Many of my favorite films of the year are still awaiting wider release, so although this top 10 list wraps up my 2010, it can also serve as a guide to your 2011. My number one film, in fact, sneaks into New York just three days before the year ends:…
Every four years, the American people act en masse to send a message to the nation’s power brokers, and every four years, this vote is interpreted as a sign of the decline in taste, intelligence, and moral rectitude of the populace. Every four years, a Jackass movie opens at number…
Midnite Movie Mamacita is a household name around these parts, and she’s hoping her award-winning work translates into overflow crowds when she opens her very own cinema house. “Finally, after five years of programming [and] doing events at other people’s locations, I’m finally making the step to create my own…
Jason McClure and his father, Ron, own and operate Desert Valley Auto Parts, one of the largest auto salvage companies in the Southwest. Their lots in Casa Grande and North Phoenix are one acre (combined) and are home to more than 10,000 vehicles in a variety of conditions.Blame the numbers…
Just in time for the whole family to file into the multiplex on a silent Christmas night when there’s nowhere else to go: a return to the magnified dysfunction of the Focker household and the cozy glow of some paychecking celebrities. This began a decade ago in Meet the Parents,…
Boldly reanimating the comic Western that secured John Wayne his Oscar 41 years ago, the Coen brothers’ True Grit is well-wrought if overly talkative and seriously ambitious. Opening with a strategically abbreviated Old Testament proverb (“The wicked flee when none pursueth”), the film returns the Coens to the all-American sagebrush…
Local painter Jason Rudolph Peña liked Conan O’Brien so much he decided to paint him when Conan’s show was on hiatus early this year. He writes on his blog:I was always on [Conan’s] side during the late night wars and I hate to see his show get destroyed by NBC…
This week in reality-television meltdowns: Camille Grammer invited Allison DuBois to her dinner party for the latest episode of Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, aptly titled “Dinner Party From Hell.” DuBois, a Phoenix-based psychic/medium New Times profiled in 2008, achieved quasi-celebrity fame after the debut of Medium, a…
As we bid farewell to the year and look ahead to 2011, Jackalope Ranch contributors will bring you some greatest hits from 2010. We’ll start with a few favorite flicks, and who better to ask for a few pointers than the local lady of film, The Midnite Movie Mamacita (aka…
Besides doing fun relationship stuff like arguing about how to discipline our dog, New Times blogger Tyler Hughes and his girlfriend, Jackie Cronin, go to the movies.Tyler: So that was pretty good.Jackie: It was good, but it wasn’t as good as I had expected it to be. The trailers made…
Discovery Channel announced its lineup for the Fall 2011 season on its blog yesterday, including a new reality show based in Arizona called Desert Car Kings. The show features the McClure family that searches for and restores classic vehicles. The family owns Desert Valley Auto Parts in Phoenix, which is…
Jeff Bridges is God and, as image-captured from the original 1982 Tron, he’s also the devil in Disney’s mega-million-dollar reboot, Tron: Legacy. The notion of a tragically split persona might have been scripted to give the new movie a measure of emotional gravitas, but why bother with writing when Tron:…
A picnic for Anglophiles, The King’s Speech is a well-wrought, enjoyably amusing inspirational drama that successfully humanizes, even as it pokes fun at, the House of Windsor. The story — shy young prince is helped by irascible wizard to break an evil spell and lead his nation to glorious victory…
The Fighter is based on the true story of Lowell, Massachusetts light welterweight champ “Irish” Micky Ward, but, starring Boston working-class hero Mark Wahlberg, it plays as a Rocky-fied fairy tale for our time: Consigned to Palookaville, a sweet, unassuming boxer with more heart than brains steps up — all…
An odd duck of a romantic comedy from James L. Brooks, How Do You Know strays as far from a barrel of laughs as a writer-director formed by network television can get without losing his grip altogether. The movie’s rhythms are loose, disjointed, and peppered with strategic silences or half-finished…
Chelsea Ryan’s no stranger to film — the ASU Film senior has worked various roles behind the scenes of school and independent films. But when she decided she was going to film a musical for her capstone project this year, she knew she was in deep water. In tackling all…
Besides doing super-fun dating stuff like going to haunted houses for Jackalope Ranch’s comprehensive Halloween guide, New Times blogger Colin Lecher and fellow young journalist Jessica Testa go to the movies. Colin: Well, that was surprisingly unsurprising… pretty straight-forward movie. Jessica: Yeah, was that seriously a Coen film? There was…
Besides doing super-fun dating stuff like going to haunted houses for Jackalope Ranch’s comprehensive Halloween guide, New Times blogger Colin Lecher and fellow young journalist Jessica Testa go to the movies. Colin: I’ve never felt so bad about laughing in my life. From what I understood after digging through those…
A massive project, taken up lightly by Disney in the giddy post-Lord of the Rings atmosphere and dropped upon failing to return the requisite billions, this third adaptation from C.S. Lewis’ seven-volume Chronicles of Narnia comes underwritten by a new studio, 20th Century Fox, and with a new director, Michael…
The Tourist gawks at its stars, visits Venice, has twist. Men follow Angelina Jolie in The Tourist. Men and cameras. They follow her — chic, coiffed, assless — through the streets of Paris. They follow her onto the train to impossible, floating Venice, where she heads on the instruction of…
It’s taken almost two years for the bonkers, exhilarating same-sex romantic comedy I Love You Phillip Morris to finally reach theaters. Premièring at Sundance in January 2009, the movie was a near-casualty of nervous-nellie U.S. distributors — more comfortable with innocuous gay genres like the homosexual weepie or the martyr…
A near-irresistible exercise in bravura absurdity, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan deserves to become a minor classic of heterosexual camp — at the very least, it’s the most risible and riotous backstage movie since Showgirls. Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake has had a spooky quality at least since Tod Browning appropriated a few…
