What’s 40 feet tall, weighs 58,000 pounds, has a jaw-crushing force of 20,000 pounds and consumes dead, fossilized dinosaurs? Well, besides Stone Cold Steve Austin. Robosaurus, the electro-hydromechanical car-nivorous monster, will breathe fire, crush cars and make the world safe for democracy at Ford Motor Company’s Jets vs. Funny Cars…
Get the hook! The theater season is winding up with a whimper, thanks to Is What It Is Theatre’s subpar production of The Curious Savage. On a set dressed with all the flair of a fourth-grade talent show, John Patrick’s humdrum comedy is being huffed out by yet another clutch…
Steven Spielberg just might turn into a great director if only he’d stop sabotaging his movies. For the second time in as many films, he demolishes his product with a third act that renders all that’s come before it void. It’s as though Minority Report, set in a near future…
It’s a nice surprise when a seemingly innocuous cartoon inspires inner critical debate. For fun, let’s let the coldly cynical voice speak first. Somewhere within Disney studios there is a board room, and doubtless there’s some scary honcho in there who clobbers a table full of yes-people with market research…
Remember going to the drive-in? Double features playing into the wee hours of the morning through a tinny window speaker, the picture slightly obscured by the couple making out in an old Caddy in front of you . . . This is just like the drive-ins you remember — except…
College students face an age-old dilemma when starting their careers: You can’t get hired without experience, but you can’t get experience without a job. Well, not unless you’re a student in the Department of Theatre at ASU’s Herberger College. More than 60 undergraduate students (and some alumni, too) have taken…
Shouldn’t have said yes, couldn’t say no. The deal was simple, and those who chose to accept it had made their own private pact with the showbiz-journalism devil. “You will spend an hour with Tom Cruise and an hour with Steven Spielberg,” said the publicist, a lovely woman from 20th…
In an age when televised car chases are a staple on the local news — edging out coverage of murders and the latest political bungle — Phoenix is proud to own perhaps the most sensational footage ever broadcast. It’s a chase so spectacular that it made an international celebrity of…
Five years ago, this interview would have been such the big deal—the coup of the year, the elusive great white at last wriggling on the hook. At least, that’s how she was treated back then, when she still took her meals in that velvet closet. She attracted the spotlight (some…
When I first reviewed Joe Marshall’s Dirty Secrets three years ago, I was wowed by the smart story but lamented the second-rate acting of that particular production. Little has changed on either front with this show, which Alternative Theater Company has remounted at On the Spot playhouse, the scene of…
The plot of The Bourne Identity is astonishingly straightforward. It is bereft of twists (instead, we’re offered tangible explanations), free of the gaping plot holes that swallow confused viewers, and absent the cynical machinations of filmmakers who believe that, to entertain, it’s necessary to also bamboozle. This adaptation of Robert…
The opening credit sequence of Windtalkers — a montage of Monument Valley — instantly invokes memories of the opening of John Woo’s immediately previous film, Mission: Impossible 2, in which Tom Cruise was dangling off a rock. It is the last moment of similarity between the two. Windtalkers is a…
There’s more than meets the eye in the thought-provoking artworks included in one of Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art’s current exhibitions, “Quartet,” a collection of works by four Arizona-based artists. Although their styles differ, these artists share an intimate role in the subtle revelation of nature’s mysteries. Kate Breakey’s four…
When warehouse manager Patrick Kellum got married, he did so dressed as “Wild Bill” Hickok, with his wife Chris done up as Sally Jensen. When a friend “objected” to the marriage, they gunned him down during the ceremony. Such is life for a gunfighter. Since 1993, The Arizona Gunfighters, who…
It’s one of the great ironies of the modern-day smut biz that it took a boob burglar like Joe Francis to shake Hugh Hefner’s once-mighty empire to its creaky knees. Francis is all of 28, which means he wasn’t born the first time Hef bagged triplets on the merry-go-round bed…
Pity Rico Burton: She’s working double-time to keep Black Theatre Troupe’s new show afloat. If Cookin’ at the Cookery were a one-woman tribute to Alberta Hunter, and not a musical biography of the legendary blues singer-songwriter, it might qualify as a success. But a ponderous script and deadly direction doom…
It’s no surprise that Louisiana-born novelist Rebecca Wells has seen her wildly popular books translated into 18 languages, with no less than 6 million copies in print. She’s no deep-thinking stylist, but she has an unfailing gift for injecting Southern sentimentality, low-grade neurosis and mischievous charm into stories that deftly…
So this is what it’s come to: another week, another terrorist-with-a-suitcase-nuke movie. Last Friday, it was up to Ben Affleck to save the world from nuclear annihilation, an unsavory proposition. He succeeded, but not before the Super Bowl disappeared in a holocaust flash. This Friday, it’s Chris Rock’s turn to…
When English playwright Harold Pinter wrote his dark comedy Hothouse in the winter of 1958, he shelved it as a “fantasy.” But in 1980, he pulled it off the shelf, as the newly exposed reality of the mental health system made it suddenly relevant. Twenty-two years later, it’s being offered…
It’s going to be a banner season for comic characters, and if the pun in that phrase eludes you, you have a lot of catching up to do. But those who are familiar with Bruce Banner, a.k.a. The Incredible Hulk, might want to attend the first Phoenix Cactus Comicon on…
There has always been something infuriating, if not appalling, about killing thousands of people in the name of blockbuster entertainment. Before September 11, no one thought much about it. Audiences accepted wholesale slaughter on the big screen because they knew there would be some sort of payoff — revenge, redemption,…
Quick! Name a brilliant mathematician at one of the country’s leading academic institutions who, despite obvious emotional problems that keep him on the edge of a nervous breakdown, is enlisted by his government to decipher seemingly impenetrable military communications that the enemy sends to its operatives around the world. If…
