There are plenty of movies filled with holiday cheer, but there’s only one that features Chevy Chase taking the reindeer by the horns to provide the best yuletide ever. San Tan Brewing Company gets jingly while kicking off their Merry Movie December with a screening of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation…
There’s plenty of football going on, but one kickoff we’re looking forward to is the start of Glendale Glitters. The annual event will illuminate 16 historic city blocks in the heart of the west valley with more than one million lights — a good reason to extract our poultry-stuffed bodies…
A little piece of advice can go a long way. After an unsuccessful post-college year looking for acting gigs, an acting teacher suggested that Jon Lovitz focus solely on comedy. Ever since, the man best known for his stint on Saturday Night Live has been in the funny business. In…
A second look can make all the difference. The Arizona Women’s Theatre Company has cultivated crops of female playwrights with its annual Pandora Festival for the past nine springs. The second annual Pandora Showcase takes a selection of those short plays to the next level. Polished versions of previously seen…
You know what never let us down as a kid? Science! Whether it was Bill Nye rocking an experiment on TV, or taking it upon ourselves to shove some Mentos into Diet Coke bottles, science kept us entertained. Sometimes we even learned stuff. The Arizona Science Center’s Adults’ Night Out…
Every time a politician calls himself maverick, the ghost of Barry Goldwater likely scoffs. No one could buck the party line like the one-time presidential candidate and Arizona native. Though he passed away in 1998 at the age of 89, Goldwater’s legacy as a five-term state senator still looms large…
Today’s teens have it easy. Anything they want to know about the hazards of growing up is available literally at their fingertips. Before Internet connectivity, kids had to learn about touchy subjects from wonderfully awkward (and unintentionally hilarious) film strips. During RetroSpectacular: Scared Straight, local historian and pop culture lover…
Travelers frustrated by strict TSA guidelines and expensive luggage fees might admire Winnie Ruth Judd’s deranged moxie. In 1931, she managed to travel from Phoenix to Los Angeles toting steamer trunks stuffed with a couple of ex-friends’ dismembered dead bodies. Filmmaker Scott Coblio’s Murderess: The Winnie Ruth Judd Story tells…
According to Tumblr blog Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse, it’s smart to close your mouth when bludgeoning the undead. It’s not just prissy etiquette, mind you, but a smart way to keep tainted blood from flying into your gob. Thankfully, you won’t have to worry about such things if you happen…
Jack Bauer, the ass-kicking scourge of fictional bad guys everywhere, had a penchant for packing a ton of action in a single 24-hour period. And while participants in this weekend’s 24 Hour Comics Day won’t have to stop any worldwide terrorist plots, they too will have exactly a single day…
Before Tupac and Biggie’s East Coast-West Coast throwdowns spilled onto the streets of New York, another turf war in Gotham, four decades prior, was far more captivating than the mid-90s rap scuffles. It made for better music, to boot. We’re speaking of West Side Story and its classic Broadway showdown…
If there’s indeed a fiery afterlife awaiting us once we shuffle off this mortal coil, our one hope is that it’s as entertaining as the Hellzapoppin Sideshow. After all, if we’re gonna spend eternity in the company of flame-wielding freaks, they might as well be amusing. And, believe us, the…
Laidback comedian Eddie Griffin seems like the kind of affable, easygoing dude that you might invite over to watch the game and share a six-pack. Just make sure that the kids and wife aren’t around. The gravelly-voiced comic can kick it mellow, but tends to get hilariously raunchy at times,…
Standard summertime shindigs in the Valley usually call for plenty of booze, danceable tunes, and hot hipsters slinking about. The cats at Conspire, however, up the ante with their First Friday fiesta: They’re adding gallons of ice cream into the mix. The artsy vegan eatery and hangout will sling scoops…
Video may have killed the radio star, but MP3 playlists still can’t seem to get past the classic hip-hop mix tape. One of the stalwart soldiers in keeping real mixing and scratching alive is the Valley’s own DJ Element. The dope deckmaster and resident of weekly hip-hop night The Blunt…
Rap superstar Ice Cube once held down one of the angriest mugs in all of hip-hop. While it was fairly rare to see the west coast legend without his impenetrable scowl, comedian Mike Epps broke the rapper’s gangsta-tough façade during a Def Comedy Jam gig in 1999, and got his…
While more than 45 years have elapsed since Malcolm X was gunned down in cold blood in 1965, the famed civil rights leader is still a major topic of conversation. You can credit the newly published Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention for that, as the epic biography by the…
Say what you will about Pauly Shore and his marginal skills, but the man definitely has an eye for talent. In 1995, the Encino Man actor plucked Bobby Lee out of the miasma of the SoCal comedy scene to open for him in Vegas. And Lee’s been busy ever since…
Few Arizona legends are as celebrated as the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. The historic shootout between Doc Holiday, Wyatt Earp, and three pistol-packing outlaws outside of a Tombstone lodging house back in 1861 may have only lasted a mere 30 seconds, but the tale of that fateful day has…
If those rumors we keep hearing about Hollywood’s intent to remake the raunchy ‘80s comedy Police Academy ever prove true, we’ve got someone who’d be perfect to star in the flick: Pablo Francisco. The hilarious impressionist and sound effects-spewing comedian would be a natural fit for the onomatopoeia-bending role of…
Long before computers and video games occupied our collectively short attention span, the world’s unfettered fascination shone upon the Rubik’s Cube. Though it has been more than 35 years since its debut, the complex square-shaped assortment of colored cubes causes just as much consternation these days as it did back…
It’s said that there’s no place like home, which is especially apt when it comes to the Arizona State University Sun Devils baseball team. The devil squad has notched an impressive win-loss record at Packard Stadium this year, and is hoping for a few more victories during their final home…
