On Wednesday night, Phoenix Art Museum’s Contemporary Forum awarded eight local artists who’ve made a mark in the contemporary scene. The annual event recognizes up to seven emerging Arizona artists with $1,500 grants to purchase materials and one mid-career artist with $5,000 plus a special exhibition of his or her…
This Friday, Dulce Dance Company will debut Para Tus Ojos, a series of newly-choreographed movement pieces that seek to engage the audience in new ways. For starters, the performance will take place throughout several of the cavernous rooms in the Icehouse. “We wanted to make the audience feel that they’re…
The setup: Orange Theatre Group, not unlike the ASU Herberger College grad cohort that more or less begat it, Interrobang, and its other offshoot, festina lente, is committed to pushing the envelope of new drama, developing performance that connects with varying degrees of tenacity to the existing texts it’s often…
Grab a sweater and stock up on your snacks of choice — here are five movies worth heading to the theater to see this month. The Great Gatsby Though it’s garnered mixed early reviews, Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby will be one thing for sure: visually stunning. The…
When members of the college-aged party brigade or recent ASU grads looking to celebrate their milestone stroll into Gringo Star Street Bar this evening (and in all likelihood they will), they’ll encounter a few things that are a bit foreign to the Mill Avenue nightlife scene. Namely, arcade games, skeeball,…
And we thought the era of big boxes carrying high-end designer diffusion lines was all but over, thanks to lagging sales and a super-saturated market. Wrong-o. Target announced today that a 3.1 Phillip Lim capsule collection will be released this fall, to much shrieking and geeking from fans of the…
Ever since Allie Brosh and her webcomic Hyperbole and a Half dropped off the face of the Internet more than a year ago, we’ve been twiddling our thumbs, attempting to find similar webcomics (her friend Matthew Inman creates a pretty good, and wildly successful one called The Oatmeal), and putting…
You’ve probably seen them at flea markets — metal letters, words, and images that were once set, inked, and rolled against paper in a printing press to create the daily newspaper, novel, or informational flyer. Once an industrial process, letterpress (the act of printing with metal, wood, and now polymer-based…
There’s a scene in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s hyper-rich, super-awkward Jay Gatsby takes it upon himself to redecorate the bachelor pad of his less-prosperous friend, Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire). Gatsby’s old flame, Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), is coming to Nick’s house for tea. Eager to…
Farm films blow up human drama to mythic, big-sky terms in which the world itself is represented by a character’s land, hard-earned and easily lost. Vast landscapes, both psychic and literal, are threatened by unstoppable outside forces. Kind of like zombie movies, farm films are vast canvases for directors to…
For At Any Price Director Ramin Bahrani, Bigger Films Demand Bigger Targets
Responding to the uproar in April over the passage — and President Obama’s signage — of the so-called “Monsanto Protection Act,” the gene-bending agri-giant Monsanto issued a press release dismissing any attendant conspiracy theories as “worthy of a B-grade movie script.” They got it half right. Immediate in its politics…
The supreme testament to Hitchcock is that no matter how many years pass, his work exerts an ever-stronger influence. Just last month came Park Chan-Wook’s reimagining of Shadow of a Doubt, Stoker, and last year Anthony Hopkins did Hitchcock as a Hitchcock character in Hitchcock — and let’s not forget…
One of the most beguiling of the many stories all knotted up in Salman Rushdie’s brilliant, baggy, exhausting 1981 novel Midnight’s Children concerns a lovelorn doctor, his beautiful patient, and that timeless exemplar of old-world prudishness: a sheet with a hole in it. The patient, Naseem, not yet of marriageable…
Stray Cat Theatre’s production of Trista Baldwin’s Chicks with Dicks commences with a go-go dancing competition and a lap dance, and heads south from there. This unyielding camp comedy is so relentlessly awful, it should be offered up not as entertainment but as punishment for the worst possible crimes. Last…
In the course of reviewing movies in the early 2000s, just as computer-generated special effects were becoming radically sophisticated and also were, increasingly, becoming the chief selling point of big-ticket movies, I more and more often found myself invoking the name “Ray Harryhausen.” He died on Tuesday, May 7, at…
In his new film, the social drama At Any Price, director and co-writer Ramin Bahrani examines how the transformation of food into intellectual property through seed patents has corrupted, impoverished, or dissolved the American family farm. As with the Iranian-American director’s previous films (Man Push Cart, Chop Shop, Goodbye Solo),…
If there’s a modern Mecca for the followers of letterpress, it’s got to be the Chapel of the Blessed Eutectic in Prescott, Arizona. From downtown Phoenix, it’s less than a two-hour drive. Take I-17 to State Route 89 and you’ll find yourself in big-sky Prescott. And just a few miles from…
The title promises something rarefied and heady, but The We and the I, Michel Gondry’s shaggy, roving social study, is grounded in home truth. If you’ve been to high school, you know all about it: The dreaded “we” that tends to form vicious clusters — in the cafeteria, the smoke…
Has anyone ever been so perfectly cast as Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused? Sculpted entirely of charisma and cheekbones yet still seedier than a stash of gym-locker pot, McConaughey’s radiant stoner exemplified high school promise gone bad. he looked like the little man of top of trophies, just horny,…
Uwe Boll will no longer fight you — at least, not with his fists. Often lambasted by critics as the worst of the worst, Boll once literally got into the boxing ring with four film bloggers, but these days prefers to combat negative press with what he claims are more…
“It was 1991. I fly into L.A. I take a cab to Compton. On the phone, Richard [Williams] said, ‘The only thing I guarantee you, you won’t get shot,’ ” says tennis coach Rick Macci. “I thought he was kidding.” Macci was meeting with Williams and his two young daughters, Venus…
The only thing we English teachers hate more than Sparknotes is a high-quality, mostly faithful movie version of a book. Why would a student slog through Pride and Prejudice when she can drool over Colin Firth in the excellent BBC miniseries? And shh! Don’t tell the eighth-graders about Gregory Peck’s…
