New Times‘ top DVD picks for the week of December 6

Dirty Love (First Look) Dragonball Movie Boxed Set (Funimation) Everybody Loves Raymond: The Complete Fifth Season (Warner Bros.) Fun With Dick and Jane (1977) (Columbia/Tristar) The Future of Food (Cinema Libre) Gilbert Gottfried: Dirty Jokes (Image) God Save the Queen: Punk Rock Anthology (Music Video Dist.) Hellbound (Warner Bros.) He-Man…

Art Scene

“Big City” at Phoenix Art Museum: There isn’t a single image of the PHX among the cityscapes and urban life scenes drawn from PAM’s permanent collection. That’s odd, seeing as how we’re the nation’s fifth or sixth largest metropolis. The omission is partly because of the age of the work,…

This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks

THU 8Imagine your bath mat on acid — or you on your bath mat on acid. No, you’re not all wet; you’ve stepped into the Alice in Wonderland world of Brian Knep. The multimedia artist’s “Brian Knep: Healing Series” is a totally groovy collection of interactive floor pieces reminiscent of…

Erika Rolfsrud

She’s played Shakespeare festivals and appeared on soap operas and been directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman, and right now Erika Rolfsrud is appearing all by her lonesome in Arizona Theatre Company’s one-woman Bad Dates. Here, she considers rug burns and lazy eyes and the horrors of slow-mo screaming. I knew…

Supersize Me

If Hollywood wants to learn from the videogame industry — which outgrossed the box office last year — it should pay careful attention to Shadow of the Colossus, a game with the epic scale of a summer blockbuster but the emotional heart of an indie flick. Shadow is brought to…

Homewreckers on DVD

Mr. & Mrs. Smith (Fox) The pairing of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, both in real life and on celluloid, is so obvious as to be almost cartoonish. So even though both are better actors than they need to be, they perfectly belong in this goofy, explosiony world. Married assassins,…

Not Bad . . .

I usually wind up on the sofa every night, watching those badly dubbed episodes of Sex and the City that are breeding like rabbits all over late-night cable stations. Probably you’ve seen them, squeezed between carpet-cleaning commercials and sanitized to the point of absurdity, all the “twats” and “fuckers” re-looped…

Last Laugh

A common criticism of Hollywood from the right side of the political spectrum is that it hasn’t made any movies that deal with the War on Terror, the way it did with World War II, for example. The truth is that it’s probably less an example of political bias than…

Snow Bored

It begins with a very literal cliffhanger. Five snowboarders — the best in their field, we’re told — are dropped off via helicopter atop an Alaskan mountain called 7601, imaginatively named for its height above sea level. Swooping aerial shots around the peak convince us that it’s steep, high and…

E-shop ‘Til You Drop

The holiday season may be the only time of year we’re prepared to kill other shoppers — right in the middle of the aisle — if they dare lay their hands on that last, limited-edition Star Wars thingamajig that every kid in the world seems to want. Or that damn…

Ted Alert

The controversy-starved folks at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals may freak when word hits the street about Tara Logsdon’s hands-on operation “Ursidae Anaplasty” (Latin for “bear plastic surgery”) during the “Stuffed Animal Show” at Waycool. But before PETA starts protesting, we should tell you that the furry patients…

Dreamworks

12/2-12/16Jason Hill’s retro-futurism is so bright, he’s gotta wear shades. You will, too, when you view his blindingly vivid works, which seem to leap out of their frames and smack you right between the eyes. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to liken Hill to Ed Mell, another…

Man of Steel

FRI 12/2The giant squid may have eluded scientists for decades, but Phoenix artist Pete Deise has been capturing them for years — in metal, that is. Deise creates steel sculptures (including one at the airport and another in front of My Florist Cafe) with characteristic tentacles. His latest exhibition, “Ascension,”…

The White Stuff

12/2-12/3Filmmaker Warren Miller is to skiing what Bruce Brown is to surfing. Brown’s instant-classic flicks The Endless Summer (1966) and Endless Summer II: The Journey Continues (1994) follow two generations of surfers seeking the perfect wave. The prolific Miller averages a film a year, and all deal with winter-sports fanatics…

Island Hip-Hopping

THU 12/1The Reggaeton Festival 2005 is like a yummy mixed drink: two parts reggae, one part hip-hop, one part Latin dance, with just a splash of techno and dancehall. The Puerto Rican brew of Caribbean music and rap (mostly in Spanglish) will shake up the Venue of Scottsdale, 7117 East…

New Times‘ top DVD picks for the week of November 29, 2005

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (Empire) Caterina in the Big City (Empire) CSI: Five-Season Pack (Paramount) Death to the Supermodels (Columbia/Tristar) Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo (Columbia/Tristar) Empire (Buena Vista) Family Guy: Volume 3 (Fox) Formula 17 (Strand) The Frighteners: Director’s Cut (Universal) The Hives: Tussles in Brussels (Universal Music)…

This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks

THU 1It’s high time the Hooters girls did a little ogling of their own, and they’ll get an eyeful of topless man meat at the Arizona Bad Boys Single Elimination Boxing Tournament, which crowns Arizona’s toughest lightweight, middleweight and heavyweight hunks. The tourney features amateurs with no previous pro boxing…

Spin City

There isn’t a single image of Phoenix in the “Big City: Cityscapes and Urban Life” exhibition at Phoenix Art Museum. Which is odd, seeing as how there are only a handful of cities in the country bigger than this one. Don’t we rate at least one tiny watercolor in a…

For Those About to Rock

Deep down, we all want money for nothing and chicks for free. Back in 1985, when Dire Straits first revealed this eternal truth, it seemed that any goofball with a DayGlo headband could pour himself into package-hugging spandex and become a rock star. But it turned out that noodling on…

Your Government at Work

Punishment Park (New Yorker Video) This 1971 movie from director Peter Watkins could have been made yesterday, which is no doubt why it finally sees video release long after accruing cult status. Born of the filmmaker’s outrage over the Kent State killings, the war in Vietnam, and other abominations of…

Weighting . . .

For those of us who dug Rob McKittrick’s recent comedy Waiting . . . , Just Friends offers up some good news: Ryan Reynolds and Anna Faris are together again as a dysfunctional couple. He’s a slick music executive named Chris Brander, still traumatized at having gotten the “Let’s just…

Spent

Ever since its Broadway debut in 1996, Rent has generated a loyal, almost cultlike following. Showered with praise, the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical touched a nerve among the young, artistic, gay, urban, and alternatively dressed people who identified as outsiders and wondered how they would make their way in the world…