It took Norman Mailer seven years and 1,282 pages to write 1991’s Harlot’s Ghost: A Novel of the CIA, and, if memory serves, it took me 12 years to actually finish it. So director Robert De Niro and screenwriter Eric Roth can be forgiven for taking two hours and 40…
Bankrupt and brain-damaged in Rocky V, a bout fought so long ago that the other Bush was still sucker-punching Saddam, Sylvester Stallone’s titular pugilist returns to issue another beating in Rocky Balboa. How much punishment can an audience take? Even 007 gets his license renewed by younger models every decade,…
Men are literally disposable in Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver. But the film, particularly for fans of the gynophilic, flamboyantly color-coordinating maker of loco melodramas, is essential. The title translates as Coming Back — as in “back from the dead,” referring to the matter-of-fact resurrection of Irene (Carmen Maura), an old grandmother…
Travis Smith is serious about Christmas kitsch. Not only has he amassed thousands of vintage dime-store holiday ornaments, he’s also spent decades rescuing the unwanted homemade Christmas knickknacks that languish on thrift-store shelves. He’s documented both in Kitschmasland!: Christmas Decor From the 1950s to the 1970s, a new book that…
Aside from that new ball, NBA Live 07 may be the worst product to bear the league’s name this year. The new basketball game from Electronic Arts is so glitchy that scores of buyers launched an online petition demanding a do-over. Luckily for the rest of us, consumers have a…
When the Levees Broke (HBO) Spike Lee’s four-part doc, easily the best non-fiction film of 2006, gets a fifth part on DVD: a 105-minute epilogue that reveals just how little has changed since Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in August 2005. Featuring new interviews with the displaced and displeased,…
Aspirin? Check. Killer threads? Solid. Bail money? Sho’nuff. Sounds like you’re fully locked and loaded to get your New Year’s Eve freak on, except you need some off-the-chain parties and places to peep. Fear not, funky Phoenicians, because we’ve got the lowdown on all the hoedowns going down around the…
Dagne Hanson at West Valley Art Museum: It’s difficult to reduce an artist’s entire life down to a single room of works, but WVAM does an excellent job in illustrating local painter Dagne Hanson’s personal and professional growth. Her efforts are traced from early charcoal nudes to more recent, emotionally…
For one night a week, the McDonald’s at Scottsdale Pavilions is the coolest fast-food joint in the world. By our calculation, about half of the chain’s trillions and trillions of burgers sold have been served up at this single location since the advent of the Rock-and-Roll McDonald’s Classic Car Show…
About Will Smith’s estimable talents, there is no doubt. Six Degrees of Separation, Ali . . . um . . . the “Parents Just Don’t Understand” video — the man’s got skills to pay the bills, yours and mine and his. That he seldom uses them, or their attendant clout,…
Of all the hundreds of pedophile priests to be flushed out of the woodwork in recent Catholic Church history, Father Oliver O’Grady has to be one of the most harmless looking, and the most sinister. Wispy, unremarkable and accommodating, with an ingratiating half-smile playing permanently about his thin lips, Father…
Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish play unbelievably gorgeous heroin junkies in Candy, a don’t-try-this-at-home melodrama adapted from Australian author Luke Davies’ aptly billed “novel of love and addiction.” Essentially, the film is Requiem for a Dream with a lot less of that overrated indie’s shooting-gallery pizzazz, although director Neil Armfield…
It’s finally happened. Joseph Kremer has at last appeared in a role that he’s not able to make his own. Kremer, who arrived seemingly out of nowhere a couple of seasons ago, has tackled — and excelled at! — roles as diverse as a sleazy French aristocrat in Les Liaisons…
I couldn’t tell if the holiday choir that kicked off the surprisingly dreary Sister’s Christmas Catechism: The Mystery of the Magi’s Gold was for real or not. Are they deliberately off-key, I wondered, and that’s the joke? My uncertainty grew as this overlong evening dragged on and on. How, I…
Nintendo has achieved the impossible: My 50-year-old, non-gaming father wants a Wii for Christmas. Either I’ve been whisked to Bizarro World, or The House That Mario Built is on to something big. With the release of its oddly monikered next-gen system, Nintendo may just have revolutionized the way America will…
Talladega Nights (Columbia) This cut of Will Ferrell’s NASCAR comedy runs 13 minutes longer than the theatrical version, and that doesn’t take into account the deleted and extended scenes, outtakes, phony commercials, public-service announcements, and gag reel. A movie that already seemed to be constructed from deleted scenes is well…
Wishes, Wassail, and Wonder: Don’t let its super-cheesy title fool you: iTheatre Collaborative’s fourth annual Christmas cabaret is in on its own joke, and may well be your best bet for kicky holiday entertainment with an edge. Shot through with caustic comic turns, this Yule-themed New York-style cabaret cobbles together…
AFI: I Heard a Voice (Interscope) Air Buddies (Disney) Ali Rap (ESPN) The Andy Griffith Show: The Complete Series (Paramount) Barnyard (Paramount) The Chronicles of Narnia: Four-Disc Extended Edition (Disney) A Dead Calling (Lions Gate) The Doors (Lions Gate) James Bond: Ultimate Edition Volumes 3 and 4 (MGM) John Wayne…
You love music, you enjoy a drink while listening to music, but you aren’t all into acting like a hipster foolio in public while marinating on music. Well, Shane Kennedy, a local deejay and never one to bite his tongue, has a cure for the hipster-foolio part during his weekly…
Spanish-language students and foreign-film connoisseurs can kick it together during the weekly English-subtitled Spanish Place Movie Mondays series. In honor of December’s Cuba Month, the space will screen the righteous music documentary Buena Vista Social Club, which spotlights Havana’s legendary musicians. Second Friday of every month, 6 p.m., 2007…
You won’t be singing The Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop” during Punk Rock Karaoke. Nor will you belt out Black Flag’s “TV Party” or the Dead Kennedys’ “Halloween.” These spike-and-leather standards haven’t been banned or anything, they simply aren’t in the catalogue of more than 10,000 songs available for musical mimicry at…
Remember when your first-grade teacher said that without the abundant rays of the sun, the Earth would die? Humans can’t get enough of the stuff, and nothing proves our sentimentality for shine like the work on display at “Molten: Glass and Neon Art” at Mesa Contemporary Arts. The four featured…
