We’ve all done it — killed an afternoon drinking in a pleasantly grungy roadhouse somewhere, boozily enjoying the illusion of having fallen off the grid, playing semi-forgotten blues songs on an outdated jukebox, and thinking aloud, See, I should capture this feeling. This should be a movie. Sobered up, we…
UC-Berkeley gymnast Dan Millman (Scott Mechlowicz) is one of the best at what he does, and he has it all: perfect abs, a big bulge in his crotch (the camera focuses on it early on), beautiful girlfriends, and the ability to balance full beer glasses on his feet. There’s just…
First, the accolades: Arizona Theatre Company’s production of Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays With Morrie is nearly perfect. Its actors turn in superb performances; its stage design is magnificent; its director, Samantha K. Wyer, brings subtleties to its simple, sad, two-character story. Which all leads to Morrie’s working so beautifully on the…
If the creepy, self-flagellating albino monk in The Da Vinci Code really wanted to suffer, he’d drop his flesh-shredding cat-o’-nine-tails, pick up a controller, and play The Da Vinci Code videogame. It’s that bad. Now it can be told: The Da Vinci Code game is one of the crappiest, crap-lousy…
Will & Grace: Series Finale (Lions Gate) The way this got hustled to shelves, mere days after Will Truman and Grace Adler said their mushy farewells, you’d think this were some classic adios — another M*A*S*H or Cheers wrap-up. Alas, it was just another Very Special Episode of a show…
Whether your summer vacation starts in May and ends in September, or just consists of weekends and the Fourth of July, we want to help you make your vay-cay more than okay. So stick your toe in our guide to keeping your sanity when all those around you are sweltering…
Barbecue envy. You know you’ve had it. You feel it every time you arrange that finger-blackening pile of Kingsford charcoal on your half-baked hibachi. If your heart races when you finger the Sunday Weber ads and you whisper sweet nothings to the stainless-steel 53-inch Vikings at Lowe’s, you know what…
Just after I turned 39, I started making mosaics. Suddenly I began buying tile trivets, ceramic figurines and odd pieces of old china at thrift stores, smashing the objects into pieces with a hammer, and reassembling the shards into two-dimensional images that I then mortared or glued on anything I…
If the Iliad were brand-new — if it were one of this summer’s beach-reading blockbusters — it wouldn’t be a swashbuckling saga of siege, slave girls, and slaughter. That stuff might be in there, sure, but just as adornments to the main bit, which would be Homer yakking about how…
Summer is the season of high expectations and profound disappointments. That suntan looks more like sunburn, your beer stays ice cold ’til the moment it’s opened, and fat guys are the only ones hanging by the pool in bikini briefs. So it goes with summer movies: Sequels to beloved faves…
Your folks will be spending the summer on a Serengeti safari. The roommates are gonna dance ’til dawn in the dapper discotheques of Ibiza. And your boss? He’ll be slamming sake amid the hustle and flow of Tokyo. Meanwhile, you’ll be stuck wiling away your summer vacay at home. Sure,…
Urban legend has it that you’ve gotta be downright filthy rich (and/or retired) to escape the sweltering Phoenix summer. Meet some mythbusters with sweet careers — or lack thereof — that give them a chance to split town, come June. Become a “Professional” Student Angel Fuentes plans on never trading…
A friend and I have resolved that this will be the first summer of our lives during which we never once complain about the heat. Each of us has spent our lives here in the desert, and both of us are champion whiners — she about injustices against children and…
Trainspotting: The heck with rehab. Anyone wanting to kick narcotics addiction should just go see this gloriously ugly production of Harry Gibson’s meditation on addiction’s dark night. The play, based on the Irvine Welsh novel and best known from director Danny Boyle’s popular 1996 film adaptation, is really just a…
The Bette Davis Collection, Vol. 2 (Warner Bros.) A Fine Romance (Tango) Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (Dark Sky) Freedomland (Sony) Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Fox) Hercules/Mole Men Against the Son of Hercules (Image) John Wayne: An American Icon Movie Collection (Universal) The Kids in the Hall: Complete Season 4 (A&E)…
The Goodwill store at 2115 North Scottsdale Road, Scottsdale generally has a great supply of discarded dishes in its housewares department. Scottsdale folk have great junk. The one at 330 East Brown Road, Mesa usually has a good inventory of reject dishes, too. Dishes are the cheapest source of tesserae,…
Send In the Idiots, by Kamran Nazeer (Bloomsbury, $23.95) Untouchables, by Narendra Jadhav (Scribner, $26) Self-Made Man, by Norah Vincent (Viking, $24.95) A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life, by Dana Reinhardt (Wendy Lamb/Random House, $15.95) Poppy Shakespeare, by Clare Allan (Bloomsbury, $23.95) City of Tiny Lights, by Patrick Neate…
Vagina not what it used to be, ladies? Hey, fella, what about those man boobs? Summer in Phoenix gives you three (okay, four or five) solid months indoors. If you’re going to sit in the semi-dark, flipping cable channels, why not have something to show for it, come Halloween? You…
This guy knows how to take a photo. That was my first thought when I entered the gallery space at Mesa Arts Center. Fine-art photographer Michael Eastman’s interiors of crumbling Cuban mansions are breathtaking — and they’re enormous, about 5×4 feet on average. Each work, with its large scale and…
When kids of all ages discuss comic books and superheroes, there is inevitably one question that comes up time and again: If that one guy and that other guy had a fight, who would win? Comics companies occasionally indulge these debates with special issues pitting Thing against Hulk, or Wolverine…
Amid brutal competition from A History of Violence, Caché (Hidden), and Last Days, the top prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival went to L’Enfant (The Child), a Belgian drama about a 20-year-old hustler who sells his infant son like a bag of weed. The makers of this provocative movie,…
Tom Zoellner — journalist, former Phoenician, recently heartbroken guy — has written a book about the diamond industry. The Heartless Stone digs deep into the cold, hard heart of the diamond business, which Zoellner globetrotted to uncover. From the mines of Africa to the further reaches of the Arctic Circle,…
