SAT 8/20Last fall, Valley comics Josh Skalniak and Josh McDermitt got the chance to compete at the Las Vegas Comedy Festival, and both felt a little out of place. To the surprise of many — mostly themselves — Skalniak won first place in the Wild Card category and McDermitt took…
“Hector Ruiz: La Realidad (Reality)” at the Heard Museum: Phoenix artist Hector Ruiz fires a shot between the eyes of American values with wood carvings, block prints, and mixed-media assemblages that address racism, border issues and capitalism. A King Kong-size blonde crushes a hapless businessman in her manicured hands in…
THU 18Comedian Alonzo Bodden doesn’t need to worry about planes malfunctioning when he travels. The comic worked as a jet mechanic for Lockheed and McDonnell-Douglas for nine years, and his work included a little project called the Stealth Bomber. But when Bodden discovered he enjoyed entertaining his fellow airplane mechanics…
It’s silly, and a little bit sad, the way that Phoenicians crowd around to watch a summer rainstorm. Packed onto front porches, posted at windows, pulled to the side of the road, we ogle rainy weather as if it were an eighth wonder, a heretofore unseen miracle that may never…
Before I tell you why and how very much I hated Theater League’s The Wonder Bread Years, allow me to explain that this is a show I was born to love. I am the audience for this nostalgic gander at life as a boomer-era kid, one of those poor saps…
If for no other reason, Happy Endings deserves its soft spot in our collective hearts for rescuing Tom Arnold from the why-are-they-now? scrap heap. The former Mr. Roseanne Barr plays Frank, a widower who falls for and sleeps with his son’s conniving would-be girlfriend Jude, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal. And…
The old John Wayne-Dean Martin hayburner The Sons of Katie Elder wasn’t a very good movie the first time around — Dino and a cowboy hat go together about as well as Sinatra and bib overalls — and John Singleton’s jokey, urbanized rehash isn’t likely to snow the Oscar voters,…
The Aristocrats may be the most foul-mouthed movie of the summer, but Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo is the foulest in deed, actually depicting some of the nigh-unspeakable acts that are merely hypothetically talked about in the former film. It’s been a while since we’ve seen a big-time gross-out comedy, and…
The Skeleton Key ranks high on the list of 2005’s funniest films, bested only by the first two-thirds of Wedding Crashers, all of The Aristocrats, and that part in Stealth where the airplane starts sassing Josh Lucas. Doubtful that was the intention of director Iain Softley (K-PAX, an inexplicably well-regarded…
You will be forgiven for believing Brian Herzlinger is something of a creepy guy. Certainly, at first (and 23rd) glance, the man seems to be covered in the icky residue of the stunted, the pathetic and the desperate, which makes him like most hopeful young men who move to Los…
Once you get past its negligible plot, scant dialogue, and almost zero action, Gus Van Sant’s elliptical rendering of the final hours in the troubled life of a grunge musician is rarely boring. That may seem like a backhanded compliment, but, given the absence of such customary cinematic conventions as…
“The most daring rescue mission of our time is a story that has never been told,” boasts the poster for The Great Raid. The credits of the film, however, reveal that it’s based on not one, but two books about the 6th Ranger Battalion, which ventured 30 miles into enemy…
Don’t go to the Tempe Improv this weekend expecting old Saturday Night Live bits from comedian Tracy Morgan. And if you’re offended by anything in Morgan’s standup act, don’t you dare go home and diss him on the ‘Net. “I think those people are cowards that get home and get…
Luther “Luke” Campbell’s Web site bio claims that Campbell was the “riveting leader” of 2 Live Crew, the raunchy hip-hop trio that garnered national headlines for its sexually explicit 1989 album As Nasty As They Wanna Be. But Fresh Kid Ice (né Chris Wong Won) claims on his Web site…
8/12-8/27What’s black, white and red all over? A penguin in a blender? A zebra with diaper rash? No, it’s a world-première drama presented by Is What It Is Productions at the Studio One Performing Arts Center, 4520 East Thomas. Black, White and Read All Over is a story that relates…
SAT 8/13When rollerblades exploded into suburbia, they got caught up in the whirlwind of extreme sports, baggy pants, and unintelligible lingo of kids pulling “serious air” off “gnarly half-pipes.” Meanwhile, the general camaraderie and anachronistic charm that went with them were left in the dust. Until, that is, some marketers…
8/13-9/2For five years, Darci Johnson’s reZurrection Gallery has lent a touch of funk and spunk to the downtown Tempe scene. Now, like a phoenix bird in reverse, reZurrection’s doors are closing because of rising rent prices in the area. Johnson plans to take her furnishings and accessories online (at www.rezurrection.com),…
THU 8/11When we tried to call Wammo, co-founder of the wacky, acoustic alterna-swing/blues band Asylum Street Spankers, all we got was the sound of sirens and Wammo screaming, “Oh my God, oh my God, look out!” followed by a beep. We’re glad Wammo’s got a sick sense of humor; otherwise,…
Plenty of things piss me off. Bad grammar. Ugly architecture. Friends who let their dog hump my leg. Weather. People. But the item at the very top of the list of Things That Make Me Want to Kill Myself With an Ax is a simple phrase, one that everyone in…
THU 11 Since Arizona seems to get more transplants than strippers get implants, why not reward out-of-staters for coming to our broiling desert metropolis with some cold, cheap drinks? Every Thursday, Daisy Dukes, 222 East University Drive in Tempe, plays host to “Transplant” — a drinking game that epitomizes random…
Once upon a time, creating an animated film meant drawing and painting each frame individually. Animation was a painstaking, time-consuming process. A few seconds of Bugs Bunny waggling a carrot required hundreds of drawings; a single feature-length film could take years to complete. Then along came computers and animation programs…
There’s no art show more egalitarian than a mail art show. Just make a drawing or painting or collage or mixed-media piece that can be mailed, and you’re in the exhibition. There’s no curator, no jury process, no commercial concerns, no snobbery. There are also no standards, which means there’s…
