After 21 years in the business of printing art, Joe Segura has moved his inventory and his presses from Tempe, where they occupied a small, relatively isolated cinder-block building, into an airy, surprisingly quiet space along Mesa’s Main Street. Sandwiched between Shanghai Express on one side and the temporary home…
In a dark bar, two men are conversing. One of them, a politician, is telling the other, his campaign manager, about a recent rendezvous with a third man, a sexy but unscrupulous fellow with whom the politician is smitten. Suddenly, the politician says to his companion, “Let me show you…
I dreamed I was in a nude cabaret with a married couple I didn’t know. They wanted to tell me about a new book they’d written, but it was hard to communicate because the music was loud and we were distracted by the naked lady who was rubbing her crotch…
Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is released from a mental institution the day of her older sister’s wedding. One afternoon with her dysfunctional family and she’s ready for rehab again. No such luck, however, so instead, Lee turns — or returns — to her favorite pastime: self-mutilation. Based on a short…
So there’s no confusion, the star of Sweet Home Alabama is Reese Witherspoon, who graces the film’s poster in full-body pout and appears on the press kit in close-up mug-shot smirk; any closer, and we’d shoot up her nostrils and exit through her pores. Of course, there’s a great deal…
Although his name sounds like an inventory notebook for candy bars, Heath Ledger is presently overcoming this confusion — as well as the plight of the pretty boy — to become one of contemporary cinema’s more vital actors. In The Four Feathers — as in The Patriot, A Knight’s Tale…
As a rule in Arizona, club nights — those wittily monikered weekly or monthly dance events (or non-events) — have the staying power and life span of a box of Krispy Kremes at an AA meeting. That’s what makes the longevity of Kind, the up-with-people-themed Friday-night DJ extravaganza at Freedom…
Thanks to sponsor Comedy Central, comedian Jim Breuer is hitting the road to perform his uncontrollably funny standup at clubs across the country. But maybe “The Lighten Up Tour,” which comes to the Tempe Improv this weekend, should really be called the “Lightin’ Up Tour” — either the ultra-talented Breuer…
Jim Campbell’s advantage as an artist is that he wasn’t trained as one. Hatched as an electrical engineer, he made the leap from pragmatism to poetry on his own, bringing with him a wariness about the limitations of digital media. This caution has served him well. As the art world…
No theatergoer should be made to stare at an ugly set for three hours. If one must, however, one should do so at Phoenix Theatre’s new production of Into the Woods. Its dreary gray forest, designed by usually dependable scenic designer Gregory Jaye, is hung limply with unsightly rope and…
It’s September 11, 2002, but Richard J. Botto isn’t at home watching the relentless CNN coverage of last year’s terrorist attacks. Instead, the native New Yorker has agreed to meet me for drinks at Sapporo to talk about Razor, the national men’s magazine he launched two years ago. Botto is…
Among the more preposterous rumors spread by Harry Knowles, whose Ain’t It Cool News movie-biz gossip Web site garners undue attention from studios too craven to do their own thinking, was one from this year’s beginning: Terrence Malick, Knowles “reported,” was working on an adaptation of The Catcher in the…
In The Banger Sisters, Goldie Hawn plays Suzette, an aging groupie too stuck in a gloriously seedy past to move into the future. It’s 2002, yet she acts as though it’s 1969 and nothing’s changed — not the Sunset Strip’s Whisky A Go-Go, where she still tends bar behind sunglasses…
Movie buffs are about to get the silent treatment — and it’s all the buzz among Valley cinephiles. The Silent Sundays film series returns for its fourth season this Sunday, September 22, with a screening of The Phantom of the Opera, the 1925 classic starring Lon Chaney and Mary Philbin…
Every year, from the Indy Racing League to NASCAR, the racing world’s big players make their way to the sizzling one-mile oval at Phoenix International Raceway. But an event showcasing the biggest ones of all — literally — will be there this weekend for the first time. The Truxpo Monster…
Greg Esser is a man who thinks in broad, connected strokes — a big-picture guy. “What we’re doing here,” he says, standing in the middle of a raw, modest space at 515 East Roosevelt, “is creating a synergy and an aggregate. A destination.” When he says “here,” Esser refers not…
The Fantasticks is not. What begins as a promising rerun quickly becomes — somewhere after its third or fourth musical number — just another small-time production of a big-deal show. Pleasant performances and familiar tunes aren’t enough to elevate this tuneful repeat, and so Stagebrush Theatre’s season opener winds up…
No matter how wide his triumphs, Ron Dible will probably always be known around these parts as Porno Cop. Dible was sacked by the Chandler Police Department earlier this year when naughty photographs of himself and his wife were discovered on an adult Web site. Never one to take his…
For those with any kind of pop cultural memory, it’s more than a little surprising to see Ice Cube in a movie like Barbershop. Not because it’s a light comedy — Friday was, too, and that was certainly in character. What’s odd about Barbershop is its seeming embrace of positions…
Read My Lips (Sur Mes Lèvres) puts forth the fascinating and heretofore unexamined theory that being deaf offers estimable rewards. It allows one the chance to tune out the world, to ignore everything and everyone. To the deaf, chaos can feel like soothing calm, and madness comes with its own…
So the boss refused your vacation request for September 10-17, and you have to cram your celebration of Mexico’s Independence Week into a single evening? Well, Saturday night’s your night, as the Fourth Annual Chandler Mariachi Festival gets loco at the Chandler Center for the Arts. The maracas will shake…
When computer geeks grow up, make millions, and have too much time on their hands, fully remote-controlled robots are born. And of course, when you spend thousands of dollars and eons of time building your own remote-controlled robot, the obvious question to ask next is, “Can my robot beat up…
