A warm embrace of paradox is at the heart of Día de los Muertos, the Mexican Day of the Dead that has its origins in indigenous celebrations of life in death — and death in life.”If I had to boil it down to one phrase,” says Mesa artist Zarco Guerrero…
There’s an unfortunate timeliness to Orson Welles’ adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, with its deadly attacks on America and its evacuation of New York City. It doesn’t take much effort to find parallels between the catastrophes of September 11 and the infamous 1938 radio broadcast, with its…
On November 4, some 1,800 television personalities–actors, writers, producers, show-runners, network executives–will, finally, parade into a Los Angeles theater to award their peers and themselves for a job well done. They will, at long last, hand out the golden statues known as Emmy, just as it has been done every…
No one has more to say about life than someone who hasn’t lived it yet. While pop culture’s juvenile slaves would shout down this concept to their last breaths — jeans slung at half-mast, navel rings linked in passionate solidarity — there’s only so much material to be strip-mined from…
The beautiful little conceit at the heart of Brad Anderson’s Happy Accidents is that audiences will sit still once more for the crackpot notion of time travel — and in a movie that’s not science fiction. To his credit, and with an implied bow to Back to the Future and…
If you’re looking to see Snoop Dogg kick some boo-tay as an undead drug dealer with lycanthropic tendencies in Ernest Dickerson’s new horror movie Bones, you’ll have to wait at least an hour before the dead guy’s body gets up and about again. And when it finally does happen, the…
All at once on October 21, Phoenix found itself home to thousands of fair-weather fans, in addition to its usual crop of diehard D-backers. But with the first two games of the World Series sold out at Bank One Ballpark, we have to find ways to channel our fandom. So…
The only thing that was off limits was the outside world.He preferred not to discuss anything that “was going on,” the handlers said. He hoped to avoid questions about current events. The thing to keep out of the conversation, they made clear in their own oblique way, was the attack…
Nearly 35 years ago, Ernesto “Che” Guevara — radical Marxist revolutionary, trained medical doctor and severe asthmatic — was captured and killed in Bolivia by Bolivian military forces. Guevara had gone there to spread the political revolution he had successfully fomented in Cuba during the 1950s side by side with…
Just before the curtain goes up on each of Black Theatre Troupe’s productions, executive director David J. Hemphill makes a gracious speech in which he thanks the company’s subscribers and supporters. Hemphill always ends his speech by saying, “If you enjoy the show tonight, tell all your friends. If you…
Two weeks ago, it would have been possible to use the name of the man interviewed below; indeed, it would have been expected, as he is no mere “spokesman,” the only identifier by which he is to be referred. Two weeks ago, it would have been possible to point out…
Ask David Lynch, and he will tell you apple-pie America just isn’t what it seems. People behave strangely, sometimes violently, and sometimes they even transform into different people without being polite enough to warn you first. Eerie and freaky, shot through with sporadic bursts of humor and sex, Mulholland Drive…
Here you’ll find madness, mayhem and murder, in no short supply. The Hughes brothers, Albert and Allen, have always had a knack for horror, as evidenced by their edgy gangster flicks, Menace II Society and Dead Presidents, which they’ve stated were influenced by the styles of Brian De Palma and…
Some guys have the kind of face that suggests they’ve been to hell and back. The narrow, steely eyes, graying hair and deep lines crisscrossing the countenance of a James Coburn or Clint Eastwood can practically do all of their acting for them in any role that calls for a…
Before this week, if Arizona knew more about Rioja than did, say, South Dakota, that owed less to residents’ discernment than to their Spanish-language exposure: at least we know how to pronounce it. Like fajitas and frijoles, Rioja, a Spanish wine region, is pronounced with a soft j. If next…
Three weeks ago, on a hot September night — the air rising from the asphalt made its own hot draft — a very small crowd collected outside the old PlayWrights Workshop Theatre on First Street. The door was locked and people were waiting to get in. They shifted on their…
On October 3, there appeared in The New York Times an article about how movie studios are struggling to find new villains in a post-September 11 environment. Writer Rick Lyman rounded up the usual suspects: a few film producers, a couple of screenwriters and the requisite amount of film scholars,…
An amazing thing happens a few minutes into 2 Pianos, 4 Hands: After the show’s co-stars, both of whom are seated at glossy grand pianos, have performed a complicated duet, one of them begins banging on the keyboard in a perfect imitation of a tiny child — a character he…
If you were to hear that Our Lady of the Assassins is one of the most genuinely shocking films you’ll ever see, what would that suggest to you? Some new level of extreme violence and explicit sex, no doubt. But that’s not what’s at play in this eerily cool melodrama…
Plot aside — way aside, as it’s almost a non-issue in a film that telegraphs its final scenes during its opening moments — Bandits is really about only one thing: Billy Bob Thornton and Bruce Willis’ bald heads. As Joe Blake (Willis) and Terry Collins (Thornton), two bank-robbing fugitives in…
Ed Ellis and Bob Kubota, who do card tricks, do them in the same way that Vincent van Gogh, who did paintings, did sunflowers: masterfully. They pull cards out of the air and link rubber bands with the same elegance and verve that van Gogh brought to his brush; with…
