The Pillowman: Child abuse and child murder are all the rage in theater these days. There’s John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, about a group of boys still scarred from their abuse by a pedophilic priest. And Frozen, the British import about a serial killer that was so nicely done here by…
A game based on 300 has no excuse not to kick ass. Just picture yourself leading 300 Greeks (that’s 1,800 abs) against the massive armies of the Persian Empire, led by the evil, pierced, and preening King Xerxes. Since your Spartans are the deadliest soldiers in the world, the Persians’…
Planet Earth (BBC/Warner Bros.) Roll over, Marlin Perkins, and tell Jacques Cousteau the news: There’s never been another nature series like this. You will spend forever glued to this five-disc BBC collection, finding such holy-shit discoveries as a herd of never-before-photographed camels who live in the frozen wastelands, great whites…
Al Franken: God Spoke (Docurama) Code Name: The Cleaner (New Line) Columbo: Mystery Murder Collection 1989 (Universal) Djà Vu (Buena Vista) The Documentaries of Louis Malle (Criterion) The Drew Carey Show: The Complete First Season (Warner Bros.) Flipper: Season One (MGM) .45 (Velocity) Ironside: Season 1 (Shout! Factory) Jean Renoir:…
If the new Tarantino/Rodriguez co-lab didn’t sate your appetite for zombies and fiendish sex, or if you’re an exploitation-starved suburbanite, Phoenix’s own Midnite Movie Mamacita will serve up a steaming buffet of squeamish delights with her Grindhouse Redux. The twin shot of original 35mm turkeys includes the sleazy sex bomb…
Most bikers are big ol’ teddy bears — unless you’re that unfortunate fellow at Altamont or you cause a chain-reaction hog knockdown à la Pee-wee Herman. Barring that, you’re welcome to wet your whistle and play a friendly game of pool with some local crotch rocketeers during Bike Night at…
Hank Aaron may not care for Barry Bonds — he says he won’t be present when Bonds breaks his all-time home-run record — but we never get tired of watching baseball’s Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and his awesome bitch tits, as we’ll get to when the Arizona Diamondbacks host Little…
No matter how hard we attempt to extend life, impermanence just isn’t in the cards. The jury’s out on cryogenics, and all the vitamins in the world won’t stop you from eventually becoming worm food (personally, I’ll skip that and get cremated instead). But most of us will live on…
It’s no secret that photography is the art form most practiced by the masses. And because any Joe Blow with a pulse can push a shutter-release button on a camera, we’ve been subjected, ad nauseam, to the dreaded snapshot. I automatically think “bad amateur” when I see a clumsily composed…
For all the huzzahs deservedly heaped upon 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, in which it took a good long while to discern the living from the walking deceased, the zombie-flick spoof was little more than an extended sketch taken, oh, 19 minutes beyond its breaking point. But the movie, created…
This week’s generically titled studio suspense thriller, Fracture, has the good sense to begin where last week’s generically titled studio suspense thriller, Perfect Stranger, ended — with the solution to that tedious riddle: Whodunit? The answer is Anthony Hopkins as Ted Crawford, an aeronautical engineer whose pockets of money and…
To fully appreciate the merits of Vacancy, you need to have the proper technology. Digitally projected lurid images and THX-amplified creaks and moans are all well and good, but what director Nimród Antal’s creepy cockroach of a thriller really cries out for are the shabby delights that can be found…
A reformist disciple of Dogme, that earth- and camcorder-shaking movement wherein waves are broken and celebration is cause for alarm, Danish director Susanne Bier makes what you’d call emotional disaster movies. Her Open Hearts and Brothers, melodramas at once feverishly pitched and finely tuned, deploy paralysis and war, respectively, to…
Holland’s gift to world cinema, Paul Verhoeven, can be a very bad boy and a very good filmmaker. Any of his movies could have been titled Basic Instinct — not least his epic World War II thriller Black Book, in which a Jewish chanteuse who watched her family be massacred…
Grijs Verleden (Gray Past) is the title the Dutch historian Chris van der Heijden gave to his 2001 account of Holland’s morally murky landscape under Nazi occupation, and it’s the phrase director Paul Verhoeven (RoboCop, Total Recall, Starship Troopers) uses to explain why he returned to his home country after…
We’ve all seen Super Mario eat copious amounts of mushrooms, but have you ever considered the care that goes into preparing such delicacies? In Cooking Mama: Cook Off for the Wii, Wolfgang Puck wanna-bes are thrust into the kitchen — alongside “Mama,” the game’s titular chef — where they’ll chop,…
Not Just the Best of the Larry Sanders Show (Sony) The greatest boxed set ever — not so much for the made-up irritainment as for the real thing, which this collection serves up by the ton. There are 23 brilliant episodes of the HBO show here, but they pale in…
“Rembrandt and the Golden Age of Dutch Art” at the Phoenix Art Museum: Sometimes, its the fame and hype surrounding a piece of art that excites us more than does the piece itself. So even if youve never been nuts about 17th-century dusky interiors or girl doing meaningless task paintings,…
Brute Force: The Criterion Collection (Criterion) Cutie Honey: The Movie (Bandai) Double Happiness (Image) Forgiving Dr. Mengele (First Run) Freedom Writers (Paramount) George Lopez: The Complete 1st and 2nd Seasons (Warner Bros.) Happy Days: The Second Season (Paramount) The History Boys (Fox) The Image (Warner Bros.) La Haine: The Criterion…
Somewhere in TV Land, Madge the Manicurist is soaking some poor sap’s digits in Palmolive and claiming the stuff softens your hands while you do the dishes. Vile propaganda! The odious chemical compound is slowly eating away your paws, though rotting extremities are the least of your worries. Your kids…
She´s come a long way since playing a fawn in a grade-school pageant, and actor/director Amanda Monrad has learned plenty along the way. Like the joys of getting loaded online. And that auditions suck, but the Louvre doesn´t. And that dirt-flavored jellybeans can sometimes rock. I knew I wanted to…
Writers Christopher Landon and Carl Ellsworth receive sole credit for the movie Disturbia, which is surprising, as the film clearly is based on both a previously published work (a 1942 short story by Cornell Woolrich titled “It Had to Be Murder”) and the John Michael Hayes-penned, Alfred Hitchcock-directed, Academy Award-nominated…
