Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Season Three (Universal) Black Sheep Unrated (Genius) Bob Mould: Circle of Friends (Granary) Bruce Springsteen: Under Review-1978-82: Tales of the Working Man (Sexy Intellectual) Concert for Diana (Universal) CSI New York: The Third Season (Paramount) Man Push Cart (Koch Lorber) The Marx Brothers Collection (Passport) Meerkat Manor:…
He’s one of three Draculas currently flapping their capes on local stages, but future Oscar contender Shane Dean is not willing to take third place — or any crap about his use of Mop & Glo, either. I knew I wanted to be in show business when I saw Michael…
The estranged brothers Whitman have reunited for a journey on the Darjeeling Limited, a colorful old train traversing the Rajasthan region of India. Along the way, they will stop to visit temples (“Probably one of the most spiritual places on Earth!”) and shop for souvenirs (slippers, cobras, pepper spray), with…
It will, no doubt, be said time and again of Michael Clayton: best John Grisham adaptation ever. Except, of course, it did not spring from the billion-dollar mind of the attorney who turned into a franchise, but from Tony Gilroy, who made his big-screen bow 15 years ago as the…
Calling all pundits. It’s a baffling caprice of the zeitgeist to have two studio Westerns released in the same season, 30-odd years after the genre basically gave up the ghost. James Mangold’s better-than-competent and highly crowd-pleasing 3:10 to Yuma has provided a harmonica fanfare for something more ambitious and polarizing…
“Will you leave your kingdom to a heretic?” That was the question posed to a dying Queen Mary in 1998’s Elizabeth, director Shekhar Kapur’s grim and dingy film now viewed in retrospect as the origin story of a superhero: The Armored Virgin Queen, faster than a speeding lead pellet, more…
“Beautiful” and “cruel” — that’s how director Ang Lee describes Eileen Chang’s 1979 short story about obsessive love and effortless betrayal in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, a tale upon which Lee has based his epic-length Lust, Caution. Writing in the afterword to a recently republished version of the 54-page story, which took…
Welcome to Phoenix, where the sun never sets and one can typically find on local stages the same half-dozen shows (Little Shop of Horrors, Forever Plaid, West Side Story always among them) playing pretty much year-round. Sometimes, one can even find the same show playing simultaneously at two different theaters,…
What’s left to say about Halo 3? How about this: All the pomp and circumstance surrounding its launch sure have been distracting. Commercials that look like clips from a Hollywood movie, extravagant collectors’ sets that sell for $130, limited-edition Xbox 360s with a green-and-gold Halo-inspired color scheme, and a midnight…
You Kill Me (Genius) Funny thing seeing Philip Baker Hall in You Kill Me, as he’s already played the role of a drunken hit man’s boss in The Matador, to which this feels like a slapshtick-noir sequel. It’s also the photonegative of Sexy Beast: Once more Ben Kingsley plays a…
Jessica Gooding and Lauren Vasquez’s Zombie Prom 2007 is not a new idea, but it’s a good one — zombies being really hip at the moment. So grab your gore-soaked tuxedo and your undead date and lurch down to Trax for the bestial bash, which features drink specials, professional prom…
As children, we often heard that secrets don’t make friends. What a load of crap. If that’s true, how is it that Frank Warren, the man responsible for PostSecret.com, is so popular? His project, in which people send anonymous postcard confessions, has made his Web site a raging success. Now…
Drunken revelry with a side of altruism — and the infamously crispy hop of Fat Tire beer — is behind the Tour De Fat, which includes a costumed bike parade and drinking stops at designated locales. The parade, which kicks things off, is followed by the tapping of frosty kegs…
If Burn Nightclub has its way, the resident DJs will continue to release pounding beats into the cement sidewalk until everything west of First Street falls into the Pacific Ocean and central Phoenix finally reigns as the terrible Queen of Light, her raised arms blurring slightly in the sunset as…
Unlike grass, xeriscape is a blank canvas waiting to be filled, and there’s no better way to patch those bothersome unfilled gaps than by nabbing some of the fine arid-landscape flora at the Desert Botanical Garden Fall Plant Sale. The selection is unparalleled, and the succulents are fat, sassy, and…
If Walt Disney had ever lived in Phoenix, he might have been inspired to write us a theme song. It would probably be something like “It’s a Suburban World After All,” because if you drive any direction from the central corridor, there’s nothing but dreaded urban sprawl — it’ll take…
What if we lived in a world where people were freaked out by illegal immigrants from Canada? And the derogatory name for the threatening hordes of border-crossers was Great Lake Swimmers? That would be crazy, eh? In real life, that moniker belongs to a Toronto-based band that traffics in low-key,…
It’s tough to find a nice patch of dark anymore, which is why local stargazers swear by Estrella Mountain Regional Park. Close to the urban core, it remains one of the areas least affected by light pollution. Let “star guy” Steve Dermer show you the sky the way it’s meant…
There’ve been quite a few rappers from the early-´90s heyday that have plunged into hip-hop’s purgatory, and for various reasons. Keith Murray was banished from the Def Jam label after choking an employee. Chicago ganja-rap ensemble Crucial Conflict never sobered up from their marijuana anthem, “Hay.” And, one of our…
Vats of mini-chimis. Free domestic canned brews. Chicks wrestling in pudding, to the delight of hygienically challenged individuals. Sounds like an Apache Junction special recipe, or the perfect concoction for yet another Doggy Style party. Though it may be tough to trump last spring’s shindig, we’re confident that Doggy Style…
Remember Roger Rabbit and his hot wife, Jessica? No one understood how the hell those two got together until she explained that the little fuzzy weirdo made her laugh. She may have looked like a bimbo, but she had a point — an ugly yet funny man can do no…
Growing up in Geneva, New York, Scott Coblio’s storybooks were all about murder. “My mother was a huge true-crime buff,” the filmmaker recalls from his home in Los Angeles, “and so Helter Skelter and biographies of Lizzie Borden and Hitler, those were my storybooks.” Coblio was especially drawn to Phoenix’s…
