril, to which belong Wait Until Dark and last year’s lame Hear No Evil and Richard Fleischer’s hair-raising See No Evil. This time the differently abled damsel in distress is Madeleine Stowe as a Chicago woman, blind since childhood, who receives a…
Blink is a thriller of that minigenre of disabled-women-in-peril, to which belong Wait Until Dark and last year’s lame Hear No Evil and Richard Fleischer’s hair-raising See No Evil. This time the differently abled damsel in distress is Madeleine Stowe as a Chicago woman, blind since childhood, who receives a…
Blink is a thriller of that minigenre of disabled-women-in-peril, to which belong Wait Until Dark and last year’s lame Hear No Evil and Richard Fleischer’s hair-raising See No Evil. This time the differently abled damsel in distress is Madeleine Stowe as a Chicago woman, blind since childhood, who receives a…
Recently, the Tucson Police Department’s child-abuse detail confiscated artwork by local artist-photographer Robyn Stoutenburg from the city’s downtown Gallery Six & 13–without a validly executed search warrant. Twelve of the artist’s photographs were seized after the principal of an adjacent middle school complained of the propriety and accessibility of the…
I’ll be honest. “Too Late for Goya,” the multimedia exhibition of Spain-born artist Francesc Torres currently showing at ASU Art Museum, is not for the politically or philosophically impaired. If the only thing you know about Hegel is that it rhymes with “bagel,” if the only Marx you’re familiar with…
If artist Frances Whitehead had lived in 16th-century Europe, she probably would have been burned at the stake for being a witch. Whitehead’s sculptural installations, which can be seen at Scottsdale’s Lisa Sette Gallery in an exhibition titled “The Dream,” use unorthodox botanical materials classically associated with ancient divination and…
You can’t miss the funky, Thirties motor court next to Shep’s Liquor on Main Street in downtown Cottonwood. Hallucinogenic folk art on its front porch makes your head swirl and throb, like a recurrent acid flashback. Someone has turned the first four units into an artist’s studio, but often, there’s…
