There’s no explicable reason for the existence of The Replacements, which is to the football-film genre what Major League was to the baseball movie: sports rendered as sitcom (or Police Academy sequel). The Replacements, which takes as its cue the 1987 National Football League players’ strike, is stocked with every…
It would be the easiest thing in the world to write off But I’m a Cheerleader, the story of a teenager discovering her sexual identity through a program designed to repress it, as a Saturday Night Live sketch somewhat awkwardly inflated to feature length. But when you start looking deeper…
Okay, so there are these beautiful ladies in tight clothes, right? And — get this — they serve alcohol while dancing suggestively! Sound cool? How about we make a movie about them? The premise oughta be enough to draw in the guys, and we’ll call it “female empowerment” or something…
Not since the Bay of Pigs Invasion blew over without nuclear fireworks, perhaps, has America breathed such a collective sigh of relief over the outcome of a crisis on an island as we did at news, two Wednesdays past, that Gervase would not be the sole Survivor. Now we can…
In the ancient Greek tradition, Eros, a.k.a. Cupid, was the son of Chaos. This ancestry might make more sense to Phoenix’s own Jill Reger, creator of the online comic Dipuc.com, than the one which later Roman mythological tradition gave to the God of Love — that the spiteful little bastard…
“Please hold for Tammy Faye.” The few seconds between those words and those that follow, uttered by the woman who once haunted pay-to-pray TV like a mascara-ed harlequin, are interminable. Until a month ago, the notion of talking to Tammy Faye Bakker-Messner, once the most adored and reviled figure in…
“This kid’s gonna be the biggest superstar DJ to ever come out of this place,” says DJ Fact, pointing to his partner, Megadef. The two turntablists are sitting at a quiet Tempe restaurant, and the younger Mega, glasses magnifying a baby face, mutters a bashful “We’ll see . . .”…
I am Vlad the Impaler, Joe Eszterhas’ penis. You know Joe, right? Bigfoot-looking son of a bitch, like Jerry Garcia after he swallowed Brian Wilson on an Acapulco Gold high? The guy who wrote Basic Instinct and Showgirls and Flashdance and a whole lotta crap for which he was paid…
The bewildering penchant of recent American movies for glorifying the lovable naïf, the perpetual adolescent and the village idiot takes a strange new turn in Miguel Arteta’s dark comedy Chuck & Buck. Arteta’s hero, Buck O’Brien (Mike White), is a 27-year-old manchild who eats lollipops all day long, takes refuge…
It’s a pleasure to say that Clint Eastwood reverses his recent downward slide — A Perfect World (1993), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Absolute Power (1997), and True Crime (1999), each of which has seemed less satisfying than its predecessor — with Space Cowboys, his latest. It isn’t an…
So who are these celebrated Coen brothers anyway, and what’s their point? These days, it’s pretty easy to switch over to critical autopilot, to gush about funny-looking friends shoved into wood chippers or Hula-Hoops being designed, you know, for the kids. But where does the slender path of the Coen…
There are many, many productive paths a bright, ambitious young fellow can pursue in America. He can, for instance, start a mediocre rock band and try to make music for beer commercials. He can also design a Web site to advertise Web sites about Web sites. Or there’s always the…
Usually, no matter how much things slow to a crawl here in the Valley under the punishment of the summer heat, there’s always an out — you can go to the movies. But this summer’s crop of movies has been, by and large, so dull that even that’s not a…
Technically speaking, they’re supporting characters — in the dramatic scheme of the play, they don’t really advance the plot, they just provide a comic-relief subplot from the far duller story of the troubled courtship of Claudio and Hero. Yet their comical romance is what has made the play immortal. In…
It’s tempting to think there’s something twisted about her tale. After all, she was a mere 18 the first time she had sex in front of a camera–for money, small change that would soon enough blossom into a pile of cash–and did so only at the insistence of her boyfriend,…
Only in the movies could a kid who looks and acts like Jason Biggs be called a loser. Let’s see: charming conversationalist, big smile, washboard abs? Oh yeah, those’ll make a guy unpopular, for sure. About the only thing that’s surprising about Biggs’ character in Loser is that the filmmakers…
Peter Fonda is the top-billed star of Thomas and the Magic Railroad. The plot involves Fonda and Thomas the Tank Engine steaming across the country, with Steppenwolf blaring on the soundtrack, to Mardi Gras, a stash of dope taped under Thomas’ cow-catcher. They have an acid trip with New Orleans…
T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock wondered whether he dared to eat a peach. But Valley residents need not ask themselves so soul-searching a question. For the next two weekends or so, we need only ask ourselves if we dare to pick a peach. Or several pounds of peaches.Wickenburg’s Date Creek Ranch –…
This year marks the 10th anniversary of what some regard as the finest, and others the only, major accomplishment of the Bush administration: the day — June 26, 1990 — when ol’ George Senior signed the Americans With Disabilities Act into law. Various events are being held around the country…
In the course of two hours, Neil Gaiman speaks 10,000 words (or damned near, when transcribed), and it seems a shame to waste a single one, since there is not an uh or y’know among them. Even the most eloquent writer gets lost in thought every now and then…uh…y’know? But…
There’s a saying in Latin that goes, “Ars longa, vita brevis.” Translation: Art is long, life is short. Inside the Tonatierra Center in downtown Phoenix, that sentiment rings true for the pieces hanging on the walls, but not for the majority of the work that its creators paint. Two weeks…
The exhibition catalogue accompanying Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art’s latest offering, “do it,” makes no bones about it. The show’s title, notes catalogue essayist Bruce Altshuler, is designed to bring to mind the nostalgic rallying cry of radical Vietnam War protestor and Yippie co-founder Jerry Rubin, as well as the…
