Eraserhead (Absurda/Subversive) — Finally available on DVD, David Lynch’s debut film is as captivating and frustrating as it ever was. The print looks great in its own weird way, and the feature-length doc shows Lynch speaking more clearly about his art than his normally cryptic style allows. A History of…
42nd Street: On the avenue they’re taking you to . . . the one where the girl goes out a dancer “but comes back a star!” This popular musical has been revived countless times, but it’s still best known in its original context: as the classic Warner Bros. tuner in…
The thing about freak shows is that they make it really easy to find the freaks. On the first Saturday of every month, Phoenix has its very own aberrant act — the KARN EVIL Strange & Unusual Carnival Freak Show. The shock fest features the deviant antics of Dr. Reverend…
Monday has historically sucked for everybody but football sluts, but it bites no more thanks to Shimmy, a weekly multimedia mega-mixer. Dig this shit: DJs Diosa, Hyder, and Felicetti crank trip-hop, house, neo-soul, and liquid funk while aerosol artists graf it up, and classic flicks unspool on the patio. Mondays,…
During a recent visit to the newly expanded Phoenix Art Museum, I overheard a fellow patron say, “The art at this museum never ceases to disappoint me on a regular basis.” Funny, that’s just how I felt about “Modern by Nature: Ansel Adams in the 1930s,” a retrospective meant to…
Every New Year’s Eve, I watch my favorite movie. I used to think that everyone had a favorite film until a few years ago, when I hosted a party to which I asked each guest to bring a clip from their most-loved movie. One by one the invitees phoned to…
On a recent Friday morning, 44-year-old movie director Eric Schaeffer woke up at his usual hour of 10:30 in his one-bedroom Upper West Side apartment that he calls “Studio Schaeffer,” got dressed in jeans and a black Nike sweatshirt, and checked to see if any dating prospects had e-mailed him…
Aspirin? Check. Killer threads? Solid. Bail money? Sho’nuff. Sounds like you’re fully locked and loaded to get your New Year’s Eve freak on, except you need some off-the-chain parties and places to peep. Fear not, funky Phoenicians, because we’ve got the lowdown on all the hoedowns going down around the…
Imagine two game producers rushing down the hall. One wants to pitch a WW2 game, the other a sci-fi shooter. They round a corner, crash into each other, and their papers go flying everywhere — and in one of those great “You got chocolate in my peanut butter!” moments, Resistance:…
Jackass Number Two: Unrated (Paramount) The sequel to the dumb-ass jamboree makes its predecessor look plain and inoffensive. In short: more puke, more blood, more semen (from a horse, consumed nonetheless), more shit, more piss, more everything till you’d think the Jackasses (Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, etc.) would be…
Airwolf: Season Two (Universal) Be With Me (Film Movement) Dane Cook’s Tourgasm (HBO) Danica (First Look) Factotum (IFC) The Family Values Tour 2006 (Firm Music) Girls Behaving Badly, Volume One (Starlight) Haven (Fox) Mars Invades the Earth! (Alpha) Mi Amigo (Velocity) Mr. Fix It (First Look) The New Adventures of…
Bring a copy of The Enemy at Home and your pro-abortion sketchbook, wire up on the skunk, and let the semantics fly during Café Alumut. The collective-community interface is a mix of madness and genius. Like Cheers, there’s a cast of hilarious and intelligent thought criminals who will remember you…
ASU Men’s Basketball head coach Herb Sendek talks like a pipsqueak girl. It’s unsettling, really. But the former North Carolina State head man definitely has cojónes. After leading the Wolfpack to five straight NCAA tourneys, Sendek left his lofty perch in the college-basketball stratosphere called the Atlantic Coast Conference to…
ASU Men’s Basketball head coach Herb Sendek talks like a pipsqueak girl. It’s unsettling, really. But the former North Carolina State head man definitely has cojones. After leading the Wolfpack to five straight NCAA tourneys, Sendek left his lofty perch in the college-basketball stratosphere called the Atlantic Coast Conference to…
What is it with those bloody Brits? Of course the arrogant blokes would come up with a tradition like the weekly Quiz Night at George & Dragon, where they can massage their massive brain tissue, flare their nostrils, and proclaim, “Jolly good, old chap!” through a decaying grill when they…
Al Gore would be proud — and maybe a little buzzed — if he went to the Orange Table’s Bike Night. Each Tuesday, the Orange turns green, offering booze discounts to anyone who rolls up on a bicycle. And enviro-freaks don’t even have to be clean. “You could come in…
Agnes & His Brothers (First Run) All the King’s Men (Sony) American Pie: The Naked Mile (Universal) The Beauty Academy of Kabul (Docurama) The Celestine Prophecy (Sony) Checking Out (Allumination) Derailed (Weinstein) Dreamland (Sony) Invincible (Disney) Lady in the Water (Warner Bros.) Long Distance (Image) My Super Ex-Girlfriend (Fox) National…
Everybody has bad days. You know, the kind of day when you oversleep, realize you have no breakfast food in the house, painfully injure your foot on a broken office chair and get stood up by a client — all before noon. Sigh. I’m convinced there must be some order…
I’m not a “girly” girl. I don’t like pink, and I’ll take my dingy brown Doc Martens over high heels, hands down. So admittedly I wanted to cut and run when I first spied Kathleen Holmes’ collection of metal, glass and ceramic sculptures at Scottsdale’s Cervini Haas gallery. Six dresses…
It is said that a great actor or actress can “bring down the house,” but before I saw (and heard) the 25-year-old American Idol finalist Jennifer Hudson in the film version of the 1981 Broadway musical Dreamgirls, I can’t recall the last time I truly feared for the architectural stability…
History repeats itself: 11 Decembers ago, Universal had the season’s strongest movie — a downbeat sci-fi flick freely adapted from a well-known source by a name director. With a bare minimum of advance screenings and a shocking absence of hype, the studio dumped it. This year, it’s done it again…
