To the knowledgeable comic book fan, all one need say about MirrorMask is that it was scripted by Neil Gaiman and directed by Dave McKean, with a final product that, while less plot-heavy than most of Gaiman’s writing, faithfully adapts McKean’s unique drawing/collage style into three dimensions. Since those who…
It’s been 85 years since Douglas Fairbanks slashed his way into the top tax bracket as the masked hero Zorro, and Hollywood still can find no reason to shut down the franchise. Technically speaking, The Legend of Zorro, starring Antonio Banderas as the guy with the sword and Catherine Zeta-Jones…
The inspiration for Alwun House’s hedonistic horror-pop party Monster’s Ball was Hieronymus Bosch’s 16th-century painting Garden of Earthly Delights, or, as Alwun House co-owner Kim Moody describes it: “that painting with all the obscene little characters with flutes up their butts.” Hmm . . . that gives a whole new…
A trio of female authors reading their novels at an event called the First Fiction “Diva” Tour must be a chick-lit thing, right? Wrong. Not one of the debut novelists featured on the tour writes about weight-obsessed women with lamentable love lives and penchants for Jimmy Choos. All three authors…
MON 10/31Tracy + the Plastics is not a real band. Or is it? The beauty is that it’s so hard to tell. The brain child of “lesbian feminist video artist” Wynne Greenwood, Tracy + the Plastics is a three-piece solo act. Yep, you read that right. Here’s the setup: Greenwood…
SAT 10/29What is it within us that makes us want to do things like wrestle in Jell-O or pudding, bathe in spaghetti noodles, or feel mud squishing up between our toes? If you’ve been neglecting your inner child, let it loose at Kokopelli Krush, a grape-harvest celebration and foot-stomping party…
SAT 10/29Alas, you won’t see gore-rock band Samhain playing a nude set with backing vocals by a buff Samantha Stevens from Bewitched at “Rites of Hekate, Samhain 2005.” However, there will be naked Wiccans galore at the garment-optional affair, which marks the “witchiest Sabbat of the year.” The 18-and-over event…
10/28-11/5Bram Stoker’s famed and fanged beast has sure turned into a sexy sucker within the past 50 years. The vampire has gone from the gaunt and pallid look of Bela Lugosi to the sleek, smooth-skinned suavity of Brad Pitt, and now everybody wants to be a bloodsucker. And why not?…
ABBA: The Movie (Universal) AC/DC: And Then There Was Rock (Chrome Dreams) Alias: The Complete Fourth Season (Buena Vista) Audioslave: Live in Cuba (Sony) The Beat That My Heart Skipped (Wellspring) Bewitched (Columbia/Tristar) The Day of the Triffids (Pro-Active) Dominion: A Prequel to the Exorcist (Warner) Face (Image) Herbie: Fully…
You feel the chill in the air, that spooky tingle at the base of your spine, the growing sense of dread in the pit of your stomach. You know it’s coming, and your ass had better be prepared. We’re not talking about yet another numbskull Adam Sandler flick, pal. Nope,…
Stella Lai at ASU Art Museum: Lai’s deceptively pretty paintings are about how ugly it is to be a woman or an animal in her native Hong Kong. Sad yellow chicken carcasses and plump pink pork chops morph into faceless silhouettes of swimsuit-clad women, and a roasted pig, cherry tomato…
THU 27Mary Shelley’s piecemeal monster with the weird neck corks and clunky Doc Martens gets a much-needed makeover in The Flying Machine’s Frankenstein, a fairy tale for adults that’s kind of like a performance-art splicing of The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. The presenting troupe, Brooklyn’s Flying Machine,…
Actors far and wide owe some kind of debt to dialect coach Dianne J. Winslow, who teaches them how to say what they say when there’s a an accent involved. Winslow’s talents can be heard in Arizona Theatre Company’s Pride and Prejudice at the Herberger; here, she considers Harpo Marx,…
It’s ugly to watch a grown man gush over a puppy. The kissing. The cooing. The “widdle-doggie” talk. Embarrassing stuff. So it was with trepidation that I approached Nintendogs, the cuddly dog-rearing sim for Nintendo DS. A million and a half people have already adopted virtual pooches, making the game…
Batman: The Motion Picture Anthology 1989-1997 (Warner Home Video) There’s good reason to be skeptical of an eight-disc Batman set that forces you to buy the campy Joel Schumacher movies (Batman Forever, its title a veiled threat, and Batman & Robin) when all you need are the dark Tim Burton…
There’s a message folded into Armentine Duryea’s The Sun City Cannabis Club, a self-published murder mystery suspense novel about a drunken granny who stumbles onto a medical marijuana ring in Wrinkle Town. That message, wedged craftily into scenes involving gun-toting, pot-smoking oldsters with black belts in karate who take out…
It helps to love good acting and the writing of Jane Austen in order to really appreciate Arizona Theatre Company’s lush, immaculate production of Pride and Prejudice. This practically flawless adaptation, crammed as it is with wonderful acting and gorgeous technical design, should come with a snooze warning for anyone…
When we first see the protagonist of North Country, a working-class heroine portrayed by a deglamorized Charlize Theron, she’s sporting a black eye and a slight limp, the results of an encounter with her abusive husband. We soon learn that Josey Aimes is only now beginning to take her lumps…
DreamWorks is so eager to have you believe in its latest family movie that the words “Inspired by a True Story” are actually part of the title. Yep, Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story is the proper name, and publicists have been well-coached to say and write out the whole…
It’s always hard to pan an earnest film, especially one by a first-time director. And The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, a plucky striver if there ever was one, can’t find a single cynical note on the scale. Essentially a hagiography in praise of Evelyn Ryan (Julianne Moore), a woman…
Perhaps the only thing more unusual than producing a program about 9-year-olds with nothing to live for is having actual fourth graders show up to audition for parts in the show. “I was floored,” says Ron May, who’s directing The Fourth Graders Present an Unnamed Love-Suicide for Stray Cat Theatre…
Halloween, schmalloween. All of the Valley’s ghoulies, ghosties, long-legged beasties, and things that go bump in the night are booked up solid thanks to the First Annual International Horror and Sci-Fi Film Festival, which plays host to an astounding galaxy of genre superstars — especially for its first go-round. Tobe…
