Sometimes, a drippy blue-raspberry Otter Pop just isn’t enough. Instead of inciting brain freeze from a pathetic Popsicle this summer, refine your palate. From simple shaved ice to gourmet gelato, there’s something to satisfy every type of sweet tooth and stave off the sweats. If you’re bored with Baskin-Robbins, and…
This summer will be my first in Phoenix, a simple statement that seems to come with a built-in drum roll. Say it to anyone in the Valley, and you’ll get a suitably dramatic response: The heat is like sticking your head in an oven. Or living in a blow-dryer. Or,…
Last Wednesday night, while the rest of America was watching Bo and Carrie duke it out in the final hour of American Idol, I was watching a room full of singers on a different stage. And thinking that maybe I’ve been watching too much television lately, because Phoenix Theatre’s production…
There was no reason to expect much from Cinderella Man, Ron Howard’s biography of boxer James Braddock, who in the summer of 1935 became the most unlikely heavyweight champion in the history of boxing. After all, it’s a true tale whose outcome has been predetermined; surely there could be no…
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is a flawed movie born of a flawed novel, but let this be clear: Girls will eat it up with a spoon. It features three young stars, indulges in rampant romantic fantasy, drips with teary-eyed sentimentality, and pays a heapload of lip service to…
Lords of Dogtown is an odd, disorienting commodity — a fictional version of a documentary (Dogtown and Z-Boys) about the birth of skateboarding in 1970s Venice, California, that was written by the man who directed said doc, in which he was a central figure. Stacy Peralta, whose Dogtown and Z-Boys…
Layer Cake, the new British crime drama from first-time director Matthew Vaughn, is a block of granite struggling to liberate the statue inside it. Vaughn (producer of Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) has plenty of dark threat and compelling visual style, but his ambitious trip into the…
Ten is a magical age, when kids are old enough to make articulate statements about their experience and young enough to express their feelings without shame. In a couple of years, excitement will go the way of the bag lunch and become uncool, and acceptable poses will shrink to a…
Jerry Springer wishes he could get into the Arizona Fetish Prom. After all, there’s going to be enough subculture action going on that he’d have material for his show for the next 10 years. But unless Springer springs for a leather g-string, he’d look really out of place. “We’re going…
She jokes about giving blowjobs to rescue workers after 9/11. She jokes about the myth of the vaunted G-spot. She even jokes about being fisted. But it isn’t comedienne Margaret Cho’s brash sexual jokes that have conservative groups protesting. Cho, a self-professed liberal, will be flying in to fill Dodge…
6/3-6/4Most of us can’t chalk up our blunders to “all the drugs we did in the ’60s.” Deadheads under the age of 50 have had to acknowledge that “acid” today is more strychnine than LSD, and since their parents did all the good drugs, they have no excuse for the…
FRI 6/3Kick the ball! Kick some ass! In this heat, they’ll never last! That’s what we’re hoping, at least, when the Vancouver Whitecaps come down from cooler climates to take on our own Arizona Heatwave in the Women’s United Soccer League’s Western Division. The game, which takes place Friday, June…
FRI 6/3Dear Cubicle Drone,We are pleased with your interest in The Raethier Corp and our latest event, Corposition, at 6 p.m. Friday, June 3, at Lumbre Metal Gallery, 925 Grand Avenue. Robert Kilman, a cog in our collective art machine, has reviewed your vitals and determined your “current condition of…
FRI 6/3Andrew Lockwood discovered he wasn’t the performer he fancied himself as part of the local bands Velveteen Dream and the Heartgraves. “When the Heartgraves disintegrated, I decided I needed to go in another direction,” Lockwood says, “and to very specifically stop trying to rock. Rocking is for people who…
Spoken Here By Mark Abley Mariner, $14 Schlepping Through the Alps By Sam Apple Ballantine, $23.95 Wrong About Japan By Peter Carey Knopf, $17.95 The 8:55 to Baghdad By Andrew Eames Overlook, $24.95 You Can’t Get There From Here By Gayle Forman Rodale, $23.95 A Continent for the Taking By…
The swamp cooler: water + electric fan = cool air. It’s a device as minimal as the desert landscape itself, and it entered American popular culture right here in Arizona. It’s as key to the classic Phoenix tableau as saguaros, ranch houses and retirees. Swampers are about leaving the door…
Deborah Butterfield makes horse statues, but don’t hold it against her. Her horses are not the ones of civic monuments, rendered in elegant marble and carrying some dead white war hero. Nor are they the romantic bronze beasts of flaring nostrils and lush manes cranked out by mediocre Western artists…
Like it or not, guns are as American as Happy Meals and maxed-out credit cards, so making them the theme of a group exhibition invites all kinds of timely and biting cultural criticism. The pieces in “The Gun Show: No Background Check Required” at reZurrection Gallery in Tempe are mixed…
“HOME: Native People in the Southwest”: The Heard ends a yearlong celebration of its 75th anniversary by opening a huge new gallery that houses a larger and improved exhibition of Southwestern Native American art. The new exhibition organizes 2,000 objects by tribe instead of type, includes maps of each tribe’s…
In front of a movie theater, far, far away, a family sits and waits. Dad is chatting with some cyber buddies, and Mom is reading. She reaches over and smoothes the hair of her youngest, who’s playing a video game on her cell phone. Nearby, her two oldest enact a…
Adam Sandler cast as a former pro quarterback — that laughable setup is about the only funny thing about this pointless, witless remake of The Longest Yard, which wasn’t intended to be taken as a comedy in 1974 and won’t be mistaken for one in its latest incarnation. (It was…
It’s fair to say that Madagascar, directed by one man who made Antz and another who used to work on Ren & Stimpy, is virtually plot-free — nothing more, really, than a scene or two from The Great Escape cut and pasted into an episode of Survivor. Its threadbare story…
