In “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” what was the Emperor’s actual state? Hint: It’s the title of Mike Leigh’s new film. Naked, a black comedy, is built around a flawless performance by a superb young actor named David Thewlis. Thewlis and several of the other actors are so good, and some…
A friend of mine was a classmate of comedian-actor Denis Leary at Emerson College in Boston in the mid-’70s. He showed me a copy of the college literary magazine, to which both he and Leary had contributed some poetry. I confess I was hoping for an expos, hoping to find…
Sexuality is the theme of two exhibitions, one deadly serious in its approach to the subject, the other, for the most part, lethally boring. “Brian Weil: The AIDS Photographs,” on display at ASU’s Matthews Center, is a nationally touring collection of AIDS-related photographs taken around the world by this internationally…
Sexuality is the theme of two exhibitions, one deadly serious in its approach to the subject, the other, for the most part, lethally boring. “Brian Weil: The AIDS Photographs,” on display at ASU’s Matthews Center, is a nationally touring collection of AIDS-related photographs taken around the world by this internationally…
The difficulty in reviewing Scott McPherson’s Marvin’s Room is knowing how much consideration to give to the playwright’s personal life. The cast of the production at Phoenix Little Theatre wore red ribbons at the curtain call, pointing out to audience members–if they hadn’t already read it in the program–that Marvin’s…
The difficulty in reviewing Scott McPherson’s Marvin’s Room is knowing how much consideration to give to the playwright’s personal life. The cast of the production at Phoenix Little Theatre wore red ribbons at the curtain call, pointing out to audience members–if they hadn’t already read it in the program–that Marvin’s…
The title is 8 Seconds, which refers to the length of time a rodeo bull rider must remain on the bull’s back in order to qualify in the competition. It’s also approximately the length of time that this little movie is likely to linger in your memory after you’ve seen…
The title is 8 Seconds, which refers to the length of time a rodeo bull rider must remain on the bull’s back in order to qualify in the competition. It’s also approximately the length of time that this little movie is likely to linger in your memory after you’ve seen…
In the grand tradition of noir, la Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, Romeo Is Bleeding is narrated by a hero who is a hopeless sap–his buddies refer to him at one point as “you dumbest of all fucks.” This particular DOAF is Jack Grimaldi (Gary Oldman), a…
In the grand tradition of noir, la Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, Romeo Is Bleeding is narrated by a hero who is a hopeless sap–his buddies refer to him at one point as “you dumbest of all fucks.” This particular DOAF is Jack Grimaldi (Gary Oldman), a…
Sierra Vista sculptor Robert Wick has a heart bigger than his art. And that’s pretty big, considering that some of his bronze sculptures are more than 13 feet high and weigh so much they have to be lifted by cranes and transported by flatbed. Wick was the featured artist and…
Legend has it that movie mogul Louis B. Mayer once stated: “If you’ve got a message, send a telegram.” With Past History, a new play written by Arizona State University’s Michael Grady and presented at the school’s Galvin Playhouse, Western Union would be snowed under. Past History attempts to draw…
No one served George Bernard Shaw’s satirical purposes better than the religious hypocrite. In The Devil’s Disciple, you can almost hear Shaw smacking his lips in anticipation as he sets forth his plot of the rogue and his pious family. The rogue, of course, ends up with the family fortune,…
Ben Stiller, who directed Reality Bites, also co-stars in it. He plays Michael, one point on a romantic triangle of Generation Xers (isn’t it amazing how quickly that term grew tiresome?). Michael is a well-to-do yupster, a producer for a vapid music-video network. Point number two is Troy (Ethan Hawke),…
If you look closely at beautiful Dana Wynter in the climactic chase scenes near the end of director Don Siegel’s 1956 sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, you can tell what she’s thinking: Oh, forget it, let’s just go to sleep and turn into aliens. She’s begun, you can…
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…
