The Wrestler may be plenty visceral, but it's no more a sports movie than professional wrestling is a competitive sport. Chronic over-reacher Darren Aronofsky's relatively unpretentious follow-up to the ridiculous debacle that was The Fountain is all about showbiz. It's also a canny example. You want to make a comeback...
Lost Dutchman Days at the Apache Junction Rodeo ParkWe lost our rodeo virginity this past year during the 44th annual Lost Dutchman Days and we can’t imagine a more perfect place to lose it. The Grand Canyon Pro Rodeo Association, based in Winslow, programs rodeos throughout the Southwest, including this three-day shindig, which headlines the Old West carnival out in AJ each President’s […]
In January of 2004, Courtney Bisbee's life was hitting a hectic but welcome stride. The divorced mother of one had recently landed a nurse's job at Horizon High School in affluent northeast Phoenix, close to the border of Scottsdale, where she lived. Across the street, her 4½-year-old daughter attended preschool...
Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden's Sugar, which premièred in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival (and was inexplicably shut out at the awards right about baseball as any movie I've ever seen. It gets the hum of the lights in the ozone-heavy summer air and the...
Hugh Hallman and Sandra Day O'Connor are dancing. It is not exactly elegant — not yet. This is only their first rehearsal, and song-and-dance routines do not come together without sweat. And both Hallman and O'Connor are clearly sweating this. It is not every day that a guy gets to...
Weirdness abounds is this week’s rendition of Future Shock, as we’re pimping the “just announced” concerts of numerous acts coming to the PHX in the near future that are kinda “out there” in many different respects, whether its outlandish stage performances, strange album titles, or bizarre music videos.
My buddy B-Boy looks like he could kick some serious ass. At 6-foot-4 and 350 pounds, he strikes an imposing figure in his baggy Dickies pants and stained T-shirts. His shaved head and scraggly beard add to the intimidation factor, so it's a good thing he's not a bully. In...
SHOP TALK Greenes odyssey: Great story on Sam Greene's big adventure ("The Wheel World," Michele Laudig, July 5). The fact that he worked for 20 years with no luck (well, he made $200 from his writing) makes his recent success with American Body Shop so much more appealing. It's not...
Saliva's rote fusion of rap metal, grunge, and alt rock should've died before the turn of the century, but it never has. Amazingly enough, the more generic and obsolete the Memphis band sounds, the more records it sells: "Ladies and Gentleman," the first single off Blood Stained Love Story, recently...
Maricopa County law enforcement violated the constitutional rights of this newspaper and its readers in October, going so far as to subpoena the identities of anyone who'd looked at New Times online in the past four years. When the paper's leaders revealed the apparent grand jury probe on our cover,...
Eddie Guerrero's grave at Green Acres Mortuary & CemeteryAs caustic comedian George Carlin once opined, “Death makes you popular.” Nowhere in town is this truer than with the gravesite of popular pro wrestler Eddie Guerrero. Ever since the World Wrestling Entertainment superstar known as “Latino Heat” was body-slammed into the ground last November at the Scottsdale cemetery, hundreds of wrestlemaniacs from around the […]
"The Rock" — formerly known as "Flex Kavana" and, a bit later, as "Rocky Maivia" — was a practicing actor long before he turned to movies and started taking down $12 million paychecks. The happily deluded throngs who used to watch him lay signature moves like the People's Elbow or...
It's impossible to talk about The Ringer, a comedy about someone pretending to be retarded in order to rig the Special Olympics, without mentioning that episode of South Park in which Cartman does the same thing. The Ringer was already in production when that episode was made, and has taken...
The Bird's nesting better at night knowing that, while local politicians wrangle over how and why to secure the Arizona-Mexico border, someone's keeping an eye on the opportunistic bums who've taken policing the border into their own hands. In fact, Democratic state Representative Kyrsten Sinema has done more than spy...
THU 6/30"Chunks of Fried Funk" might sound like a bad school cafeteria lunch, but techno-haters and hip-hop junkies love the mystery meat packed into this sonic casserole of electrobreaks, hip-hop, "nu skool," funk and "ghetto stylez." The weekly DJ night at Ichiban Sushi Bar, 1435 East University Drive in Tempe,...
"I was Batman for a week!" says Roland Sarria, barreling down Broadway Road in his two-tone black and gray Honda Element, covered with bright red and black decals advertising the sporting event he's been promoting for the past seven and a half years: "Rage in the Cage: Extreme Fighting Championship."...
Kyle Kaenel doesn't walk through barns at Turf Paradise so much as swagger John Wayne style, as if someone has kicked him in the butt so hard that he can't sit down. He's 17 and lighting it up in his first year as a jockey, 2,000 miles from home and...
It's a fine Tuesday night in the Zona, and Saddam Hussein's chrome-dome, um, brother-in-law Sheik Samir Hussein is getting his ass beat down by a big-assed Catholic priest in a dog collar known as Father Punishment. The shirtless Sheik had come into the rasslin' ring at The Sets in Tempe,...
Lenny Aviles and his girlfriend Lulu Saldana slipped away from his mother's west Phoenix home on the early evening of June 23, 1999. The longtime couple wanted to shop at Sam's Club before Lulu went home to Rio Grande, Texas, the next day. Lenny stepped outside to tell his mother,...
Sat 5/1 In a battle for Valley skateboard supremacy, who's shredding who this Saturday, May 1, when two of the state's newer skate parks -- in Chandler and Glendale -- host their first contests? If you're looking for humility, don't ask CJ Cowie of Industrial Skate & Boards, co-sponsor of...
1/26-2/1 Sell out? It's impossible at the Phoenix -- ahem -- FBR Open golf tournament at the Tournament Players Club of Scottsdale, where, every Super Bowl weekend, massive hordes of golf junkies crowd the galleries and booze it up for seven days straight. But when FBR -- a Washington, D.C.,...
Thursday, January 15 He jokingly refers to himself as "the Diaper Master" these days (ever since parenthood has given him a whole new source for jokes) but comedian Craig Shoemaker still knows how to conjure up his notoriously funny character "The Love Master" for maximum laughs. Feel the love on...
