Every New Year’s Eve, I watch my favorite movie. I used to think that everyone had a favorite film until a few years ago, when I hosted a party to which I asked each guest to bring a clip from their most-loved movie. One by one the invitees phoned to…
On a recent Friday morning, 44-year-old movie director Eric Schaeffer woke up at his usual hour of 10:30 in his one-bedroom Upper West Side apartment that he calls “Studio Schaeffer,” got dressed in jeans and a black Nike sweatshirt, and checked to see if any dating prospects had e-mailed him…
Aspirin? Check. Killer threads? Solid. Bail money? Sho’nuff. Sounds like you’re fully locked and loaded to get your New Year’s Eve freak on, except you need some off-the-chain parties and places to peep. Fear not, funky Phoenicians, because we’ve got the lowdown on all the hoedowns going down around the…
Imagine two game producers rushing down the hall. One wants to pitch a WW2 game, the other a sci-fi shooter. They round a corner, crash into each other, and their papers go flying everywhere — and in one of those great “You got chocolate in my peanut butter!” moments, Resistance:…
Jackass Number Two: Unrated (Paramount) The sequel to the dumb-ass jamboree makes its predecessor look plain and inoffensive. In short: more puke, more blood, more semen (from a horse, consumed nonetheless), more shit, more piss, more everything till you’d think the Jackasses (Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, etc.) would be…
Airwolf: Season Two (Universal) Be With Me (Film Movement) Dane Cook’s Tourgasm (HBO) Danica (First Look) Factotum (IFC) The Family Values Tour 2006 (Firm Music) Girls Behaving Badly, Volume One (Starlight) Haven (Fox) Mars Invades the Earth! (Alpha) Mi Amigo (Velocity) Mr. Fix It (First Look) The New Adventures of…
Bring a copy of The Enemy at Home and your pro-abortion sketchbook, wire up on the skunk, and let the semantics fly during Café Alumut. The collective-community interface is a mix of madness and genius. Like Cheers, there’s a cast of hilarious and intelligent thought criminals who will remember you…
ASU Men’s Basketball head coach Herb Sendek talks like a pipsqueak girl. It’s unsettling, really. But the former North Carolina State head man definitely has cojónes. After leading the Wolfpack to five straight NCAA tourneys, Sendek left his lofty perch in the college-basketball stratosphere called the Atlantic Coast Conference to…
ASU Men’s Basketball head coach Herb Sendek talks like a pipsqueak girl. It’s unsettling, really. But the former North Carolina State head man definitely has cojones. After leading the Wolfpack to five straight NCAA tourneys, Sendek left his lofty perch in the college-basketball stratosphere called the Atlantic Coast Conference to…
What is it with those bloody Brits? Of course the arrogant blokes would come up with a tradition like the weekly Quiz Night at George & Dragon, where they can massage their massive brain tissue, flare their nostrils, and proclaim, “Jolly good, old chap!” through a decaying grill when they…
Al Gore would be proud — and maybe a little buzzed — if he went to the Orange Table’s Bike Night. Each Tuesday, the Orange turns green, offering booze discounts to anyone who rolls up on a bicycle. And enviro-freaks don’t even have to be clean. “You could come in…
Agnes & His Brothers (First Run) All the King’s Men (Sony) American Pie: The Naked Mile (Universal) The Beauty Academy of Kabul (Docurama) The Celestine Prophecy (Sony) Checking Out (Allumination) Derailed (Weinstein) Dreamland (Sony) Invincible (Disney) Lady in the Water (Warner Bros.) Long Distance (Image) My Super Ex-Girlfriend (Fox) National…
Everybody has bad days. You know, the kind of day when you oversleep, realize you have no breakfast food in the house, painfully injure your foot on a broken office chair and get stood up by a client — all before noon. Sigh. I’m convinced there must be some order…
I’m not a “girly” girl. I don’t like pink, and I’ll take my dingy brown Doc Martens over high heels, hands down. So admittedly I wanted to cut and run when I first spied Kathleen Holmes’ collection of metal, glass and ceramic sculptures at Scottsdale’s Cervini Haas gallery. Six dresses…
It is said that a great actor or actress can “bring down the house,” but before I saw (and heard) the 25-year-old American Idol finalist Jennifer Hudson in the film version of the 1981 Broadway musical Dreamgirls, I can’t recall the last time I truly feared for the architectural stability…
History repeats itself: 11 Decembers ago, Universal had the season’s strongest movie — a downbeat sci-fi flick freely adapted from a well-known source by a name director. With a bare minimum of advance screenings and a shocking absence of hype, the studio dumped it. This year, it’s done it again…
It took Norman Mailer seven years and 1,282 pages to write 1991’s Harlot’s Ghost: A Novel of the CIA, and, if memory serves, it took me 12 years to actually finish it. So director Robert De Niro and screenwriter Eric Roth can be forgiven for taking two hours and 40…
Bankrupt and brain-damaged in Rocky V, a bout fought so long ago that the other Bush was still sucker-punching Saddam, Sylvester Stallone’s titular pugilist returns to issue another beating in Rocky Balboa. How much punishment can an audience take? Even 007 gets his license renewed by younger models every decade,…
Men are literally disposable in Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver. But the film, particularly for fans of the gynophilic, flamboyantly color-coordinating maker of loco melodramas, is essential. The title translates as Coming Back — as in “back from the dead,” referring to the matter-of-fact resurrection of Irene (Carmen Maura), an old grandmother…
Travis Smith is serious about Christmas kitsch. Not only has he amassed thousands of vintage dime-store holiday ornaments, he’s also spent decades rescuing the unwanted homemade Christmas knickknacks that languish on thrift-store shelves. He’s documented both in Kitschmasland!: Christmas Decor From the 1950s to the 1970s, a new book that…
Aside from that new ball, NBA Live 07 may be the worst product to bear the league’s name this year. The new basketball game from Electronic Arts is so glitchy that scores of buyers launched an online petition demanding a do-over. Luckily for the rest of us, consumers have a…
