The somber figure of Ingmar Bergman no longer looms over the film world like a guilty conscience, but the great Swedish director has spawned enough artistic descendants to keep us supplied with thorny philosophical and ethical questions for decades to come. Faithless, the second film that actress Liv Ullmann has…
Among the venerable Valley traditions of the Memorial Day weekend is getting out of town, usually to the cooler climes up north. Phoenix Symphony has contrived to do this — the outfit has a weekendlong stand, playing three concerts at Sedona Cultural Park. This also provides the rest of us…
On the day after Memorial Day, Phoenix Public Library hosts a discussion of a forgotten chapter from the Great War saga. Journalist and filmmaker Frank Abe will be present at a screening of his documentary Conscience and the Constitution on Tuesday, May 29, at Burton Barr Central Library. Abe’s subject…
My faithful theater companion and I normally agree about the quality of the shows we see every weekend. When we don’t, it’s he who is more generous and forgiving about a program’s shortcomings. Last weekend, during the long ride home from faraway Theater Works, we bandied words about the company’s…
The new musical revue at Phoenix Theatre epitomizes everything I loathe about the genre: It’s formulaic and predictable, full of half-written songs whose tunes I’d forgotten by the time I hit the parking lot. Why, then, did I so enjoy I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change?Almost certainly because this…
There are not many stories left buried in James Ellroy’s past. In 1996, at the age of 48, he penned his memoirs, in which he paired his life story with that of his dead mother, Jean Ellroy, a nurse found strangled and beaten in the bushes of suburban Los Angeles…
Kids might well be amused by the frenetic pacing of Shrek, the latest computer-animated film from DreamWorks, which moves so quickly it’s nearly a blur, though they need not get the jokes to enjoy frolicking in the muck (and the maggots) with a green, snaggle-toothed ogre who wants only to…
Presently sitting in a very peaceful meditation facility. First time here. The location (which shall remain unnamed so as to maintain nondenominational vibe) was selected specifically for the loving creation of this review, as it provides an almost perfect contrast to The Center of the World, the new motion picture…
Chances are you don’t know a whole lot about Angel Eyes other than the fact that it’s the brand-new Jennifer Lopez movie. Maybe you also know that it co-stars Jim Caviezel (periodically known as James; he doesn’t seem to have fully decided yet). It’s been described in some articles as…
It took youthful optimism and determination for Carrie Miller to start a company when she was fresh out of college. When the teenage Miller, a third-generation Arizonan, set out to become a dancer, she said, “I dreamt of presenting my own company on the Scottsdale Center for the Arts stage.”…
Say the words “performance art” and you’re bound to receive an array of amusing and predictable reactions. Even a Web site devoted to performance art — www.performanceart.net — shrinks from defining it. Perhaps this is the point. It is not so much that performance art defies definition as that the…
With the canon of Jane Austen all but exhausted, literary filmmakers continue their assault on Edith Wharton, another sharply observant writer of yore with something timeless to say about the plight of women. Terence Davies’ The House of Mirth, from Wharton’s beautifully detailed, ironically titled 1905 novel about a mannerly…
As far back as the ’60s, Terry Riley began changing the rules of contemporary classical composition. His early classic piece In C was among the first examples of what has (somewhat incongruously) come to be called the Minimalist movement. Composers who have followed in his wake and show a pronounced…
She leaves her name on my voice mail, but she doesn’t have to. Even by phone from her home in Florida, you’d never mistake Victoria Jackson’s mischievous-little-girl tones for those of any other human being — not, at least, if you watched Saturday Night Live between the mid-’80s and the…
Heath Ledger, wearing the scowl of the anxious and uneasy, is having trouble standing still. He most certainly would rather be anywhere but here: killing time in a TV studio, waiting to be interviewed during a live afternoon newscast. Waiting to promote his new movie. Waiting to assume the guise…
Too much digital or ‘Net.art’ suffers from an anemia that comes from a steady diet of neo-Conceptualism and raw, uncut theory,” sputters Mark Dery, author of Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century, during an e-mail-generated discussion with several prominent museum curators in March’s Artforum magazine. “Let’s face…
The Herberger’s center stage this week is splattered with paint and piled high with blank canvases. This carefully arranged mess (which bursts frequently into colorful life, thanks to Rick Paulsen’s extravagant lighting) is where Steven Dietz’s Inventing Van Gogh — the author’s fourth play to be commissioned by Arizona Theatre…
Let us first in olden verse this critic’s cynical curse disperse: The greet unwashede consummethe crappe, Fro Jerrye Springgere to ganggsta rappe; Bothe yonge and olde, ’tis sore pitee, Doth foule thir hertes with drede teevee, Thus slye produceres, with bisynesse cunning, Devysde a shew to pyne come running Consummeres…
At first glance, 1999’s The Mummy, starring Brendan Fraser as a lantern-jawed Indiana Jones-in-waiting facing off against an undead Telly Savalas look-alike, played like knowing spoof, a lighthearted, if half-assed, remake of the 1932 film starring Boris Karloff. At first listen, it was one big joke, a horror-movie parody masquerading…
Last thing first. At this very moment, Chris Carter sits behind his desk in the Ten Thirteen Production offices, on the 20th Century Fox lot in Studio City, California, finishing the final X-Files episode of this season. The show’s creator has just one scene left to write–the very last–and that…
Michelle Gardner arrives bearing Danish. She shows up for what she calls her “farewell interview” clutching a four-foot-long cheese-and-blueberry concoction from Karsh’s, the kosher bakery her parents have owned for decades. She’s come to talk about Blown Sideways Through Life, the new one-woman show she’s starring in, as well as…
Bleacher Bums is a baseball comedy which, from its earliest moments, had me root root rooting for the curtain to fall. The kind folks at Ensemble Theater have set up a kiosk in the lobby so that one can, as the song goes, buy you some peanuts and Cracker Jack…
