New Times‘ top DVD picks for the week of May 30

The Bette Davis Collection, Vol. 2 (Warner Bros.) A Fine Romance (Tango) Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (Dark Sky) Freedomland (Sony) Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Fox) Hercules/Mole Men Against the Son of Hercules (Image) John Wayne: An American Icon Movie Collection (Universal) The Kids in the Hall: Complete Season 4 (A&E)…

Help Getting Smashed

The Goodwill store at 2115 North Scottsdale Road, Scottsdale generally has a great supply of discarded dishes in its housewares department. Scottsdale folk have great junk. The one at 330 East Brown Road, Mesa usually has a good inventory of reject dishes, too. Dishes are the cheapest source of tesserae,…

How Your Summer Reading List Stacks Up

Send In the Idiots, by Kamran Nazeer (Bloomsbury, $23.95) Untouchables, by Narendra Jadhav (Scribner, $26) Self-Made Man, by Norah Vincent (Viking, $24.95) A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life, by Dana Reinhardt (Wendy Lamb/Random House, $15.95) Poppy Shakespeare, by Clare Allan (Bloomsbury, $23.95) City of Tiny Lights, by Patrick Neate…

Perk Up

Vagina not what it used to be, ladies? Hey, fella, what about those man boobs? Summer in Phoenix gives you three (okay, four or five) solid months indoors. If you’re going to sit in the semi-dark, flipping cable channels, why not have something to show for it, come Halloween? You…

Interiors

This guy knows how to take a photo. That was my first thought when I entered the gallery space at Mesa Arts Center. Fine-art photographer Michael Eastman’s interiors of crumbling Cuban mansions are breathtaking — and they’re enormous, about 5×4 feet on average. Each work, with its large scale and…

Lucky X III

When kids of all ages discuss comic books and superheroes, there is inevitably one question that comes up time and again: If that one guy and that other guy had a fight, who would win? Comics companies occasionally indulge these debates with special issues pitting Thing against Hulk, or Wolverine…

Belgian Waffling

Amid brutal competition from A History of Violence, Caché (Hidden), and Last Days, the top prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival went to L’Enfant (The Child), a Belgian drama about a 20-year-old hustler who sells his infant son like a bag of weed. The makers of this provocative movie,…

Romancing the Stone

Tom Zoellner — journalist, former Phoenician, recently heartbroken guy — has written a book about the diamond industry. The Heartless Stone digs deep into the cold, hard heart of the diamond business, which Zoellner globetrotted to uncover. From the mines of Africa to the further reaches of the Arctic Circle,…

Next Big Things

Yet another Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) has come and gone, and this one was the biggest yet. Exhibitors know all too well that a strong showing at E3 — an event heavily covered by both industry and mainstream press — can turn a great product into a blockbuster and a…

Your Show of Shows

Boston Legal: Season One (Fox) David E. Kelley’s latest legal drama is nothing more than a TV show about TV shows; hence the casting of Captain Kirk and Murphy Brown, with guest shots by Diane Chambers, Golden Girl Rose Nylund, and Alex Keaton. It’s like a Nick at Night mash-up,…

Art Scene

“Annual Summer Juried Exhibition” at ASU Harry Wood Gallery: This year’s crop of MFA hopefuls shows a surprising awareness of domestic issues including water conservation, racial profiling and changing family values. Look for tongue-in-cheek political lampoons, like Exhibitions Class Award winner Corie J. Cole’s ceramic caricatures of cowboy Bush and…

New Times‘s top DVD picks for the week of May 23

Africa Screams (Image) April’s Shower (Liberation) Back Door to Hell (Fox) Bloodrayne (Uwe Boll Productions) The Closer: The Complete First Season (Warner Bros.) Deadwood: The Complete Second Season (HBO) The Devil’s Miner (First Run) The Dirty Dozen: Two-Disc Special Edition (Warner Bros.) The 4400: The Complete Second Season (Paramount) Game…

Rocket Men

Mondays are quite the bitch. Not only are there four gruelingly tortuous workdays ahead of you, but there’s nothing but summer reruns on the tube, to boot. Since you’re probably gonna be feeling the blues, you might as well listen to ´em, too — namely, those blasted out by Bill…

Cracked Code

You know it’s hard out here for a screenwriter. You’ve got a sure-fire hit on your hands — an adaptation of the runaway best seller The Da Vinci Code — and yet it’s all about talking and solving cryptic riddles, which isn’t exactly suited to the visual medium. It’s also…

Shell Game

At this late date, it’s hard to tell one digitally rendered talking animal from another. Madagascar blends into Ice Age looks like A Shark’s Tale sounds like Shrek might as well be A Bug’s Life turns into Antz feels like Chicken Little could be Over the Hedge, which is really…

In the Face of Evil

We all want to believe that in even the most dangerous or frightening of situations, we would have the courage to stand up for our convictions — that we would not name names, that we would not betray our friends or our ideals. Thank God, most of us will never…

Hey, Hey, We’re the Junkies

The heck with rehab. Anyone wanting to kick narcotics addiction should just go see Stray Cat Theatre’s gloriously ugly production of Harry Gibson’s Trainspotting. Crammed to capacity with pitch-perfect performances and almost unbearably realistic scenes of degradation, this stroll through addiction’s dark night is enough to scare anyone off junk…

The Brain Game

Mom always says that videogames rot your brain. Hell, some say that Grand Theft Auto trains kids to kill. So Nintendo’s claim that its new portable offering, Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day!, actually makes players smarter has been received with a mix of curiosity, cynicism, and…

This Time It’s Serious

Winter Passing (Fox) Try this, should you be inclined to rent this downer from writer-director Adam Rapp: Skip from chapter to chapter and see whether they all don’t begin with exactly the same image, accompanied by exactly the same sound. There is always someone (usually Zooey Deschanel as a would-be…

All Aboard

It was a book and a play before it was a film, but, as ever, folks will still want Trainspotting, the play, to mirror the movie. It doesn’t. Here’s how. Character: Spud, the beloved spaz Fate in book and movie: Goofy speed fanatic who hates working. Fate in play: Nonexistence…

Theater Scene

Woodsman: Is What It Is Theatre all but vanished last year, but resurfaces this month with an original adaptation (and world première) of the 2004 film that starred Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick. The story follows Walter, who’s just been released from a 12-year prison sentence for committing a horrible…

New Times‘ top DVD picks for the week of May 16.

All You’ve Got (MTV) American Soldiers (Velocity) The Big Valley: Season One (Fox) Con Air: Unrated Extended Edition (Buena Vista) Crimson Tide: Unrated Extended Edition (Buena Vista) Doogal (Weinstein) Duma (Warner Bros.) Funny Games (Kino) Garçon Stupide (Picture This) Hill Street Blues: Season Two (Fox) My Mother’s Smile (New Yorker)…