Arts & Entertainment

Movie Review: The Lighthouse
Arts & Entertainment

Movie Review: The Lighthouse

  By KYLE KERSEY Horror: “an intense feeling of fear, shock, or disgust.” Throughout “The Lighthouse,” you’ll feel all three. Set on a New England island, separated from the outside world by the roar of the Atlantic Ocean and a thick fog, the sophomore film from Robert Eggers (whose first film, “The Witch,” might be my favorite horror film of the decade) stars Robert Pattinson as Ephraim Winslow and Willem Dafoe as Thomas Wake, a pair of 19th century wickies contracted to maintain a remote lighthouse for four weeks. Clear roles are set: Wake acts as Winslow’s elderly and eccentric supervisor; making him do the more physically exhaustive work and generally chastising him in sailor-speak (i.e. he’s like every restaurant manager). He views himself as the keeper of the lighthouse; the o...
The game is afoot at Pima
Arts & Entertainment

The game is afoot at Pima

by ANGEL CANEZ Pima Community College Center for the Arts is putting on a production of “Baskerville,” which is based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1902 classic Sherlock Holmes novel “The Hounds of the Baskervilles,” along with touches of comedy in their audience-interactive murder-mystery tale.  “Sherlock is a timeless story,” director Chris Will said. “So it’s always fun to tell a Sherlock Holmes story, and it was going to challenge the students because they have to play multiple characters. “It’s a real challenge for them to switch really quick back and forth from one character to another,” Will added. “Sometimes the actors are having the same conversion with themselves as a different character. It’s a really challenging and fun experience.” The role of Dr. Watson will take a slightly...
Movie Review: “Zombieland: Double Tap”
Arts & Entertainment

Movie Review: “Zombieland: Double Tap”

By: KYLE KERSEY What do you do when the artsy black-and-white horror film you wanted to go see doesn’t come out in Tucson until a week later than you thought and you have a movie review due in a few days? Well I don’t know what you’d do, but I went and saw “Zombieland: Double Tap” because it seemed like the best of a bad bunch of movies in theaters this weekend. Truth be told, I’m quite fond of the original Zombieland. It’s a well-paced road trip comedy with zombies as the central plot device and reference point for many of its jokes. It’s tight, well written and features a charming cast of characters, as well as plenty of gory zombie dismemberment that my adolescent brain craved back in 2009; a mix of over-the-top violence and late 2000s American comedies a la “Pineapple Express” or “Trop...
Movie Review: Joker
Arts & Entertainment, Opinion

Movie Review: Joker

By KYLE KERSEY “Joker” comes into its own within its final thirty minutes, when Joaquin Phoenix combs in the green hair dye, paints his face white and transforms into the titular villain. The rest is Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” in comic book drag, directed by the dude who made The Hangover Trilogy and…“Due Date”? The story goes like this: Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is a mentally ill man living in 1980s New York Cit…I mean Gotham, working as a clown by day and taking care of his sickly mother by night. Arthur dreams of making it big as a stand-up comedian and appearing on The Murray Franklin Show (Robert De Niro), a Johnny Carson-esque late night talk show. Perhaps the best scene of the movie revolves around this; when Arthur watches a stand-comic perform at a small club, laughing ...
A theater experience for all audiences
Arts & Entertainment

A theater experience for all audiences

Story by LEIGH MOYER  photos by JOSHUA SHAVER Pima Community College Theatre Arts’ program coordinator Todd Poelstra and theater faculty Chris Will see every moment with a theater full of people as a teachable moment.  Each season is structured to contain a children’s show in the fall, a musical in the spring, and either a contemporary piece or a classical piece rounding out each semester for a total of four productions per year.  While chatting, though, they quickly moved past these nominal constraints to the boundlessness of what theater offers. “We could do Disney or something very popular, but we don’t,” Will said, explaining why they are producing “The Sun Serpent,” the third installment of a bilingual (or in this case, trilingual) series by José Cruz González. “We’re d...
Movie Review: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Arts & Entertainment

Movie Review: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

BY: KYLE KERSEY In his review of “Inglorious Basterds”, Roger Ebert said “Tarantino films have a way of growing on you. It’s not enough to see them once.” I have now seen “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” five times in theaters, consuming more than 13 hours of my life (not counting previews and the like). And I might go see it again. Perhaps that speaks to my opinion on Tarantino’s 9th film more than anything else. The story takes place in 1969, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Rick Dalton, the former star of the fictional NBC Western “Bounty Law” (a combination of real-life western shows like “Gunsmoke” and “Have Gun-Will Travel”) who finds himself on the fringes of an ever-changing Hollywood scene. His career trajectory is not too unlike those of James Arness or Richard Boone; TV cowboys s...
A tale of two debuts: Kanye’s faith and Weezer’s anomaly
Arts & Entertainment, Opinion

A tale of two debuts: Kanye’s faith and Weezer’s anomaly

By KYLE KERSEY Anderson .Paak – Ventura (Soul / R&B) Give me soul Anderson .Paak over rap Anderson .Paak every day of the week. Twice on Sunday. He’s bringing the Marvin Gaye on “Make it Better.” “What’s Going On?” era Marvin Gaye. The best Marvin Gaye. And he’s pulling off some “Brown Sugar” D’Angelo funk on “Winner’s Circle.” He even managed to lure Andre 3000 (of Outkast fame) away from his self-imposed exile to drop some bars on the relentlessly groovy opener “Come Home.” After “Oxnard,” where .Paak and producer Dr. Dre (notorious for his heavy-handed methods) diverged toward hip-hop, I was worried that his days of soulful R&B were over. His effervescent personality (and pearly white smile) were less present than before. It wasn’t as fun. This shit is jammin’. There’s not a ...
Culture Club: free passes for Pima students
Arts & Entertainment, Features

Culture Club: free passes for Pima students

By JOSH GRAY Pima Community College has partnered with Act One to provide free cultural passes to Pima students.  Culture Passes are free admission tickets that you and a guest can get by going to your local Pima Library. Act One is an organization that helps provide art and cultural experience throughout Arizona schools. Act One is a non-profit organization that is privately funded. “A lot of it comes from donors and foundations, individual donors and foundations, corporations, that's the bulk of it,” said Geri Wright, CEO and president of Act One. Act One offers two main programs.  Its first program is the Act One field trip, which helps Title 1 schools that can’t afford to take their students on field trips. Since the organization’s founding in 2011, Act One has provided “nearly ...
The return of Media Fusion
Arts & Entertainment

The return of Media Fusion

By AMARIS ENCINAS The Digital Arts department at Pima Community College will be hosting its annual Media Fusion on May 3.  Media Fusion specifically showcases three aspects: film, game design and animation. It started in 2017 and takes place at the end of each Spring semester.  “It grew out of an annual showing of student films that has been going on for many years,” said Greg Loumeau, head of Pima’s digital arts program. “Dennis Landry, the former digital art department head who passed away last May, came up with the idea to expand the film event to include student animations and games.”  Landry named the event, and he created the design for the posters that are used every year to promote the event.  “This year’s event will be the biggest yet,” Loumeau said. “We’re going to have a li...
Arts & Entertainment

Dance Fusion

By COSTA B. PAPPAS Pima Community College’s dance program kicks off their spring dance fusion show on April 26 and 27. With Nolan Kubota as their director, the performance combines contemporary styles with ballet, modern jazz, and other styles. The event will be open to anyone who wishes to come for a cost of $10.   Walking into the dance studio, all the dancers were hard at work. There were dancers in the corner stretching, others on the floor standing a top bottles while a group practiced acrobatic tricks. I was shocked to even find one girl sitting on a bed of nails in a mermaid costume for one of the dances.   All the music for each dance varied. In one room a hip-hop song was playing while a jazz song played in another.   Interviewing Yazmin Campa, 20, she explai...