Once upon a time, folks who kept their checkbooks balanced and hung up their clothes when they weren’t wearing them were considered well organized. Today, these people are Obsessive Compulsives, the scourge of the nation, strapped into recovery programs and ridiculed on Maury Povich because they occasionally polish their shoes…
The Last Five Years, which played briefly off-Broadway in 2002, chronicles a young couple’s romance using two different time lines. Her story starts at the end of their relationship, while his begins at the beginning, on the day they meet. The two stories collide briefly at the couple’s wedding, then…
Toward the end of Born Into Brothels, a superb and piercing documentary by directors Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, a 12-year-old child examines a photograph. It’s beautiful, he says, because it shows us how its subjects live. Yes, they’re very poor, and the shot is hard to look at, because…
“From the creators of Ice Age,” boasts the poster for Robots, which is no ringing endorsement. That 2002 animated feature, a sort of Three Mammals and a Baby in a prehistoric setting, looked and felt every bit as frigid as its snowbound scenery; it was impossible to warm to a…
If you’re looking for an escapist shoot-’em-up action adventure, and figure a Bruce Willis flick is a reliable option, think twice. Hostage certainly delivers violence and heroics, but not in a way everyone will enjoy. Children and dogs die brutally, and the villains are so thoroughly hateful that even the…
When was the last time you lost yourself in a Shakespeare film? It’s a testament to the success of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the sharp and brooding new version directed by Michael Radford (Il Postino), that we leave the theater without concern for the production. Instead, the response…
With the amount of breakables among the more than 185 booths at the Scottsdale Arts Festival this year — including jewelry, ceramic, drawing, glass, metal, mixed media, painting, photography, printmaking and sculpture — you’d be best off shopping with your eyes. But while you may not be able to touch…
Tongues are still wagging about the night in 1990 when Phoenix Theatre’s curtain came up to reveal a giant naked man, his ass rouged and spotlighted in the first moments of the company’s production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The derrière belonged to actor Christopher Wynn, and one of the gasps…
3/10-1/1 In the late 19th century, the U.S. government implemented a policy of assimilation to deal with what it termed the country’s “Indian problem.” The goal was nothing less than erasing all outward traces of Indian culture, and the means was forcibly removing Native American children from their homes and…
3/14-3/20 We may be saucy spectators at the FBR Open, but LPGA golfer and Phoenix resident Carin Koch says she’s never had any hecklers here. If she did, she says she would “probably tell them to go away or stop it.” Well, that beats a golf club to the head…
SAT 3/12 Muscle cars and band geeks don’t typically mesh — unless the former is running over the latter. But the Cruisin’ to the Tunes Car Show at Deer Valley High School, 18424 North 51st Avenue in Glendale, turns the odd pairing into the perfect duo for a day. The…
3/10-3/26 You know how it is: Your lover is a gay porn star, you’re the owner of a gay porno film company, and your lover wants to break into the “mainstream,” so you contribute $100,000 to the California Repertory Theatre so your lover can get the leading role in Christopher…
Maybe I’m not laughing as much at zombie flicks these days because I got a huge hole in my gut that’s leaking blood and stuff all over the house, but still . . . Last night I stayed home with my stepdad, Nick, who is here visiting me from New…
Tato Caraveo at The Lost Leaf: Some guys have all the luck. Besides serving as the bassist for the jazz trio Sonorous, turns out Adaupto “Tato” Caraveo is a talented surrealist painter to boot. His stunning 15-piece untitled oeuvre features touches of the inanity of Salvador Dali (an admitted influence)…
THU 3 Objects, the Biltmore’s newest men’s and women’s clothing and home furnishings boutique, is already known for its global thinking, snatching up apparel and merchandise from around the world, including Africa and southeast Asia. And now it’s acting locally, with the “Bella Notte” charity gala to benefit the American…
Designers are maligned as the pragmatists of the art world, the art majors who were employable instead of outrageous, responsible instead of romantic. Unlike artists, designers don’t do glamorous acts of audacity like lop off their ears, marry ex-porn stars or drape Central Park in sheets of plastic. Designers make…
Jason Rudolph Peña, 26, is the PHX’s kick-back Gustav Klimt. The soft-spoken iconoclast is known for his live paintings of ethereal women with large, dreamy eyes. Like Klimt’s women, Peña’s are idealized creatures, highly feminine and unobtainable. He’s exhibited at monOrchid, Thought Crime, Amsterdam, and House Studios, and has a…
The Michael Jackson jury has been selected, and, not unlike Jackson himself, it’s two-thirds female and mostly white. And if this jury doesn’t help convict Jackson of the child-molestation charges brought against him in Santa Barbara County, California, he’d better watch his back — because Dorothy M. Neddermeyer, Ph.D., is…
“Bwian,” I say to my pal Brian — because of the Monty Python film Life of Brian, but who I really like to call Emerald Brian since I know so many damn Brians — “who all is playing again?” “Smut Muffin, Shark Pants, Dirty Babies, and other punk-rock bands,” replies…
The novel Be Cool, written by Elmore Leonard in 1999 while the ink was still wet on the publisher’s advance, existed only because the beloved writer of seedy thrillers and Westerns knew it was guaranteed gold — the sequel to the 1991 hit novel Get Shorty that, in 1995, became…
Come this time next year, The Jacket may well occupy the slot in movie discourse that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind does now — that of the film that coulda-shoulda-woulda gotten more Oscar nominations if only it hadn’t come out so early in the year and been forgotten by…
The Pacifier, starring the human battering ram Vin Diesel as a Navy SEAL ordered to protect five kids from baddies out to steal their dead dad’s invention, was written by Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant, two members of the defunct MTV comedy troupe The State. Lennon, however, is best…
