MON 9/12When psychobilly-punk band the Tombstones was signed to Relativity Records in the late '80s, front man Stevie Tombstone bought a headstone for blues legend Robert Johnson and personally delivered the slab to Mississippi. The press labeled his gesture "disrespectful behavior." Punk was crass and uncool in those days, and...
It's the cover-up, stupid! It doomed Nixon during Watergate, got Clinton impeached, inspired outrage against the Catholic Church, and apparently it's just part of the day-to-day operations at places like Enron and Tyco. The initial crime is bad enough, but the conspiracy to hide it always ends up hurting more...
What do Julie Andrews, Peter Gunn, the Mystery Writers of America, the bolero, and one rather large pink cat have in common? Hollywood director Blake Edwards, of course. Edwards is married to Andrews, he won an MWA writing award for one of his episodes of the 1950s TV show Peter...
You just can't hate Chris Martin. Oh, you can find him overrated and his tunes sappy, but aside from the occasional run-in with a photographer, Martin is that rare gentleman rock star with a modest mouth. He married a glamorous Oscar winner, he named his kid Apple, and yet the...
TUE 10/4From Alice Cooper's onstage beheadings to Iggy Pop's broken-glass surfing to the robotic samplings of those Venetian-blinds-headed dudes in Devo, rock has seemingly exhausted its conceptual toy box. Or has it? You might change your mind after experiencing Quem Quaeritis and Weirdo Begeirdo, two bands from Riverside, California's "freak-pop"...
The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which is based on a true story the same way Harry Potter and Star Wars movies are, is the latest -- though certainly not the last -- movie of this bloody (awful) year trying to scare the money right out of your wallet. It has...
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,...
THU 22Master chef Stephen Stromberg whips out his magic pan on Thursday, September 22, for the final installment in "Cooking & Cocktails" at Latitude 30, a gratis summer series of culinary demonstrations and tastings at the swank eatery, which is named after the imaginary line that bisects the heart of...
Dave Uribe reports for duty at 6 a.m. on May 10, a Tuesday. Uribe had been a Phoenix police officer for 22 of his 48 years. He still loved being a street cop in the sprawling Cactus Park precinct, in the west and northwest parts of the city. Every day's...
Late last month, U.S. Immigration Judge John W. Richardson was expected to announce deportation dates for the Wilson Four, the former Wilson Charter High School clique detained in upstate New York while on a 2002 field trip with other classmates. Smarty-pants students Oscar Corona, Jaime Damian, Yuliana Huicochea and Luis...
Murderball is a gem of a little film, one that's at very least worth renting in its inevitable DVD release. It's also one of the most over-hyped indies of the season. It won a couple of awards at Sundance -- the Audience Choice prize and another for editing -- and...
SAT 6/11Can you imagine a more popular four-hour television show than Univision's Sábado Gigante? Now, picture a live version of the program that honors the best entertainers in Latino/Latina arts. Saturday, June 11, will be a good night to set the VCR, because the Seventh Annual International Las Palmas de...
For all their exceptionality, there is also a numbing sameness to the movies of Hayao Miyazaki, the revered animator who has bewitched Japanese audiences since the late 1970s and bewildered American ones since 1999, when Princess Mononoke was among the first of his movies to receive significant stateside release. There...
With the exception of Phil Spector, Jack Nitzsche was the greatest arranger, musician and producer of the early rock era. Unlike Spector, Nitzsche didn't allow himself to get stuck in a musical rut. He kept producing vital work, including soundtrack scores for films like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,...
If it's any consolation to Kevin Bacon, the backers of the Phoenix Film Festival believe he's worthy of recognition, even if the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences doesn't. Bacon's taken the Oscars snub -- the Academy ignoring his leading-role performance in The Woodsman, one most critics said was...
Playwright Oscar Wilde once quipped, "Work is the curse of the drinking class," and we're inclined to agree with the swishy scribe, especially when it comes to this year's St. Patrick's Day. Since the annual exercise in alcohol excess falls on a weekday, you'd better have a sick day up...
Come this time next year, The Jacket may well occupy the slot in movie discourse that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind does now -- that of the film that coulda-shoulda-woulda gotten more Oscar nominations if only it hadn't come out so early in the year and been forgotten by...
"Better than I thought it'd be," was the refrain repeated by those exiting the preview screening of Guess Who, which doesn't mean much -- freebie audiences expect nothing and usually receive it. But in this case, it neatly summed up the experience of catching Ashton Kutcher in a part once...
It's the witching hour at Sadisco, and the bisexual Brittany Murphy and I are watching a Victorian snuff-play done to throbbing industrial music that sounds like rusty steel grinding against broken glass. One by one, women dressed like Heather Graham's whore buddies in From Hell are chased onto center stage...
SAT 3/26 Little girls love their fairy tales of Prince Charmings, glass slippers and magic wands. But Erin Smith wasn't a typical little girl. When her elementary school teachers wanted her to read "Cinderella," she read the "twisted" version from Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes instead. Now 17, the senior at...
Perhaps in honor of the fourth anniversary of Cher's farewell tour, MGM recently released a DVD edition of Chastity, the 1969 stink bomb featuring the singer's first dramatic role. Shot entirely in Phoenix, this long-lost indie (for which Cher's daughter is named) was written, produced, scored, and some claim directed...
You have to hand it to Sean Penn. Okay, you don't absolutely have to, and if you're a Red Stater through and through, you certainly won't want to, but give him some credit. After being pilloried in the press for visiting Iraq under Saddam Hussein's reign, torn apart by housecats...
