War Grime

Ride With the Devil

Directed by Ang Lee; with Skeet Ulrich, Tobey Maguire and Jewel.

Rated R.

Pine Soul

Among my more annoying flaws, friends tell me, is an unnatural affection for Christmas. I’m one of those fellows who spends the day after Thanksgiving searching for the perfect spruce pine. My holiday shopping is completed long before Halloween, and I begin playing my huge collection of Christmas records sometime…

Street Smarts

Tumbleweeds

Directed by Gavin O’Connor; with Janet McTeer and Kimberly J. Brown.

Rated PG-13.

Tried and Troubadour

The writer of a full-page rave of David Shepherd Grossman’s 10-CD boxed set in the October issue of Songwriter’s Monthly grumbles that New Times didn’t return the writer’s calls while he was writing the story. Since no one from this publication had any comment in that article, let this one…

Blues Christmas

When you hear, “I’m crossover, man, Southern rock and . . . ,” or, “My thang is kinda that hiphopnewgrungefunky-type jazz thang, y’know? . . .” or, “Uh, I do strictly blues,” it’s a fair bet you’re being snowed. A good musician won’t lay style on you. He’ll just say,…

Tide Score

In a performance space as intimate as PlayWright’s Theatre, you can name the moment when a play has grabbed its audience. That moment came during opening night of Theatre Maxim’s Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, when actor April Umbrianna blurted out her character’s horrible secret. The smallish audience froze…

Jackson Action

Forty years ago, a sculptor could stop almost any American museum crowd in its tracks by erecting an abstract tower of metal. But as times have changed, sculptural works in fabricated steel have steadily lost that allure. They haven’t suffered the infamy of collapsing on and killing college students for…

King’s Row

Have you ever endured a relationship in which your partner beat you up mercilessly, just so they could “heal” you and play the redeemer later on? Granted, that’s a weird question and perhaps one better explored via Akbar and Jeff in Matt Groening’s Life in Hell strip, but it directly…

Thumber and Lightning

The legend “That Afternoon” appears onscreen, and then we see a car hurtle past us on a lonely desert road, hotly pursued by two Arizona Highway Patrol units. Behind the wheel, our hero Wade (Drew Pillsbury) sits with a stricken look on his face, plainly baffled at how he’s gotten…

Sojourn Blue

Be forewarned: In the continuing quest to get people to pay attention to their films by any means necessary, the marketing wizards at Artisan Entertainment have been misrepresenting Felicia’s Journey to an even greater extent than the Shooting Gallery did The Minus Man (also distributed by Artisan). No doubt hoping…

Tomlin Foolery

Before she — or anyone else — had ever heard the term, Lily Tomlin was already a performance artist. Growing up in blue-collar Detroit, Tomlin says that she never missed a chance to dress up and do monologues for her friends and family. “I’d put on my mother’s slip, and…

Pack Again

They never used the name. Sinatra really hated it. Ever modest, he preferred “The Summit,” but somehow that never stuck. Back in the early ’60s, when the Chairman and a few of his best show-biz pals gathered in Las Vegas to do a movie and have a few laughs, they…

Tijuana Brash

If the latest show in the back room of Lisa Sette Gallery reminds you of being hustled by souvenir vendors wielding lacy glass galleons and spray-painted plaster statues of the Sacred Heart of Jesus or Mickey Mouse at the Tijuana-San Diego border, you’ve actually gotten the real drift of “Nouveau…

Designing Men

Warren McArthur knows something about the tenacity of fiction. For the past quarter century, he has been trying to undo the popular one that presents America’s über-architect Frank Lloyd Wright as the designer of the Arizona Biltmore. “My uncle Albert [Chase McArthur] was the real architect, but I guess some…

Spain Check

At the beginning of Spanish Fly, Zoe, the heroine, meets Antonio, who’s both Spanish and fly. Zoe’s an American writer staying in Madrid to research a book on machismo. Antonio, a blocked writer himself and a not-at-all-blocked womanizer, is her interpreter. They start bickering at once, so we know they’re…

Christ on a Crutch

The last time Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in an apocalypse-themed action movie with a Guns n’ Roses theme song was in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the biggest and loudest action movie that had thus far ever been seen. Since that time, he’s produced one bona fide balls-to-the-wall action flick (True Lies),…

Mahfood for Thought

Trivia question: What Tempe comic artist is a favorite of Ben Affleck, has common bonds with Salma Hayek, and recently appeared in Kevin Smith’s Dogma? Answer: Jim Mahfood. The artist hit the national comic scene hard in April 1998 with the release of Generation X Underground for Marvel Comics, and…

Return of the Nativity

With the arrival of Santa/Hanukkah Harry/Y2K still a couple of weeks off, the festive season is at its height this week, and, as a result, holiday concerts are abundant. Here’s a run-down of a few of the possibilities: Phoenix Symphony — Despite all the seasonal sounds around the Valley this…

Gash Register

I took more pleasure in telling people I was going to a play called Shopping and Fucking than I did from the play itself. But Planet Earth Theatre’s production of this persuasively creepy little drama — which was a huge hit in London’s West End several years ago — isn’t…

Hokeymon

The wide-screen debut of Pokémon has two subtitles: The First Movie, which implies, with almost tragic inevitability, the promise of a Second and a Third and so on, stretching out into the infinite reaches of posterity; and Mewtwo Strikes Back, which implies almost nothing, presumably even to those immersed in…

Pixar Shtick

How do you make a sequel to a nearly perfect film? Toy Story, the 1995 hit from Disney and Pixar, was not only the first fully computer-animated feature; it was also as brilliantly written and directed a film as any of the classic Disney releases. Pixar did nearly everything right…