Before Star Wars and Indiana Jones, audiences thrilled to an epic big-screen trilogy of a different sort: the tale of one righteous lawman and his big piece of wood. Based on the real-life exploits of Tennessee sheriff Buford Pusser, the first Walking Tall movie (1973) made lead actor Joe Don...
Thursday, October 16 While the gallery scene in Scottsdale covers all the bases of contemporary art, Western subject matter still has a mighty stronghold in "The West's Most Western Town." See the latest creative take on cowboy art from supporters of this all-American genre when The Scottsdale Gallery Association presents...
Sat 8/30 Impact Zone Wrestling, the state's only full-service training school for professional wrestlers, celebrates its first anniversary at 7:30 p.m. this Saturday, August 30, with a full card of local wrestlers at its Phoenix facility. For $8, fans can check out the next generation of pro wrestling heroes, who...
No title at stake. No David-versus-Goliath match-up. No villainous group of gridiron ghouls like the Miami Hurricanes. Still, the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl at Sun Devil Stadium on Friday, January 2, has something the other Bowl Championship Series games don't: the Ohio State Buckeyes, the defending national champs of college football...
Thurday, July 24 This time of year, when temperatures rise to unbearable extremes, some smart aleck inevitably mentions that none of us would be here in the middle of the desert if it weren't for the invention of air conditioning. Indeed, as we've realized during mid-summer power outages, it's artificial...
Matthew "Scar" Haugen kneels in the middle of a wrestling ring preparing for battle. The gangly 20-year-old knots the laces of his dirty navy-blue sneakers and then gathers up several weapons. He grabs a battered kendo stick and throws it into an aluminum trashcan, along with several other tools of...
Even under our current government, drugs are still something of a problem in society, which means that the rockin' and reelin' Spun hasn't arrived too late to buzz with significance. In modern pop culture, being young, hooked, miserable, depraved and endlessly self-pitying reached its zenith of coolness about a decade...
Derek doesn't like to let his mind wander he's been fighting his thoughts for nearly two decades yet it wanders every day. Usually he can hold off his reflections until he's safely alone in his room with the door shut. That's when the darkness seeps in, sexual arousal triumphs over...
"There was one fight called Soup vs. Sandwich.' Basically like a can of soup fighting this sandwich, essentially. A totally weird, weird sporting event." John Schmersal, creator of Enon, is talking about a show his band played in Boston a few months back. They opened for something known as the...
Kick a boy enough times, and he'll become a man. The question is: A man of what sort? In his long-awaited feature portrait of the comic-book hero Spider-Man, director Sam Raimi brings forth a kaleidoscopic answer full of hope and verve. Flashy enough for kids yet insightful enough to engage...
The toddler in the photograph beams as he rests his arm on the cantaloupe-size growth on his side. The doll-faced boy in the old print seems unaware that his body shouldn't look this way, that the growth isn't an armrest, that humans shouldn't have cauliflower feet. Doctors in Denver chopped...
If 2001 was a maddening, schizophrenic year for America, that goes double for the music that bubbled to the surface in the last 12 months. For most of the year, bland frivolity and mindless chest-thumping ruled the airwaves. Then, as the World Trade Center went down in a monumental pile...
To put it mildly, it is uncomfortable and embarrassing to have one's cynical ass whipped by a huge, hulking Hallmark card, and this is exactly the sensation one takes away from Mimi Leder's Pay It Forward. Not that the near-total emotional submission isn't preceded by a knock-down, drag-out battle for...
Vassiliy Jirov is on his own. Jirov, the International Boxing Federation cruiserweight champion of the world, is working without a trainer and without a sparring partner, shadowboxing in a makeshift boxing ring hidden in the back of the AZ Fitness gym in Mesa. For the past two years, Jirov's been...
There is much to be said for failure. It is more interesting than success. -- Max Beerbohm There's the blackness that's tethered to an overwhelming sense of failure. That point where you see no joy, so you figure there is no joy. No joy anywhere. That's the kind of shit...
There's no explicable reason for the existence of The Replacements, which is to the football-film genre what Major League was to the baseball movie: sports rendered as sitcom (or Police Academy sequel). The Replacements, which takes as its cue the 1987 National Football League players' strike, is stocked with every...
"Mexico sucks!" Under normal barroom conditions -- particularly in a southern-Arizona beer joint heavily populated with Hispanics -- them's fightin' words. But as the anti-nationalist proclamation echoes through Tucson's Wildcat House on a recent Sunday afternoon, them's more like wrestlin' words. "Butt-biting midgets," "masked Mexican wrestlers," "marauding mat maidens." For...
There is a killing late in Gladiator, Ridley Scott's new heroic epic, and it is one of those wonderfully cathartic extinguishings that make a wide-eyed audience rise and cheer. After several brutal battles, after much bloodshed, after considerable suffering both needless and entertaining, a blade finds its mark, and a...
By the time the starter trills his ready whistle, and the crowd at the Sydney Aquatic Center begins to hush, and the four hulk-shouldered, body-shaved U.S. swimmers have exchanged a few last looks of anxious resolve, the swimmers will each have won a spot on what may prove to be...
Kids killing kids. Kids killing teachers. Kids killing themselves. The nation's youthscape is a fright, all right -- but there's one person who thinks he's got the magic bullet. That would be The Scary Guy, "America's Only Live Comic Book Hero." "The country's No. 1 social disease?" asks Scary, as...
CITIZENS OF THE VALLEY: This is a code-red Mullet alert. In recent months, there has been a drastic increase in the number of confirmed Mullet sightings in Phoenix and surrounding cities. Estimates indicate we are rapidly approaching the crisis threshold of one Mullet Cut per hundred hair styles. Simultaneous outbreaks...
"In 1966, one of the great albums in rock 'n' roll history was made: Pet Sounds, by the Beach Boys. Even today it holds up. I listen to it and moan, sit on my bed encircled in a knee-high pile of paper and write poetry." So who's that waxin' wimpy...
