Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs includes an infamous slice of cinematic history that’s been forever burned into our collective pop-cultural consciousness: the giddily psychotic thug Mr. Blonde hacking off the ear of a bound and gagged LAPD cop to the lighthearted strains of Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle With You.”…
Serenity, Joss Whedon’s big-screen spinoff of the 2002 TV show Firefly, which didn’t even last a dozen episodes, is already a cult phenom well before its opening. The show’s DVD boxed set lines the shelf of every fanboy who dreamed of gunslinging in space alongside preachers and prostitutes, and already…
Into the Blue offers precisely what one would expect from the director of Blue Crush and the writer of Torque: beautiful stupidity. Its every frame dripping from a noxious recipe of suntan oil, summertime sweat and salt water, this heist movie (or whatever it is, which isn’t much) delivers a…
In 2001, Jonathan Safran Foer made an astounding literary debut. “A Very Rigid Search,” published by The New Yorker, was his hilarious, heartbreaking account of an attempt by a young American man (named, cheekily, Jonathan Safran Foer) to find a Ukrainian woman who had saved his grandfather from the Nazis…
Anyone vaguely familiar with the rules of golf knows that you may not improve your lie, ground your club in a sand trap, or — most grievous of all — subtract strokes from your score. This last one apparently never occurred to the makers of a new movie with the…
Oliver Twist It’s almost impossible to watch Roman Polanski’s rendition of Oliver Twist without drawing parallels between the deprivations endured by the book’s young protagonist and the director’s own brutal boyhood. A Jew raised in Nazi-occupied Poland, Polanski first tackled the Holocaust head-on in his 2002 film The Pianist, but…
Thomas Seyr, the central figure in director Jacques Audiard’s kinetically charged new film The Beat That My Heart Skipped, is a young Frenchman torn between a life of crime and a career as a concert pianist. It’s hardly your usual dilemma — and hardly the usual French film, come to…
Any thing can be anything to anybody, particularly in the case of David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence. If you want to believe that his new film, a loose adaptation of a little-known graphic novel, is a work of damning criticism aimed at the hypocrisy of Americans who believe violence…
I have been to the mountaintop, and, yes, I’ve eaten it, because that’s just the kind of guy I am. The edible pinnacle of which I speak is as formidable as Mexico’s Popocatepetl volcano, and while devouring it, I felt like the food-critic equivalent of some intrepid mountaineer determined to…
As the temperatures start to drop, Monday nights are heating up in the world of beats and thumps. The latest entry is hip-hop weekly Boom Bap Room at Big Fish Pub in Tempe (1954 East University Drive), kicking off on Monday, October 3. Brought to you by Universatile Music, the…
When last seen as a duo in 2002, Chief Xcel and Gift of Gab had just dropped Blazing Arrow, one of the most accomplished hip-hop albums in recent memory. An ambitious and humane collection, filled with eclectic samples, sensitive live instrumentation, and interesting guests (Ben Harper, Gil Scott-Heron), it was…
In a 2003 interview, Ryan Adams’ idol, Paul Westerberg, suggested that it might do the younger singer-songwriter some good to get his teeth kicked in. This seemingly mean-spirited comment, despite coming from someone who’d slapped an audience member that same year, was taken personally. But Westerberg was right. Anyone who…
Andrew: What are you listening to? Sam: The Shins, you know them? Andrew: No. Sam: You gotta hear this song, it’ll change your life, I swear. Andrew: Hmm, the song is skipping really bad. Sam: Oh, crap, look, there’s a big scratch on the disc! Andrew: Oh well. Sam: Wait,…
Mindless Self Indulgence hates you. Don’t worry, the band will still make out with you — but only after attempts at setting you on fire and maybe throwing feces at you. It’s a third-grade mentality, but it works. MSI aptly named its live album Alienating Our Audience, but the four-piece…
Kieran Hebden secured a contract for his English post-rock band Fridge while still in his teens. With the money he would’ve used for school, he bought a computer, and, after dropping out of school, began composing music on it during his off time from Fridge. Influenced by the hypnotic avant-jazz…
Battle Acts for week of September 29 through October 5 Battle Act: Green Day Where & When: Wednesday, October 5, America West Arena, $37 to $42.50 Strongest Selling Point: They’ve scored a career milestone by claiming American Idiot is “the first punk rock opera.” Somewhere, Meat Loaf is furiously mopping…
By the time Henry Rollins carries his last box of merchandise out the back door of Celebrity Theatre, the building lights have been shut off and the parking lot is almost empty. But a handful of fans still wait behind the line of tape that separates them from his tour…
Back in the day, I regularly watched DJ Radar perform with his Bombshelter DJs crew at Nita’s Hideaway and, later, the Green Room. The scratch virtuoso and I became friends, and I rarely missed one of his sets, even if it was at a rave where he was the only…
Jim Pederson is a consummate politician: He’s rich, well-connected, and not above pointing fingers at the opposition. He’s also quite dull — or, to be fair, at least unwilling to bite when he’s baited with stupid questions from newspaper reporters. All these skills will come in handy should the former…
In retrospect, it wasn’t exactly a brilliant move for an AIDS charity to bring on arch-conservative Congressman J.D. Hayworth as its partner. Hayworth, after all, has repeatedly refused to sponsor legislation that would prohibit workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation. In 2001, he voted to bar the District of Columbia…
Hours after the bizarre death last December of the City of Phoenix’s chief financial officer, city officials blamed a brain parasite contracted in Mexico for his bizarre demise. Now, nine months of extensive testing have eliminated the possibility that such a parasite caused Kevin Keogh, 55, to crawl out the…
Bill Rudy takes a slurp of the melted ice and Coke at the bottom of his cup. He cradles his last 1,400 in chips, takes another peek at the pair of cards he’s been dealt, mumbles to himself, and then makes the call. “What the hell,” he announces, pushing all…
