THU 17The iPod Nation has a seemingly insatiable craving for larger-than-life gaming. What’s The Amazing Race but a high-stakes Easter-egg hunt? What’s Fear Factor but an over-the-top game of chicken? The latest overgrown-kid craze is RoShamBo/Rock-Paper-Scissors, an extreme makeover of the kiddy contest that’s morphed into a fiercely competitive “sport.”…
Live in the Southwest long enough, mi’ja, and you would rather eat live fire ants than look at one more gallery full of quaint, decorator-friendly Latino folk art. Ruben Maqueda makes art in this tradition, but mercifully, Maqueda manages to bring some contemporary kick to “Tradiciones de Mi Gente (Traditions…
Rockstar Games has a winning recipe: Blend a nuanced story with a rich environment, add a dash of sensational marketing, then drench the confection in blood. What else would you expect from the publisher that gave us Grand Theft Auto? Rockstar’s latest release, The Warriors, proves that the bad boys…
Beavis and Butt-head: The Mike Judge Collection, Volume One (Paramount) This three-disc, 40-episode volume chronicling Beavis and Butt-head’s early years will come as a relief to anyone who was stuck in a teenage wasteland when the MTV series first hit the air; turns out, we weren’t just stoned — this…
Dan Collins, 51, a pioneer in digital sculpture, bumps art up against science and lands on the cutting edge. As both fine artist and computer crackerjack, Collins co-directs Arizona State University’s PRISM, a state-of-the-art laboratory that gathers 3-D digital data and builds objects with a rapid prototyping machine — a…
As a screenwriter, Shane Black has built a reputation on action movies featuring mismatched partners. Crazy Mel Gibson and aging Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon; sassy Samuel L. Jackson and amnesiac hit-woman/housewife Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight; burnout detective Bruce Willis and football player Damon Wayans in The…
Keira Knightley, who is all of 20 but has the grace and gravitas of someone a good decade older, probably considers herself the luckiest lass in all the world at present. Just as Pride & Prejudice begins filling the cineplex with dewy, hopeless romantics who can’t get enough of Jane…
Moviegoers with a taste for nasty villains will get all they can handle from the heavy in Swedish director Mikael Håfström’s Derailed. Philippe LaRoche — played with obvious relish by a craggy-faced Vincent Cassel — is not the kind of effete Frenchman you find reading poetry in the corner bistro…
Pay attention, Disney: This is how you do a family film right. Neither pandering nor dull, Zathura plays exactly like a no-limits replica of the kind of space adventure that imaginative kids left to their own devices might enact. Assuming there’s no Xbox to distract them, naturally. Loosely based on…
About halfway through Get Rich or Die Tryin’, the new movie starring rapper 50 Cent (a.k.a. Curtis Jackson) and loosely based on his life, 50’s character Marcus is in prison, being visited by his girlfriend Charlene (Joy Bryant). Surprised by his inability to communicate with her, she asks the gangsta…
Don’t stand on Grand looking grubby this week. While downtown’s diagonal avenue may be better known for its streetwalkers than its catwalkers, the stretch of deserted industrial buildings turned art galleries moves toward mega modish during “Fashion Week: Grand’s Secret Catwalk”. For four nights, Four White Walls gallery will host…
Greetings, landcrawlers! Homarus americanus here — better known as the American lobster — to tell y’all that Neptune can kiss my bright, red thorax. I’m the real king of the sea, especially at this weekend’s Tempe Original Lobster Festival. Check it: Me and hundreds of my underwater crew are the…
MON 11/14When Jethro Tull won the Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance in 1989, beating out contenders like AC/DC and Metallica, a lot of people raised their eyebrows. But nobody was surprised by the controversy; Jethro Tull has been making people scratch their heads for years. Here’s a classic…
WED 11/16If you’re looking for an alternative to Hollywood’s seasonal onslaught of high-concept blockbusters, you’ll find it at “Video Slam!” — a digital offshoot of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art’s popular “Slide Slam” series. “Video Slam!” features experimental offerings by Tony Ash and Steve Gompf and a screening of…
11/10-11/13Conventional wisdom holds that in sports, the four “majors” consist of football, baseball, basketball, and hockey, though hockey now toils on the Outdoor Life Network while NASCAR runs laps around the competition both on television and at the turnstiles. This weekend, more than 200,000 of the faithful, or roughly the…
THU 11/10To hell with Niagara Falls, we’ve got an even better location lined up for our impending nuptials: Hades. Sure, the guests might have a devil of a time trying to find transportation, but think about all the gory details: Instead of champagne, we’ll sip blood from bone goblets and…
Bang Rajan (Hart Sharp) Big Fish: Special Edition (Columbia/Tristar) Blue Collar TV: Season 1, Volume 1 (Warner Bros.) Burn (Columbia/Tristar) Christmas With the Kranks (Sony) Cronicas (UMVD) Edward Scissorhands: Anniversary Edition (Fox) 50 Cent: Refuse to Die (New Line) Jumanji: Deluxe Edition (Columbia/Tristar) La Dolce Vita: Deluxe Collector’s Edition (Koch…
“Private Pictures” at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art: Some superstars of photography come together in this exhibition of images owned by Arizona collectors. Classic photos by Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, Cindy Sherman, Henri Cartier Bresson and Tina Modetti prove there are people in this state who have a lot of…
THU 10If spoken-wordsmith Adam Gnade was a gunfighter, you wouldn’t want to engage him in a stare-down at high noon. Though the slim wordslinger looks like he’d blow away in a gentle breeze, he’s made of pretty stern stuff. Gnade (pronounced “Gaw-na-dee”) speaks softly but packs a literary wallop with…
Pity the videogame zombie. He spends his short afterlife dodging self-righteous heroes hell-bent on peppering him with buckshot, setting him on fire, or blowing him to smithereens with a bazooka. Well, Stubbs is here to even the score. Set in the 1950s, Stubbs the Zombie casts players as the eponymous…
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (Lucasfilm Ltd.) The final installment of the Star Wars saga actually plays better at home: You can watch it, then pop in the original trilogy and chart the evolution of Anakin, and have it all actually make sense. Though it’s still a…
Christopher, who may be insane, believes that the oranges in the bowl in the psychiatric hospital are a bright, luminous blue. His doctor, Bruce Flaherty, believes that this is evidence that Christopher is still mentally ill and shouldn’t be sent home today, his intended day of release. Thus begins the…
