Wristcutters: A Love Story, a well-wrought indie written and directed by Goran Dukic, has to be the kewpie doll of current zombie flicks: Its walking dead are a bunch of attractive slackers whose wounds are largely internal. They’ve got attitude. Before the opening credits end, the movie’s glum protagonist has…
Less a war drama than a set of dueling position papers, Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs may be the gabbiest movie ever made about American foreign policy — and it wasn’t even written by Aaron Sorkin. Hot young screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan is fresh off his alpha-male script for The…
Phillip Fazio, a youngish local stage director and artist in residence at Phoenix Theatre, e-mailed me recently to tell me, in effect, it isn’t fair that I’ve given up on the smaller East Valley theaters because I think they do only tired old shows everyone’s seen a hundred times. I…
Debbie Does Dallas: The Musical: Artists Theatre Project launches its fifth season with a reprise of the company’s popular 2004 staging of this campy tuner about a whorish teen with her eyes on the big prize. This adaptation of the classic 1978 skin flick was already old news when @Pro…
Castlevania, the vampire-hunting series that stretches over 20 years and as many games, has two kinds of fans. There are the traditionalists, who’ve followed the games since they were straight-up action titles with thumb-busting combat and infamously steep difficulty curves. Most agree that the best of the old-school Castlevanias is…
Sesame Street: Old School Volume 2 (Genius) On the heels of the Electric Company boxed sets, which were at once educational and groovy as all get-out, comes the latest in greatest hits from Sesame Street, before the neighborhood was gentrified for Elmo’s protection. Chief among the copious highlights in this…
The Best of the Colbert Report (Paramount) Blame It on Fidel! (Koch Lorber) Blood Car (TLA) The Crown Prince (Koch) Deck the Halls (Fox) Election (Tartan) Flight of the Conchords: The Complete First Season (HBO) Help!: Deluxe Edition (Capitol) I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry (Universal) James Bond Ultimate…
Yes! in my backyard. That’s the message behind the third annual Certified Local! Fall Festival, an activist fair highlighting local entrepreneurs who are doing it for themselves. So what’s in store? Stacy Bertinelli of the event’s organizer, Local First Arizona, says: “You can get a jump on your holiday shopping…
Considering the insanity that has been NCAA football 2007, we’ve been feeling an itch to hit the gridiron for some football of the non-contact variety. (Definitely not tackle, because we’re not that tough. We’re freaking writers.) And if Appalachian State can knock off Michigan, then why can’t we be recruited…
Art patrons, families, dude bros, and even Maricopa County plainclothes officers who aren’t on roundup duty are invited to the Heard Museum Spanish Market. More than 75 Southwest-area artists will sell their works while mariachi ensembles represent with south-of-the-border beats. Sat., Nov. 10; Sun., Nov. 11, 2007…
The standard-issue high school cheerleader is a baby-fatted, gawky teen destined for marriage and motherhood, but what of the preternatural beauty who realizes all she needs is that one lucky break or a good agent? In the 1978 skin flick Debbie Does Dallas, a naive pep squad pools its sexual…
To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee won the 1961 Pulitzer for her timeless tale about Atticus Finch, Scout, and Boo Radley, but did she really write it? In his unauthorized bio Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, author and Lee scholar Charles J. Shields refutes the rumors that Mockingbird…
Hillary Rodham Clinton is pilloried regularly by dittoheads and the endlessly fulminating drones on Fox News, but the vast left-wing conspiracy has pretty much represented her with hand jobs and puff pieces. Until now. Carl Bernstein, the Pulitzer Prize winner and former Washington Post reporter who worked with Bob Woodward…
Ever wonder how hot Lieutenant Uhura (circa ’67, of course) would look on the big screen? Thought so. As if the nerd gods were listening, the divine Nichelle Nichols and the rest of the original Enterprise gang have finally been delivered to us in remastered, high-def glory in the form…
Women’s sports rule in the Valley. You hear us, Arizona Pigeons, uh, Cardinals? If you don’t believe it, let’s jostle those brain cells and remind you of the Phoenix Mercury’s WNBA championship as well as the ASU Women’s Basketball team, which made it to last year’s NCAA Elite Eight. The…
Doncha hate it when your nerdish friends quote their favorite bits from the Star Wars trilogy (the original, not the execrable prequels)? You know the scenes… the Mos Eisley cantina, the trash compactor, “I am your father.” While such mimicry seems irritating coming from our über-geek pals, it’s kickass coming…
Screw the baker’s dozen. It’s all about the number 10, because we Americans base our cultural milestones on the lovely number. When we turned 10 years old, we were pumped to enter an age expressed in double digits. Our first significant high school reunion is the 10th. And, most important,…
Your beloved grandma dies. Hard enough, so tell us you’re not gonna take a picture of her in the casket and keep it by the hearth, okay? Well, they did back in the Victorian Age, when death was a familiar caller and the act of dying was seen as more…
We don’t know if it’s Spike Lee’s temper tantrums, visions of Patrick Ewing’s box haircut, or the fact that their mascot is Dutch trousers, but it’s always a treat when the New York Knickerbockers come to town to battle the Phoenix Suns. This game marks the Knicks’ only Valley stop…
A brief history of NASCAR: The automobile was born. Two Southern dandies looked askance at one another. In lieu of dueling pistols, they jumped in their jalopies and set off on a gripping, 14-mph game of chicken. Somebody slapped a gigantic endorsement on the winner’s flivver. This, of course, is…
We scoured the globe to find this event: the New Times 10K presented by Whole Foods. The 13th-largest race in the States will feature a grip of fitness challenges, including a 5K run and walk, a 10K wheelchair event, and the main race. Sun., Nov. 11, 8:30 a.m., 2007…
The mouth-watering smell of juicy meat roasting over open flame will mix with the sweet smell of success at this weekend’s Southwest International BBQ Cookoff: Dual in the Desert, where competing teams of cagey cooks from four different states descend upon Rawhide for some grillin’ gamesmanship to determine who can…
