Trotted out like ol’ Trigger whenever there’s a movie with saddles and six-shooters, the term “revisionist Western” would surely be a cliché if there were enough Westerns to warrant its use more than every few years. Fact is, any movie in a genre as depressingly out to pasture as the…
With ice caps melting, sea levels rising, and Poseidon sinking fast, this is no environment for any disaster movie — particularly a real one — to take our interest for granted. Thus An Inconvenient Truth, named for the super-bad news of global climate change, isn’t just another lefty doc for…
Face paint? Check. NoDoz? Check. Deep wellsprings of violent nationalistic pride? No doubt, mate. Yes, it’s time for the World Cup, that quadrennial spectacle that consumes the globe for a month of TV marathons, street parties, and patriotic gestures by men with shaved skulls. That means it’s also time for…
The John Wayne/John Ford Film Collection (Warner Bros.) Featuring the most epic pairing of director and actor in Hollywood history, this 10-disc box spews machismo all over. Wayne and Ford defined not only the western and war-movie genres, but also our culture’s image of rugged manhood. Among the highlights is…
“Annual Summer Juried Exhibition” at ASU Harry Wood Gallery: This year’s crop of MFA hopefuls shows a surprising awareness of domestic issues including water conservation, racial profiling and changing family values. Look for tongue-in-cheek political lampoons, like Exhibitions Class Award winner Corie J. Cole’s ceramic caricatures of cowboy Bush and…
We’ve seen them listed in playbills, and maybe we’ve even been seated near one in a restaurant or on a bus. But who knows what stage managers actually do, anyway? Glenn Bruner does. As stage manager for Arizona Theatre Company, Bruner is the lifeline to the actors, the props people,…
You know how in most romantic comedies, the best friends are nearly always more interesting than the actual leads we’re supposed to care about? The Break-Up doesn’t play that game. Vince Vaughn is the focus and the primary source of entertainment, which is all the more impressive when you consider…
There was a time when people moaned whenever Hollywood would remake — and thus suck the life out of — a classic movie. These days, Hollywood just sucks the life out of movies that weren’t that great in the first place. Ah, progress. Well, June 6, 2006, is upon us,…
The Old West has vanished, John Wayne is dead, and — this just in — the two most famous ranch hands in America are gay. But there would be no point in telling any of that to Harlan Fairfax Carruthers, the deceptively charming protagonist of Down in the Valley. Like…
We’ve all done it — killed an afternoon drinking in a pleasantly grungy roadhouse somewhere, boozily enjoying the illusion of having fallen off the grid, playing semi-forgotten blues songs on an outdated jukebox, and thinking aloud, See, I should capture this feeling. This should be a movie. Sobered up, we…
UC-Berkeley gymnast Dan Millman (Scott Mechlowicz) is one of the best at what he does, and he has it all: perfect abs, a big bulge in his crotch (the camera focuses on it early on), beautiful girlfriends, and the ability to balance full beer glasses on his feet. There’s just…
First, the accolades: Arizona Theatre Company’s production of Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays With Morrie is nearly perfect. Its actors turn in superb performances; its stage design is magnificent; its director, Samantha K. Wyer, brings subtleties to its simple, sad, two-character story. Which all leads to Morrie’s working so beautifully on the…
If the creepy, self-flagellating albino monk in The Da Vinci Code really wanted to suffer, he’d drop his flesh-shredding cat-o’-nine-tails, pick up a controller, and play The Da Vinci Code videogame. It’s that bad. Now it can be told: The Da Vinci Code game is one of the crappiest, crap-lousy…
Will & Grace: Series Finale (Lions Gate) The way this got hustled to shelves, mere days after Will Truman and Grace Adler said their mushy farewells, you’d think this were some classic adios — another M*A*S*H or Cheers wrap-up. Alas, it was just another Very Special Episode of a show…
Whether your summer vacation starts in May and ends in September, or just consists of weekends and the Fourth of July, we want to help you make your vay-cay more than okay. So stick your toe in our guide to keeping your sanity when all those around you are sweltering…
Barbecue envy. You know you’ve had it. You feel it every time you arrange that finger-blackening pile of Kingsford charcoal on your half-baked hibachi. If your heart races when you finger the Sunday Weber ads and you whisper sweet nothings to the stainless-steel 53-inch Vikings at Lowe’s, you know what…
Just after I turned 39, I started making mosaics. Suddenly I began buying tile trivets, ceramic figurines and odd pieces of old china at thrift stores, smashing the objects into pieces with a hammer, and reassembling the shards into two-dimensional images that I then mortared or glued on anything I…
If the Iliad were brand-new — if it were one of this summer’s beach-reading blockbusters — it wouldn’t be a swashbuckling saga of siege, slave girls, and slaughter. That stuff might be in there, sure, but just as adornments to the main bit, which would be Homer yakking about how…
Summer is the season of high expectations and profound disappointments. That suntan looks more like sunburn, your beer stays ice cold ’til the moment it’s opened, and fat guys are the only ones hanging by the pool in bikini briefs. So it goes with summer movies: Sequels to beloved faves…
Your folks will be spending the summer on a Serengeti safari. The roommates are gonna dance ’til dawn in the dapper discotheques of Ibiza. And your boss? He’ll be slamming sake amid the hustle and flow of Tokyo. Meanwhile, you’ll be stuck wiling away your summer vacay at home. Sure,…
Urban legend has it that you’ve gotta be downright filthy rich (and/or retired) to escape the sweltering Phoenix summer. Meet some mythbusters with sweet careers — or lack thereof — that give them a chance to split town, come June. Become a “Professional” Student Angel Fuentes plans on never trading…
A friend and I have resolved that this will be the first summer of our lives during which we never once complain about the heat. Each of us has spent our lives here in the desert, and both of us are champion whiners — she about injustices against children and…
