Six Super Bowl Commercials That Didn’t Suck

The Super Bowl XLV’s over and we’re just happy our team in yellow pants made it through the halftime show. If you need to catch up on a recap, check out this back and forth on Valley Fever. The game was intense — unexpected touchdowns, a few pathetic incomplete passes…

Six Strange Addictions We’re Waiting to See on TV

If you’ve ever watched TLC’s horror-inducing show, My Strange Addiction, or seen the previews and thought about watching it, you might be a little messed up. Not that we can judge — it’s hard to look away from one of television’s largest and most fascinating train wrecks that only supports…

Sundance: Cults and Uncertain Futures Dominate the Festival

In Mike Cahill’s Another Earth — a multiple prize-winner at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and one of two titles movies OR titles (to avoid rep of “film”) co-written by and starring the festival’s biggest breakout, Brit Marling — both hope and anxiety follow the discovery of Earth 2, a…

The Rite: Anthony Hopkins Goes to Hell

Tyler: Alright, well, I’m not sure where to start with The Rite …Jackie: How about we start with the best part, Anthony Hopkins who plays Father Lucas Trevant.Tyler: Alright, I can agree with that. Hopkins’ performance was really the best part. He is the only reason that I wanted to…

Behind The Scenes of ‘Mantecoza’

Capes, top hats, goggles, and plasma cannons may seem like extravagant outerwear for a Sunday morning, but was in fact the standard at the downtown Phoenix filming of the steampunk miniseries Mantecoza. Mantecoza is a steampunk/fantasy miniseries in which an ordinary office worker named Sebastian King comes upon a magic…

Local Steampunks: Be Featured in ‘Mantecoza’ Miniseries

The creators of a locally filmed internet miniseries are calling all airship captains, mad scientists, and various other steampunk lords and ladies to help out with their latest shoot on Sunday in downtown Phoenix.The series is called Mantecoza, a steampunk-themed web show that features an average guy thrust into an…

Archer Returns With A Bang To FX

The idiot spy comedy Archer came back with a vengeance on Thursday for its second season premiere, which proved to be just as full of raunchy, underhanded humor as fans remember. After thousands of fans flocked to the likes of Facebook and Twitter to plead with FX to renew the…

The Rite Features Demons No Scarier Than Nasty Older Sisters

The Rite is the latest of at least a dozen widely released American movies in half as many years with demonic possession a major plot point. This doesn’t mean the subject is wrung out — its continuing resonance with audiences hasn’t been effaced by secular pop psychology or modernization within…

Sundance’s Prodigal Children Return

The Sundance Film Festival, which ends January 30, self-identifies as a “discovery festival,” meaning that it embraces its own legend of being a place where, over the course of a single screening, an unknown can transform into an industry-redefining star — even as that fantasy seems increasingly out of date…

FilmBar Delays Opening Until February 10

FilmBar owner Kelly Aubey and Programming Director Steve Weiss announced last night that the downtown film venue is delaying its opening for a week — the first show will run the night of February 10 instead of February 3. Weiss says the program schedule has been adjusted — Red Chapel…

Academy Announces 83rd Oscar Nominations

The Social Network and The King’s Speech would first like to thank the academy for a boatload of nominations for the 83rd Academy Awards (live on February 27). Oscar nominees were released this morning by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and it’s looking like a good year…

Natalie Portman Follows Black Swan With an Awfully Good Romantic Comedy

Ivan Reitman, master of the high-concept, big-budget Hollywood comedy (Ghostbusters, Dave) would seem an unlikely candidate to direct No Strings Attached, an extremely low-concept, low-key romantic comedy of contemporary sexual mores centered on the dating foibles of attractive nerds. Fully devoid of the fantasy contrivance that often sets a Reitman…

The Company Men Takes Pity on the Emasculated Executive

Tracking the parallel trajectories of three employees laid off from cushy corporate jobs at the same Boston-based manufacturing conglomerate, The Company Men is transparent in its ambition to capture The Way We Live Now from a sensitive, equitable — rather than a withering and satiric — point of view. Writer/director…

The Green Hornet: Why Heroes Need Sidekicks

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: I just want to start this off by saying that the only thing I knew about The Green Hornet, besides it’s trailers,…

The Green Hornet: Seth Rogen Schlubs It Up

Only inertia will bring people to Michel Gondry’s 3-D spectacle, The Green Hornet. Opening amid persistent negative buzz in the mid-January dead zone, this long-germinating prospective franchise, based on a character that first saturated the nation’s radio waves in 1939, seems pretty much DOA — although in the absence of…