If anything good has come from Sheriff Joe’s tyranny, it’s the art being created in response. The latest creative commentary to surface is New Carpa Theater Company’s The Tears of Lives, a play by James E. Garcia, directed by Luis Avila. It tells the tale of fictional Regino Ortega, an…
Did you roll your eyes at the by-the-numbers triteness of Being John Malkovich? Did you yawn and squirm in your seat at the formulaic banality of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Did you mutter “same old, same old” as you walked out of Synecdoche, New York? Well, Charlie Kaufman…
Hollywood almost-star Lisa Cerasoli has made a sorta-career out of making semi-wrong turns. But however you frame her present, the cutie-pie Arizona State University alum seems satisfied with it, and how she arrived at it. The Michigan native stumbled onto ASU more or less by chance, earning her theater degree…
Mystery authors Ann Parker, Juliet Blackwell, and Sophie Littlefield (pictured) discuss their many femme creations in this panel discussion. Sat., Aug. 15, 2 p.m., 2009…
The tasting-slash-guessing game challenges participants to guess if a certain wine came with a screw cap or a cork. Those who guess ’em all right receive a prize. Wed., Aug. 19, 6:30 p.m., 2009…
The 2003 film Our Nationhood, which chronicles the ongoing challenges of the Mi’kmaq community at Listuguj in Quebec, screens during the Heard’s Movie Mondays series. Mon., Aug. 17, 1:30 p.m., 2009…
If you think right-wing religious nuts went crazy when Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code came out, just wait ’til they hear that businessman Lon Safko rewrote the Bible. The Social Media Bible, that is. He even blogged his own Ten Commandments, which begins with the obvious “Thou Shalt…
Compared to the Japanese movie House (Hausu), Evil Dead 2 seems about as frenzied, surreal, and blackly comic as an episode of The Brady Bunch. Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 feature has seven adorable Japanese girls spending their school break at a haunted house presided over by the imposing aunt of one…
Midnite Movie Mamacita screens Tommy Wiseau’s love-triangle turkey, which she refers to as “Floor Plan 9 from Outer Space.” Others have called it “the Citizen Kane of bad movies,” and the flick, which belly-flopped on its first run, has become a sensation in L.A.’s midnight-movie circuit. Fri., Aug. 14, 9…
The fundraiser for Phoenix Pride features neo-soul by Valley singer Lauren Winston (pictured), spins by DJ Sophia Gunn, sushi and cocktails, and a silent auction. Sat., Aug. 15, 8 p.m., 2009…
Sometimes the weekend is just too far away, even if we’re still recovering from the last one, and we need Monday to be our fun day. Thanks to enterprising young comics like Ashley Pirouznia and the Ashley’s What Are Ya, Def? Comedy Slam, we’ve got a fighting chance at surviving…
The rising young troupe presents an action-packed evening of works, including its second collaboration with the also-rising young choreographer Emery LeCrone. Fri., Aug. 14, 8 p.m.; Sat., Aug. 15, 2 & 8 p.m., 2009…
Mimi is a drug-addicted whore. Roger is a rocker. Angel is a drag queen. Perhaps most shocking of all, Angel’s boyfriend is a former MIT professor. And Mark Cohen is trying to get them all onto film, because Mark is a wannabe filmmaker who hopes to become a famous movie…
God, are we sick to friggin’ death of watching celebs and regular schmoes tip the scales on reality weight-loss shows like The Biggest Loser and DietTribe. This is America, land of the lard-ass and the free, and our national verve seems to be going the way of our fatty acids…
You should know by now that there are more chickens in the world than any other type of bird. They may not be smart or beautiful or willing to learn tricks, but they sure are popular. And for good reason. The feathered ground scrabblers eat pests, lay eggs, and can…
Brazil seems pretty cool and stuff. Fine fútbol, beautiful woman, and music that, if you dig below surface of the typical samba, bossa nova, and Brazilian jazz, is pretty darn awesome. Take Database for example. The Brazil-based, French-house emcee collective started making music together in 2007 in the vein of…
Okay, Lisa Lampanelli, we’ve checked out your pretty new hair and glam frocks on Comedy Central roasts and your HBO Long Live the Queen special. We’re massively stoked about your upcoming memoir, Chocolate, Please! And we’re happy you’ve found love, even if it’s with a fat Italian club owner from…
We get a lot of funny looks when we tell people about our tendency to sit on the toilet backwards. What we’ve noticed, however, is that those funny looks tend to evaporate when people bother to actually try doing their business “Slater-style,” à la Saved by the Bell. We get…
In our experience, local bands that promote the crap out of themselves with flier bombardments, MySpace bulletin blitzkriegs, and/or free CD-Rs aplenty turn out to be not so good. But Pigeon Religion, a Tempe-based rock-punk group that personally hands out oodles of fliers and business cards, is worth all of…
Seems like only yesterday that we were stoked on seeing Nivek Ogre and his band ohGr perform at the Marquee last December. But no matter how great the performance was, many die-hard fans of Skinny Puppy were still left with a gaping hole in the shape of cEvin Key –…
This is typically where you’d find a diatribe against Hellogoodbye and their bland, unoriginal electro-rock sound. True, the band sounds like an unlikely (and unwanted) collaboration between Blink-182 and T-Pain. True, there are certainly bands that do the whole dance-rock thing to much greater effect (Under the Influence of Giants,…
The former Hermosa Beach punk-rocker sticks it to the inland empire with this lovely, acidic showing of paintings and drawings inspired by (duh) golden-age Disney, film noir, James Ellroy, and Edward Hopper. Fri., Aug. 21, 6-10 p.m., 2009…
