If you need a good excuse to salivate over estrogen-rich cheerleaders and huge inflatable dolls, tell your wife that you’ll be attending the Fort McDowell Fiesta Bowl Parade. She’ll likely want to come along, if only to see a bunch of supercool floats and spruced-up marching bands beating their drums…
Local theater director Joseph Benesh won’t go so far as to say there’ll be nudity in the underground production The Bobo Theatre Project: A Lullaby Jubilee in 3 Acts, but he and his partners in aesthetic crime do hope to make people squirm in their seats. The Project is the…
Yippee-ki-yay! The Arizona National Livestock Show presents its 59th annual critter competition with more than 2,000 cream-of-the-crop cattle, ewes, horses, and swine from across the nation, all primped and primed by idealistic 4-H and FFAers. Is the competition cutthroat? It will be for the “winners” of the climactic Junior Market…
If you thought McLovin from Superbad was a badass, wait ’til you get a load of MacReady, Kurt Russell’s alien-slaying character in John Carpenter’s classic horror film The Thing (1982). Based on John W. Campbell Jr.’s 1938 novella Who Goes There?, the flick centers on an army base in Antarctica…
The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Volume Two — The War Years (Paramount) Alien Apocalypse (Anchor Bay) Balls of Fury (Universal) Black Moon Rising (Anchor Bay) Boy Eats Girl (Lionsgate) Braveheart: Special Collector’s Edition (Paramount) Bring It On: In It to Win It (Universal) Cinderella II: Dreams Come True Special…
As the waning days of 2007 tick away like Vicodins down the gullet of some rehab-bound starlet, so do your final chances of being bad. See, you’ve finally decided to cut the bullshit, buckle down, and stick to those troublesome New Year’s resolutions you’ve blown off year after year. Which…
She’s got the lead in Black Theatre Troupe’s production of Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change, but actress Taylore Mahogany Scott has also got humbling memories of auditioning for a Miami Vice star and a deep fear of clowns. You can get to know here a little better here, but don’t…
Once (Fox) Easily the year’s most perfect pop album — damned good movie too, the finest “musical” of the past 20 years. The disc’s making-of refers to it as a “modern musical,” but Once is as old-fashioned as it gets: Guy (Glen Hansard) meets Girl (Markéta Irglová), they fall in…
Here’s the thing: Tim Burton pulled it off. Nearing the end of an uncommonly strong year for American movies, he’s taken a hallowed classic of the modern musical theater, hemmed in the narrative from well over two hours to well under, cast confessed non-singers in the principal roles, and somehow…
Simmering below the squeamish elder-care euphemism “uncharted territory” is a fearful awareness that when it comes to dealing with the growing army of senile parents, we have no idea what the hell we’re doing. Tamara Jenkins plumbs the depths of that terror in her new film, The Savages, and jacks…
As an actor, John C. Reilly is the opposite of Mr. Cellophane. He doesn’t disappear into a role; roles disappear onto him — the unlikely porn sidekick of Boogie Nights, the inadequately adequate family man of The Hours, the cutup cowboy of A Prairie Home Companion, all stamped and imprinted…
Nothing says “holiday spirit” quite like stabbing a terrorist or hammering a goombah, as the hottest games this season invite us to do. But no matter how cutting-edge the stars of 2007 may be, they are also unmistakably familiar. This week, we stack the holiday hits of today against the…
If there’s a criticism to be leveled at Black Theatre Troupe for presenting Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change, it’s that attempting such a challenging piece of theater seems imprudent of any company that has failed in the past with musicals only half as complicated. But artistic director David J. Hemphill…
Anything Goes: Not to be confused with the super-cheesy ’70s game show of the same name (Remember? Pie fights and challenge rounds featuring The DeFranco Family?), this popular book musical is among the better composer-centric homages. Sing-along standards from Cole Porter like “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “You’re…
Kites fly high over the San Francisco Bay and Kabul (okay, China), but not much else soars in Marc Forster’s flaccid adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s vivid 2002 novel, which covers three decades of Afghanistan’s misery under serial totalitarian rule. Arriving on the heels of Atonement, The Kite Runner tells a…
Hell of a thing, getting Mike Nichols to adapt the yer-kiddin’-me story of Charlie Wilson, the congressman from Lufkin, Texas, who damn near single-handedly helped the Afghans kick out the Russians in the 1980s. Says right there on page 11 of the paperback edition of George Crile’s 2003 book Charlie…
If the term “butt-shake” isn’t part of your musical vernacular, you had better get hip ASAP and have a listen to Phoenix’s own Acapulco-Five-O. Inspired by ’50s and ’60s spy music, go-go, Latin exotica, and, of course, butt-shake, Acapulco-Five-O was designed to infect the masses with the rockin’ pneumonia and…
Andrew Jackson Jihad has received a grip of ink in our esteemed publication. From glowing praise (“Their music could almost be the perfect soundtrack to the black humor of a Kurt Vonnegut novel”) to backhanded compliments (“[co-frontman] Sean Bonnette is the poster boy for twentysomething angst”), the acoustic folk-punk duo…
Peeping and appreciating art at the gaggle of Roosevelt Row galleries doesn’t mean sporting beatnik berets or bongos, emo hoodies, ironic t-shirts, or the ever-present guyliner. Sometimes the work is just gorgeous, man. Especially if the show involves art of the wearable kind, like the beautiful bijoux of Ali Kauss,…
Name a Phoenix-based musical act that’s been nominated for five Grammys in the same year. Alice Cooper? False. CeCe Peniston? Uh, no. Jimmy Eat World? Gross, dude. Phoenix Bach Choir? Say what? Say yes to the following nominations for the choral group: • Best Classical Album • Best Choral Performance…
Name a Phoenix-based musical act that’s been nominated for five Grammys in the same year. Alice Cooper? False. CeCe Peniston? Uh, no. Jimmy Eat World? Gross, dude. Phoenix Bach Choir? Say what? Say yes to the following nominations for the choral group: • Best Classical Album • Best Choral Performance…
Name a Phoenix-based musical act that’s been nominated for five Grammys in the same year. Alice Cooper? False. CeCe Peniston? Uh, no. Jimmy Eat World? Gross, dude. Phoenix Bach Choir? Say what? Say yes to the following nominations for the choral group: • Best Classical Album • Best Choral Performance…
