If you're like me, then you take your tree-decorating seriously. When I saw the holiday themes out this year (if you haven't noticed, ornaments come and go in cycles) I was less than thrilled. Snowflakes? zzZZZZ. A lodge-style moose, lanterns and flannel ornaments? Seriously, does this look like the Midwest? Ballet...
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NOVA M MELTDOWN Is there anything sadder than the backstabbing pettiness of a liberal talk-radio station going under? The Bird would like nothing more than to listen to left-wing lip-flappers such as Randi Rhodes, that ribald yenta of the airwaves, as a counterbalance to the political poison emitted daily from...
Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg — a lot of name for a lot of guy. Born into aristocracy in 1907, he was a soldier by the age of 19 — and, by most accounts, a warrior with the soul of a poet (he was especially smitten with the...
Two years ago nearly to the day, Will Smith and Italian director Gabriele Muccino released The Pursuit of Happyness, one of the most underrated of recent Hollywood movies, which starred Smith as a single father navigating a hand-to-mouth existence on the streets of San Francisco. Writing at the time, I...
Back in the early 1980s, when I was a graduate student in Boston, a prominent professor I knew was accused of sexually harassing a female colleague. This man was a compulsive flirt who couldn't get within feet of a woman without coming on to her, so I wasn't altogether surprised...
With Coldplay hitting town, we got to thinking about frontman Chris Martin and his wife, actress Gwyneth Paltrow. Given the success on both sides of that marriage, who really wears the pants? Come to think of it, who wears the pants in a lot of these musician-celebrity pairings? Chris Martin...
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Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, 1992 to be exact. Gus Van Sant, the filmmaker who had just thrilled the world with his young-hustlers-in-love classic My Own Private Idaho, was picked to direct The Mayor of Castro Street. Already six years in development, this proposed adaptation...
Bobette Riner publishes an electricity index used to promote renewable energy, and she bought a brand-new Prius last year to shoot the bird at the oil companies. "I felt so smug for a while," she says. "Especially being in Houston." She was lucky to score the car from a dealership...
"I hated the '90s. The '90s fuckin' sucked," says professional wrestler Randy "The Ram" Robinson early on in The Wrestler — and he should know. Over the hill and past his prime — his steroidal body a palimpsest of battle scars, his graying hair dyed a Nordic blond — Robinson...
It's July 20, 1944, and Adolf Hitler has been assassinated — the victim of a bomb blast organized and executed by a cabal of high-ranking German army officers seeking to wrest control of the country away from the Third Reich and, with luck, bring an end to World War II...
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Positively Enough
Gus Van Sant has never been what you'd call a risk-averse filmmaker, but he directs his Harvey Milk biopic so carefully that there could be a Ming vase balanced on his head. Van Sant's steps are deliberate, his posture is straight, his attitude is responsible, and his eyes are fixed...
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The Wine-Slingin’ Risk Taker
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It’s a Wonderous Life
In a nation of frightened dullards, there is always a sorry shortage of outlaws, and those few who make the grade are always welcome." So wrote Hunter S. Thompson of the Hells Angels after riding with California's motor-psycho Mongol hordes in the mid-1960s, a feat of embedded journalism that left...
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Exterior Decorators
Those who believe that Jonathan Demme went all soft with Philadelphia and never recovered may not be reassured by his latest movie, an ensemble tale of family pathology gussied up with vérité camera work, world music, and improvising actors both trained and not. You can find the worst and the...
"Course he's willing to die. You think we do this kinda work 'cause we scared to die?" So speaks Virgil Cole (Ed Harris) about his sidekick Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen), as the two stare down a posse of bad guys in Appaloosa, New Mexico, circa 1882. Cole and Hitch, who...
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BENEDICT NAPOLITANO This nutty nightingale was tooling down the road the other day in his fabulous Thunderbird, scanning the FM dial, when the knob alighted on KJZZ 91.5-FM — you know, the NPR station. There, this warbler heard our soon-to-be-ex-Governor Janet Napolitano on the talk show Here and Now. It...
Biltmore Fashion Park used to be so full of itself. Once, about 10 years ago, I went there to buy a wedding band, and no one would wait on me. I visited each of the mall's jewelry shops, as well as the jewelry counters in two department stores, and none...
By Benjamin Leatherman Dear and the Headlights is scheduled to hold its CD release party tonight at the Clubhouse Music Venue in Tempe. Even though this weekend’s concert schedule is dominated by tomorrow’s massive Edgefest hootenanny out in Queen Creek, there are plenty of other big-time shows happening around the...
Masters of the carefully crafted cheap shot, Joel and Ethan Coen have built a career on flippancy. Given their refusal to take anything seriously — least of all the enthusiasm of their fans — the brothers surely got a chuckle from an upcoming academic tome, The Philosophy of the Coen...