The Upside of Anger belongs to Joan Allen, who plays Terry Wolfmeyer, a wife abandoned by her husband and left to pick up the pieces and collect them in a giant bottle of vodka. Terry’s is the cold, composed visage of a woman struggling to keep it together; through her…
The Ring, Gore Verbinski’s 2002 remake of Hideo Nakata’s Ringu, offered sufficient closure that it didn’t exactly demand a sequel. The horror lay in wondering why a mysterious videotape kills viewers seven days after they watch it; to a lesser extent, there was the mystery of the creepy girl, face…
You’d think your own brother wouldn’t bust your watermelon. Produce-pulverizing comedian Gallagher didn’t have a problem with his younger brother, Ron, touring as a Gallagher impersonator, as long as Ron didn’t perform Gallagher’s signature move: smashing watermelons with a sledgehammer at the end of the show. But things got messy…
By day, Paula Shimel is an unassuming real estate marketer who loves to eat chocolate, update her blog and gush over her three cats, Nermal, Nala and Bastet. But on Friday nights, she straps on black vinyl platform boots, carefully laces up her corset, and, if it’s cold outside, grabs…
FRI 3/18 “The Moog,” as it’s known among musical types, is the indispensable electronic synthesizer that has pioneered both mainstream and independent music movements over the past 40 years. It also happens to be one of the most criminally mispronounced names in the history of popular culture (correct pronunciation rhymes…
SAT 3/19 Slash and Scott Weiland (formerly of Guns n’ Roses and Stone Temple Pilots, respectively) might have mellowed a bit — a tad bit — since the days of their reckless youth. But the Speed Jam at Phoenix International Raceway, 7602 South 115th Avenue in Avondale, on Saturday, March…
SAT 3/19 Grandpa’s been acting kookier than normal lately, whistling “Pennsylvania 6-5000” to himself, and doing a solo Charleston in the mirror. But don’t up his dosage of Xanax just yet, as the old coot’s probably just aching to skedaddle to “A Night in the 40’s” Big Band Dance and…
3/22-3/26 Mark Lundholm refers to himself as “a professional mistake-maker.” In 1988, he found himself in a halfway house after carjacking for fixes. The divorced father of two had gone from being a Catholic altar boy to a homeless addict and mental patient. He found some humor in it all,…
Playwright Oscar Wilde once quipped, “Work is the curse of the drinking class,” and we’re inclined to agree with the swishy scribe, especially when it comes to this year’s St. Patrick’s Day. Since the annual exercise in alcohol excess falls on a weekday, you’d better have a sick day up…
“I hate them guys,” explains my stepdad as he sits and watches me shoot Nazis through my XBox on my 32-inch Panasonic television, which he can’t stop raving about because of the colors. “Okay, Indy,” I say to Nick, who’s 74 years old and able to remember every great movie…
Imagine for a moment that you’re at a diner, and you’ve just ordered one of those “man-size” breakfast combos, the kind that come with four eggs and three kinds of meat and griddle cakes and a side of hash browns and a little plate of toast. In the space of…
THU 10 You’ve heard the joke about joining the Army, right? “Travel to exotic places, meet interesting people, and kill them.” Well, in James’ Journey to Jerusalem, which closes out the Phoenix Jewish Film Festival on Thursday, March 10, at the Harkins Camelview 5, 7001 East Highland in Scottsdale, our…
Once upon a time, folks who kept their checkbooks balanced and hung up their clothes when they weren’t wearing them were considered well organized. Today, these people are Obsessive Compulsives, the scourge of the nation, strapped into recovery programs and ridiculed on Maury Povich because they occasionally polish their shoes…
The Last Five Years, which played briefly off-Broadway in 2002, chronicles a young couple’s romance using two different time lines. Her story starts at the end of their relationship, while his begins at the beginning, on the day they meet. The two stories collide briefly at the couple’s wedding, then…
Toward the end of Born Into Brothels, a superb and piercing documentary by directors Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, a 12-year-old child examines a photograph. It’s beautiful, he says, because it shows us how its subjects live. Yes, they’re very poor, and the shot is hard to look at, because…
“From the creators of Ice Age,” boasts the poster for Robots, which is no ringing endorsement. That 2002 animated feature, a sort of Three Mammals and a Baby in a prehistoric setting, looked and felt every bit as frigid as its snowbound scenery; it was impossible to warm to a…
If you’re looking for an escapist shoot-’em-up action adventure, and figure a Bruce Willis flick is a reliable option, think twice. Hostage certainly delivers violence and heroics, but not in a way everyone will enjoy. Children and dogs die brutally, and the villains are so thoroughly hateful that even the…
When was the last time you lost yourself in a Shakespeare film? It’s a testament to the success of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the sharp and brooding new version directed by Michael Radford (Il Postino), that we leave the theater without concern for the production. Instead, the response…
With the amount of breakables among the more than 185 booths at the Scottsdale Arts Festival this year — including jewelry, ceramic, drawing, glass, metal, mixed media, painting, photography, printmaking and sculpture — you’d be best off shopping with your eyes. But while you may not be able to touch…
Tongues are still wagging about the night in 1990 when Phoenix Theatre’s curtain came up to reveal a giant naked man, his ass rouged and spotlighted in the first moments of the company’s production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The derrière belonged to actor Christopher Wynn, and one of the gasps…
3/10-1/1 In the late 19th century, the U.S. government implemented a policy of assimilation to deal with what it termed the country’s “Indian problem.” The goal was nothing less than erasing all outward traces of Indian culture, and the means was forcibly removing Native American children from their homes and…
3/14-3/20 We may be saucy spectators at the FBR Open, but LPGA golfer and Phoenix resident Carin Koch says she’s never had any hecklers here. If she did, she says she would “probably tell them to go away or stop it.” Well, that beats a golf club to the head…
