You don’t need to mow down a Wal-Mart employee or kidnap a teenager and force her into prostitution to make headlines in Phoenix. Just ask Jose Avila, a Valley wiseacre who’s made news (not to mention the rounds of network talk shows) thanks to his super-thrifty approach to home furnishing…
I was baffled when Nearly Naked Theatre announced earlier this year that it planned to open its season with Scott McPherson’s Marvin’s Room. McPherson’s dramedy tells a story that, despite some gallows humor and a better-than-competent script, isn’t more challenging than your average Lifetime Movie of the Week. The play’s…
The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which is based on a true story the same way Harry Potter and Star Wars movies are, is the latest — though certainly not the last — movie of this bloody (awful) year trying to scare the money right out of your wallet. It has…
The Man isn’t so much a movie as a parody of one, the kind of thing people in movies about the movie business pitch as outrageous, inept ideas when a director’s going for the cheap and quick giggle. Only in movies like The Player or Bowfinger or Christopher Guest’s The…
Fans of the last two Miramax films from Swedish director Lasse Hallström — Chocolat and The Shipping News — may be happy to know that he has stuck to the exact same formula for his latest, An Unfinished Life. Like its predecessors, this is the tale of an itinerant single…
Imagine you’re a rock chick with a thing for drummers. Instead of becoming a Banger Sister, you become a rock photographer specializing in drummers. You become so good at capturing the personalities of rock’s timekeepers behind their fortresses of cymbals and cans that you rise to the top of your…
If it hasn’t already, professional racing is threatening to replace hockey as Americans’ fourth-favorite spectator sport, after the NFL, the NBA, and Major League Baseball. This is as true in the Valley as anywhere else, thanks to signature events like the NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Checker Auto Parts 500 (coming up…
TUE 9/13DJ Seduce is trying very hard to be humble. When he started the weekly “P.A.I.N.T.: Music* Art* Spoken Expression” nights at the Paper Heart, he was struggling to get a dozen people through the door. Thanks largely to word of mouth, his conglomeration of underground audio mixes, live painting…
9/9-9/10Looks like the lovely ladies of the ASU volleyball team need to step up to the net and show some, er . . . balls. After a dismal 2-4 effort thus far in what is turning out to be a pretty miserable preseason, these spike-blocking sirens are looking to rebound…
MON 9/12When psychobilly-punk band the Tombstones was signed to Relativity Records in the late ’80s, front man Stevie Tombstone bought a headstone for blues legend Robert Johnson and personally delivered the slab to Mississippi. The press labeled his gesture “disrespectful behavior.” Punk was crass and uncool in those days, and…
SAT 9/10You know you’ve made it when people start impersonating you. But comedian Neil Hamburger admits he’s a little nervous about seeing his clones at the 1st Annual Neil Hamburger Fan Convention on Saturday, September 10. “I’ve heard about people dressing as me for Halloween,” says the tuxedo-clad comic, who…
The Blues Brothers 25th Anniversary Edition (Universal Studios Home Video) Dan Aykroyd and John Goodman’s modern-day revival of the Blues Brothers is less a stroke of comedy genius than a dose of karaoke night at Hooters. Fight off those thoughts and pop in this 1980 classic. John Belushi and Aykroyd,…
Barn of the Naked Dead (Koch Vision Entertainment) The Bela Lugosi Collection (Universal) Bruce Springsteen: VH1 Storytellers (Sony Music) Charmed: The Complete Second Season (Paramount) Crash (Artisan) The Deer Hunter: Special Edition (Universal) Dragnet: Volumes 1-3 (Delta Music) Fat Albert’s Halloween Special (Ventura) Fraggle Rock: Season 1 (Hit Entertainment) Greta…
One can only guess at what the new theater season holds. And because speculating about theater, at least in Phoenix, is often more entertaining than actually looking at it, here’s a list of facts and likely figures about where we’re at and what’s to come. Number of producing theater companies…
THU 8Laws of Deception, a short film made on a shoestring by Valley writer/director Charles Peterson, is a compact thriller with a twisted ending that Peterson sets up nicely. It’s a “Hit man meets girl, hit man seduces girl, hit man kills girl?” kinda flick starring Hispanic Schwarzenegger-alike Jose Rosette…
Walking through “Emilio Pucci,” the fashion exhibition at Phoenix Art Museum, is like going back in time. The bikinis, gowns and mini-dresses covered in the Italian designer’s singular geometric patterns and acid-bright colors are relics of an age when it was okay to call a flight attendant a stewardess, when…
There are two things Amy Milliron wants you to know: First of all, she did not expose herself while breast-feeding her baby in public recently. And secondly, the media have completely invented the part about public outcry against public nursing. According to Milliron, a 29-year-old Tempe mother who’s lately become…
Cindy Iverson, 43, makes mixed-media collages and artist books, exquisitely crafted ruminations about anxiety, historical injustices and the secrets people keep. But first, Iverson makes her own paper. She collects everything from dead saguaros to old blue jeans, boils it, pulps it, and transforms it into paper, one sheet at…
At the opening of The Constant Gardener, Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles’ adaptation of the novel by John le Carr, we hear a conversation before we see it. The screen remains black, still running credits, as a man and a woman negotiate a departure. Slowly, the scene dawns, revealing the couple…
Viewers of those VH1 nostalgia countdown shows are familiar with the term “awesomely bad,” denoting a song that one hates to love because it’s unintentionally tacky and awful, yet there’s something about it that won’t let you dismiss it entirely. It’s also a fine way to describe The Cave, but…
Remember Nick Cannon? For a while there, he seemed to be the next big young heartthrob, right after starring in the marching-band movie Drumline and the remake of the ’80s comedy Love Don’t Co$t a Thing. When Dave Chappelle joked that his son was leaving him for Nick Cannon, people…
Many of those who saw the Disney superhero spoof Sky High were impressed by the debut of Steven Strait. Playing the brooding school bully Warren Peace, who hurls fireballs at our heroes before showing his more sensitive and heroic side, Strait displayed a moody rock-star charisma and an impressive range…
