“Super Heroics” by Mark Newport at Arizona State University Art Museum: Fiber artist and ASU professor Mark Newport pokes fun at traditional gender roles by using the feminine art of knitting to make manly superhero costumes. His empty Aquaman, Batman, Daredevil and Spiderman suits hang flaccidly from the museum walls,…
Kelli James, Broadway’s first-ever Eponine in the original production of Les Misérables, is here among us. Tired of living out of a suitcase, and after a distinguished career that includes dozens of Broadway starring roles, James has settled in Phoenix, where she’s featured this month as a singing teapot in…
Good news, girls. Apparently, mankind has at long last passed through that era where guys only wanted to get laid and have someone cook for them. Young men today, according to a cover story in this month’s Marie Claire magazine, want to get married and have babies, and they’re even…
Disney’s Beauty and the Beast is exactly the kind of entertainment I deplore: a corporate-inspired translation of a cutie-pie musical cartoon adapted from classic literature. It’s peopled by actors dressed in character costumes that all but swallow their performances, which are anyway built on attempts to ape the motion picture…
If the Navy is looking for splashy recruiting tools, it could do worse than Stealth, a zillion-dollar action movie stuffed with futuristic jet fighters, glamorous carrier pilots, and an overload of explosive, mostly digital derring-do. Here is Top Gun revised and updated, complete with a new array of enemies –…
Must Love Dogs, it should be clearly stated, is not the greatest romantic comedy ever made about a quirky couple who meet at a dog park. That honor goes to Dog Park, the oddball 1998 flick starring Luke Wilson and Natasha Henstridge, written and directed by former Kids in the…
So little time, so much trouble. In the 24-hour period that’s dissected in Heights, the first feature from Harvard/Cambridge/USC Film School-educated Chris Terrio, an aspiring Manhattan photographer named Isabel (Elizabeth Banks) gets cold feet about her upcoming marriage to a dull but pleasant lawyer named Jonathan (James Marsden); a needy…
Remember the scene in X2 where Wolverine grabs a Dr Pepper and enlists the aid of Iceman to make it cold? Take the tone of that scene and stretch it out to feature length and you get Sky High, a less angsty, more kid-friendly movie about teenagers attending a school…
After more than a decade of transmitting seditiously confrontational artistic communiqués to the Valley, the rabble-rousing raconteurs of Thought Crime received a pretty disturbing reply on their doorstep earlier this month — an eviction notice instructing them to get the hell out. Despite what you might expect, the reasons behind…
At their CD release party scheduled for the Old Brickhouse Grill this Friday night, The Society of Invisibles plan to perform a song so across-the-board offensive, even their staunchest fans have been advising the crew against it. “We’re gonna be doing a song we’ve never performed before, called ‘Down,’ that’s…
SUN 7/31Thank Salvador Dali for Blade Runner. That goes for Fight Club, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Truman Show, and even Total Recall, too. His name doesn’t pop up in the credits, but the most famous name in Surrealist art is credited with making the genre a profitable commodity in Hollywood, where Dali…
7/28-8/31While the action emanating from the local nine at the BOB this year has been roughly akin to watching paint dry, the up-and-coming rookies participating in the Arizona Summer League offer a unique alternative for baseball purists hoping to catch an early glimpse of tomorrow’s stars. There’s nowhere to go…
FRI 7/29Though you could make the argument that a majority of 21st-century kids (or adults, for that matter) couldn’t find Japan on an unlabeled map of the world, that doesn’t stop them from looking to the East for their animation. The popularity of anime, the Japanese form of animation influenced…
THU 7/28The Rubber Robot that plays Emerald Lounge this week is not the band by the same name that wears horse-head masks and plays the theremin. Nor are they a soulless, automated device that looks and responds just like a human. “I kind of got Rubber Robot from — well,…
THU 28Though he failed to cement his place in history as the first pop star in space, *NSYNC’s Lance Bass could always head down to the Challenger Space Center, 21170 North 83rd Avenue in Peoria, to see what he missed besides the Top 40 charts for the past three years…
Screw Willy Wonka. Colin Redding is our very own chocolate wizard, a man with his own candy factory who’s willing to make a 40-foot dildo out of chocolate (although he’d rather not). He’s even pulling a Wonka by sneaking golden tickets into chocolate bars sold at Changing Hands Bookstore (ticket…
b royalty, 37, painter, day-care artist and self- proclaimed mediocre violinist, says she paints “to make me visible to myself.” Visible to the rest of us are her enormous talents, via the oil-and-collage paintings that have brought her almost instant recognition in the fickle art world. Royalty’s texture-heavy, color-saturated paintings…
Murderball is a gem of a little film, one that’s at very least worth renting in its inevitable DVD release. It’s also one of the most over-hyped indies of the season. It won a couple of awards at Sundance — the Audience Choice prize and another for editing — and…
It should come as no surprise that the hero and heroine of the new Michael Bay action extravaganza are clones. Exact copies of other people. You don’t get to be a Hollywood hitmeister like Bay — 200 Zillion Tickets Sold! — without indulging in formulas, and the characters Star Wars…
Gregg Araki likes to shock. That’s no secret to anyone who has followed the director’s career, but a cartoonish layer of unreality has usually kept the polymorphous sexual pairings and graphic violence somewhat at a distance. There’s a little bit of that in Mysterious Skin, but mostly it stays grounded…
Going to the theater this summer has been like stepping into a time machine where your fondest childhood memories are retooled by cynics and sadists. Bewitched, Herbie: Fully Loaded, last week’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and now Bad News Bears are meant to be gobbled like comfort food by…
When rocker turned director Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses was released in 2003, after years of bouncing around between studios afraid to put their name on a movie about a cartoonishly murderous family, it was anticipated as a hard-core gore fest. Instead, it was a plotless mess, with decent…
