12/13-12/14 In 1978, Arizona Governor Bruce Babbitt formally established an event that had already gained a foothold in the Phoenix area: the Annual Hohokam Commemoration and Indian Market Days Celebration. That year's event drew more than 3,000 people, establishing itself as one of the best markets in the nation. Now...
It took four years, but finally Dark Castle -- Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver's horror division that puts out a movie a year around Halloween -- has made something that's genuinely scary. It may be no coincidence that this time around, Silver has scored a higher-profile cast than usual, and...
Thursday, November 6 Laughter and, well, gaiety are guaranteed at Hamburger Mary's, 5111 North Seventh Street, when Toronto-based comedian David MacLean takes the stage for a one-night standup stint. While MacLean admits that his comedy -- rooted in his experiences as a gay guy -- hasn't always been openly embraced...
Now they are standing, and cheering. Jesus Gonzales is walking -- toward the ring and his professional debut as a boxer. The screams and whistles among the 2,600 attending on this summer night quickly merge into collective noise that bounces around the Celebrity Theatre in Phoenix. The din gains strength...
Sometimes something so wonderful appears on the big screen that I want to leap up like a shameless non-professional and hug it. Such is the case early on in Sylvia, a superb drama based on the brief life of writer Sylvia Plath. While boating in Cambridge, England with her beau...
Never mind the trailers, which advertise Cold Creek Manor as some kind of horror-thriller, complete with the image of a hand emerging from the shadows to quiet (yes!) Sharon Stone. Mike Figgis, most recently a maker of unwatchable art-house fare shot on digital video (Timecode, Hotel) that suggests a fetish...
Veronica Guerin isn't at all a bad movie, and some kind things will be said about it here. But cynical appraisal also has its place, so we'll cover that aspect as well. Even before that, a significant disclaimer: Since this review is being written for several New Times publications, which...
Once upon a time, Cher was cool. No, really. She was cool. Long before she became an iconic cottage industry, Cher was a hippie chick folk singer whose naughty songs upset radio programmers and whose eye makeup terrified uptight parents. A full decade before the '70s schlock of "Gypsies, Tramps...
Secondhand Lions is cornier than the cornfields spread out in front of the dilapidated rural Texas manse inhabited by Robert Duvall and Michael Caine, playing grumpy old brothers with mismatched accents. (Caine, in fact, has accent enough for three actors -- one English, another maybe Texan, another perhaps Australian.) There...
Kevin Costner appeared in his first Western when he was 30 and looked to be in his early 20s. He was a slender, restless actor in Lawrence Kasdan's Silverado, the 1985 film in which Costner played the blithe brother of a somber Scott Glenn -- all giggles and gunshots, a...
Tue 7/29 "It's a grudge match," asserts boxer Leslie Sonnenklar. "She's going down in 48 seconds flat." Sonnenklar is being facetious in predicting the outcome of her first non-kickboxing bout, but when she goes up against Chrystal Proctor on Tuesday, July 29, she won't be in the ring to read...
For a few minutes, at least, things don't look so bad. Watching Ben Affleck swagger around as the thuggish title character of Gigli ("Rhymes with really," he tells us, twice) is amusing for a bit. Affleck's eminently qualified for the role, actually -- that of a low-level hood pretending to...
ONGOING More than 40 years after his death, Frank Lloyd Wright remains a true giant in the world of architecture. Evidence of his genius abounds, and nowhere more so than at the winter home, studio and architectural campus he created at the foot of the McDowell Mountains: Taliesin West. Experience...
He knows there are people, too many, who do not like him. He has to know. They've told him to his face--the studio executives who slice and snip the scenes he loves the most and suffer his outbursts for it, the directors he's pushed out of the way so he...
If you're reading this paper, chances are you're more literate than the average American. If you're reading the film reviews, it's also likely that you've become familiar with words like "bravura" and "eponymous," which seem to exist only in the vocabularies of professional movie assessors. But what if you were...
At the colorful Mariscos Ensenada restaurant on 59th Avenue and Thomas, owner Oscar Rubio demonstrates how to make a michelada. He takes a salt-rimmed frosty mug filled with ice and adds lime juice, Tapatio salsa, salt, pepper and lots of Clamato -- the tangy clam-juice-and-veggie drink that Latinos love. Then...
The PC forces may not want to hear this, but the porn industry of the 1970s wasn't all bad. It created numerous professional opportunities for artists, and I'm not necessarily talking about Bambi Woods and John Holmes. Writers like Nick Tosches and Sam Shepard helped fill up countless pages in...
Culture Shock Prophet margin: A very strong case can be made that the polygamists of northern Arizona and southern Utah are, at their core, a criminal cult subsidized -- in large part -- by tax dollars ("Dirty Tricks," John Dougherty, July 31). It is a truly shocking and generally underexamined...
He's 12 feet tall. He's ripped. He's as quick as a tiger and fierce as a dragon. Lit by his fury to a dull green glow, the guy is sheer, boundless power. Any NFL team you can think of would love to start him at middle linebacker. But, as art-house...
6/276/29 From Orson Welles to Steven Spielberg, the fraternity of successful filmmakers is a select one indeed. And while it's safe to assume that the many intricacies required to bring an idea to the big screen are most likely cultivated over the course of a lifetime, a weekend crash course...
If grown-ups were meant to watch Walt Disney cartoons, God would have kept us all in the third grade for two or three decades. Still, somebody has to drive the SUV every time the Disneyfolk decide to lure the little ones down to the multiplex, and as long as the...
I find myself on the couch excited about watching the last few innings of an Arizona Diamondbacks game. I haven't felt this way since the postseason run in 2001. What the hell is going on here? I'm supposed to be mowing. My 10-year-old son joins me. I look at him,...
