If Jarhead, director Sam Mendes and writer William Broyles Jr.’s adaptation of Anthony Swofford’s 2003 Gulf War memoir, seems at all familiar — like, say, a DJ’s mash-up of Full Metal Jacket and Three Kings — there’s good reason for it. Swofford, 20 years old during Operation Desert Storm in…
Chicken Little is a groundbreaking movie in more ways than one. Not only is it Disney’s first in-house all-computer-generated feature, but on select screens, it will be presented in “Disney Digital 3-D,” a brand-new system created with the help of George Lucas’ special-effects company Industrial Light & Magic. It’s revolutionary!…
If The Memory of a Killer were not mostly in Flemish, it would be easy to mistake for a Hollywood movie. The story of a hit man with a conscience and the cop who’s always a step or two behind him as they pursue the same villains, it’s full of…
Adam Roberts is schizo-rama. On the one hand, he’s the Dr. Jekyll of jazz, a serious-as-cancer student of the form who tosses around names like Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, John Zorn, and Bill Frisell. On the other — slightly hairier — hand, he’s Mr. Hyde, a mad beast…
Tommy Chong discovered one important thing after serving nine months in the poky for selling marijuana paraphernalia over the Internet. “I learned never to put my face on a bong,” he says. Following his July 2004 release from jail on charges in which he wore “the badge of honor as…
MON 11/7If you value your privacy, don’t drop a love letter anywhere near Davy Rothbart. The founder of FOUND magazine has been scooping up people’s discarded letters, journals and postcards for years and publishing them in the magazine or posting them on his Web site, www.foundmagazine.com. And it’s not just…
11/3-11/26Maybe NASA and Michael Jackson should fall to their knees and kiss the feet of collaborative artists Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick, whose “Apollo Prophecies Project” has made moonwalking cool again. Kahn/Selesnick’s massive “Project” portrays a fantastical world in which astronauts from 1960s and ’70s space missions are mistaken for…
SAT 11/5Pound puppies can compete on equal footing with their purebred cousins at the Skyhoundz Hyperflite Canine Disc Championships on Saturday, November 5, at Encanto Park, 15th Avenue and Encanto Boulevard. Though the Phoenix event is a stand-alone meet from which winners don’t advance, “we average around 500 spectators,” says…
11/4-11/6Savion Glover has the world at his feet, literally. The 32-year-old tap-dance king is like a shoehorn in a shoehorn factory — hard to miss. He’s left his artistic footprints everywhere from Broadway (Bring In Da Noise, Bring In Da Funk) to the silver screen (Spike Lee’s Bamboozled) to TV…
American Chopper: Third Season (Columbia/Tristar) Attack Pack (Commando, Predator, and Kiss of the Dragon) (Fox) Bill Maher: I’m Swiss (Image Ent.) The Brady Bunch: Four-Season Pack (Paramount) Dear America: Letters Home From Vietnam (Warner Bros.) Disney Princess: A Christmas of Enchantment (Disney) Duran Duran: Live From London (Universal Music) Fame:…
1. Start out as an overly solemn and often pretentious child with a more-than-passing interest in Gilbert and Sullivan. Worry your parents with constant criticisms of their clothing, their taste in furnishings, and their favorite television shows. Ask Santa for an IBM Selectric and a velvet-lined cape. Brood. Be sent…
THU 3There’s no reason the island sounds of reggae and the exotic music of the Middle East can’t get along, especially when beer and beautiful belly dancers are involved. Every week, Sinbad, 5004 South Price Road in Tempe, hosts Hookah Jam Thursdays, a culture dish of hookah smoking, impromptu jams,…
Some superstars of photography come together in a fascinating exhibition of photographs at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. “Private Pictures: Photography From Arizona Collections” features work by classic shooters like Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, Cindy Sherman, Henri Cartier Bresson and Tina Modetti. It’s a greatest-hits show, the art world…
Colin Chillag’s paintings at Modified Arts make you feel like you’ve seen them before, in an earlier life. The one of a grandmotherly woman holding a baby is eerily familiar, as is the one of the middle-aged couple standing in front of an elaborately decorated cake. We’ve all lived these…
We’ve all been kicked in the junk by Marvel superheroes before. Watching Elektra was like two hours of nut-pummeling by a relentless, sack-hating donkey. But superhero films — even bad ones — gross bazillions of dollars. So it’s no surprise that Marvel is cashing in with a slew of licensed…
Titanic: Special Collector’s Edition (Paramount Home Video) Loved and loathed in equal measure, Titanic nonetheless is among the few modern-day movies deserving of lavish treatment; this boxed set, three discs with three hours of new stuff, feels almost as big a production as the feature itself. Writer-director James Cameron, never…
I was walking out of Trader Joe’s last week when an extra-smiley man in a tie-dyed dashiki stepped in front of me. “Would you like to invite Jesus into your life to be your Savior and Lord?” he asked, beaming maniacally. “Actually, no,” I replied. “I would like to go…
The Weather Man, starring Nicolas Cage as a disappointment of a son and a failure of a father, was screened for critics in the spring, before its April release was pushed to October, ostensibly to allow for the off chance that Cage or Michael Caine (as Cage’s father) might be…
Does Steve Martin have multiple personality disorder — or is he just brilliantly in tune with some things and wildly out of touch with others? Shopgirl, the movie based on Martin’s novella of the same name, is one of the most schizoid films in recent memory. It opens with crystalline…
This fall, the roll call of gigantic ghosts inhabiting cinematic biographies continues unabated, with Joaquin Phoenix as a shrunken Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, David Strathairn as an inscrutable Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck, and Philip Seymour Hoffman as the ambitiously manipulative Truman Capote in,…
With a name like Prime, a movie had better be about something more than an older woman digging on a younger man, much to the disapproval of the younger man’s mom. It ought to be about, oh, I dunno, math or something — like Pi or Proof or even Primer,…
Talk about striking while the iron is hot: It’s been only a year since Saw became an instant cult hit, as well as a topic of debate among horror fans. Was it an innovative new classic, or did the occasionally lackluster acting and ludicrous final twist doom it to also-ran…
