We all hid our alternative ways from our parents in high school. Punk rockers stashed spiked leather jewelry and hippies stashed, well, their stashes. If you were goth, your eyes were always burning after rubbing off the black makeup just before your folks’ Caravan pulled into the student-pickup area. Funny…
Wanna see folks rolling in phat 6-4s, tricked-out sub-compacts, and bangin’ modified wheels? Then peep the inaugural Latin Festival Lowrider & Euro Car Show. Music by Brown Boy and the appropriately named Chingo Bling rounds out the slammin’ shindig. Sun., Sept. 30, noon, 2007…
It’s easy to laugh at someone you hate, like the Michael Scott character in The Office, especially because dude is embarrassingly similar to at least half the bosses we know in cubicle-lovin’ corporate America. But in some societies around the globe, a culture that’s rich in contemptible bosses is a…
It’s sort of like when SCTV’s Count Floyd showed an Ingmar Bergman movie, then asked the kiddies: “You think it’s not scary to be depressed?” Thoughout September, Valley movie maven Fred Linch has covered everything from bloodsuckers to zombies to the sci-fi visions of Steven Spielberg in his weekly cinema-discussion…
What if Homo sapiens suddenly went extinct? We imagine environmental poster boy Al Gore would be tickled pink, even though he was dead. Author Alan Weisman takes a counterintuitive approach in his “thought experiment” The World Without Us, contending, among other intriguing things, that rats and roaches would themselves struggle…
Despite being named for an old, dead person — Charles Lindbergh — the Lindy hop is not just for old, dead people. Neither is it for old, almost-dead people who shuffle their feet at adult-rec centers with bingo callers yapping in the background. No, the Lindy has always been a…
There are a couple of intriguing plot lines for the Arizona Cardinals going into their home clash with the Pittsburgh Steelers. For the length of one U.S. presidential term, Cards’ head coach Ken Whisenhunt drew Xs and Os in the Steel City as offensive coordinator. Russ Grimm, the Cards’ assistant…
Whatever happened to partyin’ ’til you puke on a Monday night? Well, BYO barf bag, ’cause the partying’s back with the return of We Are Elektric!, an 18-and-over eve of live music and raunchy dancing to DJ spins. Crystal Castles headlines with a DJ set following its recent Marquee Theatre…
Once upon a time, the scariest Saturday-morning cartoon was Scooby-Doo, and a haunted house meant a bunch of teens in bedsheets spooking little kids. Now TV cartoons scare the shit out of us, and haunted houses have made a quantum leap into actual terror. Case in point: The Revenant Haunted…
Okay, ladies, what’s your number one complaint about your man? He takes you for granted, right? I knew it. But don’t be so hard on him. It’s human nature to take things for granted — and you do it all the time, too. Not necessarily when it comes to your…
The front door to my very first apartment sat a whopping 70 feet away from the train tracks, on the west side of ASU not far from the neighborhood bar Casey Moore’s. A half-dozen times a day, my walls would vibrate and my cat would hide under the couch as…
Paintings by Scooter LaForge at Antoine Proulx Design Studio: As far as turnoffs go, self-absorbed pretension is right up there with stained teeth and halitosis. And sadly, our own arts scene is rampant with artists who take themselves too seriously. But Scooter LaForge is the equivalent to teeth bleach and…
Beyond the Gates (Fox) Blade: House of Chthon (New Line) The Boss of It All (IFC) Boston Legal: Season Three (Fox) Brothers and Sisters: The Complete First Season (Buena Vista) Catherine Deneuve: Essentials (Wellspring) The Condemned (Lionsgate) Deliverance: Deluxe Edition (Warner Bros.) Family Guy: Volume Five (Fox) Flashdance: Special Collector’s…
Even the most adamantly anti-war movies about American soldiers returning from Vietnam — Hal Ashby’s Coming Home (1978) and Oliver Stone’s Born on the 4th of July (1989) — redeemed their mangled, embittered grunts through the love of good women, devoted parents, political resistance, or all of the above. You…
I’ve said it before and hope to again: David Cronenberg is the most provocative, original, and consistently excellent North American director of his generation. From Videodrome (1983) through A History of Violence (2005), neither Scorsese nor Spielberg, and not even David Lynch, has enjoyed a comparable run. A rhapsodic movie…
Until 2005, Richard Shepard’s was a lamentable direct-to-prop-plane filmography populated with such forgettable titles as Cool Blue, Oxygen, Mexico City, and The Linguini Incident, the latter of which was a heist film most notable for pairing David Bowie and Buck Henry — and that’s not even a punch line. For…
In the first few minutes of Eastern Promises, the striking new thriller from David Cronenberg, a throat is sliced, a uterus hemorrhages, and a newborn baby, slimy and palpitating, emerges from the womb of its dead mother. None of which comes as much of a surprise from the maker of…
The exemplary achievements of the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival succeeded by one of two means: narrowing the gap between author and subject in pursuit of intimate effects, or else working distance into the material and profiting from the vantage. Contemporary neorealism at its most confident and alert, Chop Shop…
People refer to Phoenix as an up-and-coming city; they call it a late-night ghost town, a sweatbox, a suburban desert. But what it looks more and more like all the time is a deserted movie set. And the film that’s just wrapped here is a cheesy sci-fi flick about an…
In space, no one can hear you scream, Jumpin’ Jesus, this is one of the greatest games ever! But that doesn’t mean you won’t try during Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. Hard-core gamers know Metroid’s star, bounty-hunter babe Samus Aran, has been kicking ass since 1986 — back when Lara Croft…
Saturday Night Fever: 30th Anniversary Special Collector’s Edition (Paramount) For all its camp-classic status as the ultimate disco-fever dream, John Badham’s movie truly is remarkable — a foul-mouthed, mean-streets masterpiece that just happens to feature a Bee Gees score that spreads like melted cheese 30 years later. And, of course,…
Young American Comedy Tour. Dull name, granted, but the sextet of comics tore up the Improv when they pulled a one-night stand there last April, and they’re back for another go. Host Mike Young (who has a sitcom in the works with ABC titled Forever Young) and his boy-wonder yukmeisters…
