If nothing else, Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City, co-directed with Frank Miller (and Quentin Tarantino, for a few seconds), will be remembered as the most faithful comic-book adaptation ever put on film (or high-def video, anyway). Rodriguez uses Miller’s hyper-noir serial, published over a 10-year period, as storyboards for the movie…
Give Dan Harris, the writer/director of Imaginary Heroes, plenty of credit for boldness and ambition. Not many kids fresh out of Columbia University would have the wherewithal to tackle a complex family-crisis drama with four or five different kinds of trouble running through it and half a dozen crucial minor…
Troy Glaus knows a thing or two about comebacks. After all, the new Arizona Diamondbacks third baseman was part of one of the greatest turnarounds in World Series history when he helped the Anaheim Angels (now the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim) avoid elimination during Game 6 of the 2002…
At last year’s Arizona Central Pride Festival, the guy in the hemp shorts and the hot-pink feather boa didn’t get to finish his fantastically ludicrous karaoke cover of “Like a Virgin.” A big rainstorm cut his performance short, just as he was simulating butt-flossing with said boa. It’s rained on…
4/1-4/10 A souvenir shop in Dearborn, Michigan, once sold a rubber stamp that read, “People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it’s safer to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs.” Obviously, the quotation predates the modern motorcycle frenzy of the middle-aged. In the 1960s, riding a motorcycle…
SUN 4/3 Break out the gloves and fly your uncle down from Saskatchewan: Hockey is back. Witness some serious slap shots as the Phoenix Adult Hockey Association plays every Sunday night at the Arcadia Ice Arena, 3853 East Thomas Road. Old pros, wanna-be stars and enthusiasts take to the ice…
TUE 4/5 To all the wanna-bes who love sushi and Bruce Lee, but whose best kung fu moves are limited to wax on and wax off, Tokyo Tuesdays are for you. Leave the coveted Enter the Dragon box set at home and karate-chop your way to Ra Sushi Bar Restaurant,…
FRI 4/1 Get your ears spanked when the thick whip of verbal science comes crashing down Friday, April 1, at the PHiX gallery, 1113 Grand Avenue. A group of 15 Valley poets congregate to stir your minds and souls while laying down their collective abilities of articulation for the first…
THU 24 While it’s been said that Thomas Gibbons’ “provocative and fearless drama” Permanent Collection does a lot of preaching to the choir, we hear that these are the salad days for religious symbolism, anyway, so why not? The play, produced by the Arizona Theatre Company in its Southwest premi’re…
The last good punk rock that came from Los Angeles was probably in the early to mid-1980s. Those were the days. The Angry Samoans, Black Flag, X, The Germs, Fear, and so many other greats. Then Social Distortion and Bad Religion won the lottery and it was all downhill from…
Whenever I find myself trapped in a theater with another lousy production of another dreary play or musical, I always turn to my friend the playbill. I’ve destroyed my eyesight peering into the dark at these marvels of bad syntax and questionable grammar, but it’s been worth it. Because playbills…
I’ve been watching anime for the past couple of days, and there isn’t enough aspirin (or Chivas Regal) in the world to relieve my pain. For those fortunate enough not to know, anime is a term used to describe a type of highly stylized Japanese animation in which drawings of…
It must have been Molly that finally set me off. I mean, with her warm, brownish hair and those loving eyes, well, she just reminded me of someone I left behind in New York. Sophie. Who used to live in my building. She, too, had the same color hair, and…
Molly Sweeney is blind. And she’s married to a windbag, a dorky bore who’s convinced her to undergo surgery to restore her eyesight. She’s lived a full, happy life in her native Ireland — at least until her meddlesome husband takes her on as his latest cause. The operation restores…
“Better than I thought it’d be,” was the refrain repeated by those exiting the preview screening of Guess Who, which doesn’t mean much — freebie audiences expect nothing and usually receive it. But in this case, it neatly summed up the experience of catching Ashton Kutcher in a part once…
Damian Cunningham has the face of an angel — calm and cool blue eyes perched above freckled cheeks and a benevolent grin — which is only appropriate for a 7-year-old boy who speaks with the late, great saints, among them Peter, Joseph, Claire, and, of course, Francis of Assisi. Damian…
Call it the naked truth. Although depictions of the bare-assed male form throughout history have always had more than a hint of homosexuality — from Grecian urns to the works of Michelangelo and Raphael — Wim Griffith rebukes the stigma that only the swishy set is interested in peeping paintings…
A Canadian lass once wrote a song that millions starving for a catchy melody thought was solid gold. But mostly, her ode to occasions she thought were ironic was really a tune about things that just kinda suck, plain and simple. So how’s this for irony? An artsy rock trio,…
SAT 3/26 Little girls love their fairy tales of Prince Charmings, glass slippers and magic wands. But Erin Smith wasn’t a typical little girl. When her elementary school teachers wanted her to read “Cinderella,” she read the “twisted” version from Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes instead. Now 17, the senior at…
SAT 3/26 If your heart goes fluttery at the scent of dusty blue chalk, and beats to the cracking sound of a cue ball barreling through a triangle of solids and stripes, then you need to see how it’s done “Sledgehammer” and “Assassin”-style at the Women’s Pro Shootout, Saturday, March…
SAT 3/26 How do you make a guy think about horses while watching nude cabaret? “Well, that’s not really the point,” says Janie Wiseman, a manager at Christie’s Cabaret, 44 North 32nd Street, which is hosting “Girls! Girls! Girls!”, a benefit for Wildhorse Ranch Rescue, on Saturday, March 26, starting…
THU 3/24 Arthur Edwards, the ex-Refreshments’ bassist turned novelist, provides a diversion for summer-scorned Phoenicians in his book Stuck Outside of Phoenix. With triple-digit temperatures quickly approaching our soon-to-be-burning hell, escape sounds like heaven on Earth. Sadly, though, engaged readers who participate in Edwards’ intricate plot will be taken far,…
