New Year’s Eve will find some 150,000 revelers packed cheek-by-jowl along Mill Avenue and environs at the Tempe Tostitos Fiesta Bowl Block Party. Here are the Top 10 reasons to go.No. 10: It’s big — the “block” covers about 4 million square feet of downtown Tempe and Tempe Beach Park…
David Salo’s colleagues and classmates at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have absolutely no idea how he spends his free time. It’s not that the 32-year-old linguistics grad student is ashamed of his hobby (or obsession), which has occupied him for some 26 years. They simply cannot be bothered with it…
Since the horrors of dominator culture — destruction, devastation, dumb-assness — do not appear to be receding of their own accord, there’s great poignancy to the new cinematic adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The film succeeds as massive, astonishing entertainment; enthralling…
Arizona Jewish Theatre Company’s production of Play It Again, Sam opens Saturday, December 22, at The Playhouse on the Park, in the Viad Corporate Center at 1850 North Central. Shows are at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays, through January 6. Tickets are $25-$27, with $7 student rush tickets available 30 minutes before curtain. Call 602-264-0402 for more information.
If you’re dreaming of a white Christmas in Phoenix, maybe you’d better hit the snooze button. But if a bright Christmas will make up for any unfulfilled fantasies about precipitation, there are plenty of local light shows to give you a jolly holiday glow. Offering Yuletide eye candy and more…
It is December 5, the day AOL Time Warner-owned DC Comics has been anxiously awaiting for almost 15 years–the day writer-illustrator Frank Miller once more dons cape and cowl to resurrect the Dark Knight, his fiercely rendered vision of an obscenely obsessed middle-aged Batman. Today, stores will finally open their…
Lest I be mistaken for a holiday-hating Scrooge, I’ll open by mentioning that I’m writing this theater review surrounded by Christmas trees — three of them, all mine, and each trimmed to sagging by myself and my beloved, while we drank eggnog and ate wreath-shaped cookies and listened to The…
Beneath the hazy, mystifying layers of Vanilla Sky lies a remarkable Tom Cruise performance — one that, to a large extent, takes place beneath a makeup artist’s piled-on scars and a costumer’s blank “prosthetic” mask. As David Aames, hipster publisher of Maxim-like magazines, Cruise plays a lothario so vain he…
It took five men to concoct the hackneyed plot and conceive the brainless jokes that constitute Not Another Teen Movie, meaning there are five men in Los Angeles right now still trying to wash that stink off their soft, idle hands. Five men — five men, the very thought boggles…
The curiosity of the human animal is such that, put face-to-face with an artist and a work of art, we are tempted to pluck at each thread that joins the two, searching for the “truth” of the work, and the artist. While the work cannot, on some elemental level, be…
The look on the face of Homer “The Rock” Moore as he pounds his fists and elbows in vicious combinations against a trainer’s gloves is pure intensity, wide-eyed and emotionless, in stark contrast to the homicidal punishment his 205-pound frame is unleashing. Moore is at Brausa Academy, preparing for his…
“Mr. Human Rights,” they once called him, and though his was never the most famous name on the bill–that was Bono or Bruce Springsteen, Sting or Peter Gabriel–as the organizer of the Conspiracy of Hope concerts in 1986 and the Human Rights Now! world tour two years later, Jack Healey…
My friend Paul is, among other things, a devoted Titanic enthusiast. While other little boys were playing kickball, Paul was playing “Capsize,” a game he’d invented about being trapped on a sinking luxury liner. As a teen, he spent his milk money on membership in the Titanic Historical Society; today,…
Some weeks my job is less about offering opinions about theater than it is about dodging Neil Simon comedies. This week I failed to completely avoid my least favorite playwright, because the only shows opening here last Friday were both written by Simon. I considered attending Stagebrush Theatre’s production of…
The lights go down, and the puzzlement begins. Ensemble cast of superstars? Check. Loose remake of amusing curiosity? Check. Built-in, prefab sense of cool? Check. A little something for wistful fans of Dino and Sammy? Check. So . . . wait a minute. Is this The Cannonball Run Redux?With his…
Of all the Japanese-made animated films to get a theatrical release in the United States in recent years, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust is by far the most cinematic. It has a particular penchant for scenes that involve a major character being utterly dwarfed by some kind of fantastical building or…
The idea behind The Monkey Show Movie Theater — a place “to watch a really strange movie with a small and intimate audience” — is not a new one. But unless one considers X-rated theaters (where “intimate” is understood much differently), it is one that has been largely sidelined in…
Polish up your “La Bamba.” For the 10th year in a row, some of the top mariachi groups in the country are coming to Phoenix to help ring in the holiday season.The Christmas Mariachi Festival is “an explosion of music and color and pageantry,” reports Lorenzo Lucas, production manager for…
In 1978, I received an F on a high school English composition in which I wrote that the characters in the film Rebel Without a Cause were all losers. John, I wrote, was a babyish invert, too stupid to hide his crush on Jim, a loser whose idea of fun…
Though Behind Enemy Lines, set in Bosnia, was originally due for release next year, already it feels antiquated; that conflict is already a distant memory, a ghost lost in the shadow of the war on terrorism. The film tested so well that 20th Century Fox pushed up its release date,…
This is the true story of seven people (Tommy! Annie! Ashley! Maria! Griffin! Carpo! And Benjamin!) picked to live in a city and have their lives changed. Find out what happens when people stop being polite, and start being real. The Real World: Sidewalks of New York.If you came across…
