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…
Just when we culturally deprived, mystery-starved Americans were convinced that that most delicious of movie genres, the French thriller, was dead and buried, a literate and exciting new filmmaker named Dominik Moll has emerged to revive it — and set our nerves exquisitely on edge. It’s a minor miracle that…
The directorial debut of actress turned screenwriter Agnès Jaoui (Same Old Song, Un Air de Famille), The Taste of Others is a work of delicate observation, falling somewhere between romantic drama and comedy of manners.Mr. Castella (Jean-Pierre Bacri, the director’s husband and co-writer) is a wealthy businessman whose life leaves…
As a kid, I could never remember which one was Judy Collins. I shared a room with an older brother who favored female folk singers, all of whom, it seemed, had first names beginning with the letter J: Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Jennifer Warnes, Judee Sill, Judy Collins.”She gets that…
If you think today’s kids are dumber than yesterday’s, try getting anything past some precocious little dinosaur geek. Try to tell him or her that a Mamenchisaurus is a plain old Brontosaurus, or an Albertosaurus is a good old-fashioned Tyrannosaurus rex, and you’ll see rolled eyes and weary head-shaking.The reason…
Visualize a pretty young woman and a handsome young man heading for the bedroom. She has just suggested that she wants to show him what she really wants, so, naturally, he begins unzipping his trousers en route to the bed. Oblivious to his loud boxers, she sits and begins swooning…
All righty, then, let’s see if we’ve got this straight.There’s this guy named Antipholus (of Ephesus) who has a twin brother named Antipholus (of Syracuse). The Syracuse-based Antipholus doesn’t know about the Ephesus-based Antipholus, and vice versa. Now Antipholus (of Ephesus) has a manservant by the name of Dromio who…
Initiated in 1989 within basements and backyards as private grudge matches, University Fight Night has evolved in the past six years into Arizona’s most attended amateur boxing event. “Revenge,” the forthcoming rumble at Celebrity Theatre, is yet another rivalry between students of University of Arizona and Arizona State University. UFN…
There is no good place to begin with Harry Shearer, because he doesn’t sit still long enough to allow one the chance to focus. He is a blur, forever in motion–on his way to the radio station, on his way from the movie studio, on his way to the publisher’s…
Somewhere, in deepest New South Wales, Australia, there exists a humble sheep paddock. (In this particular case, the paddock is nearly devoid of sheep — barring the odd sound effect — but never mind that.) The setting is rural, it’s pastoral, it’s quaint as all heck — and it also…
Joe Simon doesn’t read comic books anymore, and not because he’s an 87-year-old man with far better ways to spend his time. The former and, perhaps, future comics writer and illustrator simply doesn’t get them anymore; he doesn’t know who they’re for, what they’re about, why most of them even…
