The “one thing” at the heart of Jill Sprecher’s 13 Conversations About One Thing may not have one name. But as you wend your way through this intricate meditation on urban solitude and the nature of fate, you’ll likely discover for yourself whether it’s called happiness, hope, domestic tranquility or…
If you’re searching for vitality in the scorched downtown streets of Phoenix, look no further than the LIFE Festival, a celebration of “Liberty, Independence and Freedom of Expression” at the Icehouse on Thursday, July 4. While the venue is in a prime location to watch the fireworks display overhead, there’s…
Celebrating life in the “Land of the Free” takes on a new meaning with all of the freebie (and almost-free) Independence Day events going on around the Valley. Just don’t forget that in the “Home of the Brave,” you can keep all 10 of your fingers and leave the blow-away…
They stream in and out, all day and all night, one after the other: band members, producers, business associates, friends, family, strangers, hangers-on who stare at the familiar face made infamous long ago. The tour bus, this parked sanctuary where he can roll his joints and drink his bottled Starbucks…
Roger Egan is pissed off. After 14 years as proprietor of McDuffy’s, Tempe’s most popular sports bar, Egan is about to get boned by Big Brother. To make matters worse, his efforts to squash Proposition 200, Tempe’s just-passed anti-smoking law, have come to naught. Neither Egan nor Tempeans for the…
If it’s possible for a film to be simultaneously ambitious and banal, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys is it. There’s little here we haven’t seen repeatedly in some form or another — growing up Catholic is popular fodder for filmmakers, as is growing up in the American South, usually…
What’s most surprising about Nine Queens, a wry if awfully derivative caper come-on from first-time feature director-writer Fabián Bielinsky, is how easily it suckers you into its swindle. After all, you know from jump that something’s up. You’ve sniffed out this con before in the films of David Mamet and…
Long before The Strokes, The White Stripes or The Hives — bands currently being hyped as the new triumvirate of torchbearers for the rock ‘n’ roll legacy — were a glimmer in anyone’s eye, vocalist Sky Sunlight Saxon was cranking out fuzz-blasted freak-beat psychedelia with his influential band The Seeds…
What’s 40 feet tall, weighs 58,000 pounds, has a jaw-crushing force of 20,000 pounds and consumes dead, fossilized dinosaurs? Well, besides Stone Cold Steve Austin. Robosaurus, the electro-hydromechanical car-nivorous monster, will breathe fire, crush cars and make the world safe for democracy at Ford Motor Company’s Jets vs. Funny Cars…
Get the hook! The theater season is winding up with a whimper, thanks to Is What It Is Theatre’s subpar production of The Curious Savage. On a set dressed with all the flair of a fourth-grade talent show, John Patrick’s humdrum comedy is being huffed out by yet another clutch…
Steven Spielberg just might turn into a great director if only he’d stop sabotaging his movies. For the second time in as many films, he demolishes his product with a third act that renders all that’s come before it void. It’s as though Minority Report, set in a near future…
It’s a nice surprise when a seemingly innocuous cartoon inspires inner critical debate. For fun, let’s let the coldly cynical voice speak first. Somewhere within Disney studios there is a board room, and doubtless there’s some scary honcho in there who clobbers a table full of yes-people with market research…
Remember going to the drive-in? Double features playing into the wee hours of the morning through a tinny window speaker, the picture slightly obscured by the couple making out in an old Caddy in front of you . . . This is just like the drive-ins you remember — except…
College students face an age-old dilemma when starting their careers: You can’t get hired without experience, but you can’t get experience without a job. Well, not unless you’re a student in the Department of Theatre at ASU’s Herberger College. More than 60 undergraduate students (and some alumni, too) have taken…
Shouldn’t have said yes, couldn’t say no. The deal was simple, and those who chose to accept it had made their own private pact with the showbiz-journalism devil. “You will spend an hour with Tom Cruise and an hour with Steven Spielberg,” said the publicist, a lovely woman from 20th…
In an age when televised car chases are a staple on the local news — edging out coverage of murders and the latest political bungle — Phoenix is proud to own perhaps the most sensational footage ever broadcast. It’s a chase so spectacular that it made an international celebrity of…
Five years ago, this interview would have been such the big deal—the coup of the year, the elusive great white at last wriggling on the hook. At least, that’s how she was treated back then, when she still took her meals in that velvet closet. She attracted the spotlight (some…
When I first reviewed Joe Marshall’s Dirty Secrets three years ago, I was wowed by the smart story but lamented the second-rate acting of that particular production. Little has changed on either front with this show, which Alternative Theater Company has remounted at On the Spot playhouse, the scene of…
The plot of The Bourne Identity is astonishingly straightforward. It is bereft of twists (instead, we’re offered tangible explanations), free of the gaping plot holes that swallow confused viewers, and absent the cynical machinations of filmmakers who believe that, to entertain, it’s necessary to also bamboozle. This adaptation of Robert…
The opening credit sequence of Windtalkers — a montage of Monument Valley — instantly invokes memories of the opening of John Woo’s immediately previous film, Mission: Impossible 2, in which Tom Cruise was dangling off a rock. It is the last moment of similarity between the two. Windtalkers is a…
There’s more than meets the eye in the thought-provoking artworks included in one of Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art’s current exhibitions, “Quartet,” a collection of works by four Arizona-based artists. Although their styles differ, these artists share an intimate role in the subtle revelation of nature’s mysteries. Kate Breakey’s four…
When warehouse manager Patrick Kellum got married, he did so dressed as “Wild Bill” Hickok, with his wife Chris done up as Sally Jensen. When a friend “objected” to the marriage, they gunned him down during the ceremony. Such is life for a gunfighter. Since 1993, The Arizona Gunfighters, who…
