“This kid’s gonna be the biggest superstar DJ to ever come out of this place,” says DJ Fact, pointing to his partner, Megadef. The two turntablists are sitting at a quiet Tempe restaurant, and the younger Mega, glasses magnifying a baby face, mutters a bashful “We’ll see . . .”…
I am Vlad the Impaler, Joe Eszterhas’ penis. You know Joe, right? Bigfoot-looking son of a bitch, like Jerry Garcia after he swallowed Brian Wilson on an Acapulco Gold high? The guy who wrote Basic Instinct and Showgirls and Flashdance and a whole lotta crap for which he was paid…
The bewildering penchant of recent American movies for glorifying the lovable naïf, the perpetual adolescent and the village idiot takes a strange new turn in Miguel Arteta’s dark comedy Chuck & Buck. Arteta’s hero, Buck O’Brien (Mike White), is a 27-year-old manchild who eats lollipops all day long, takes refuge…
It’s a pleasure to say that Clint Eastwood reverses his recent downward slide — A Perfect World (1993), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Absolute Power (1997), and True Crime (1999), each of which has seemed less satisfying than its predecessor — with Space Cowboys, his latest. It isn’t an…
So who are these celebrated Coen brothers anyway, and what’s their point? These days, it’s pretty easy to switch over to critical autopilot, to gush about funny-looking friends shoved into wood chippers or Hula-Hoops being designed, you know, for the kids. But where does the slender path of the Coen…
There are many, many productive paths a bright, ambitious young fellow can pursue in America. He can, for instance, start a mediocre rock band and try to make music for beer commercials. He can also design a Web site to advertise Web sites about Web sites. Or there’s always the…
Usually, no matter how much things slow to a crawl here in the Valley under the punishment of the summer heat, there’s always an out — you can go to the movies. But this summer’s crop of movies has been, by and large, so dull that even that’s not a…
Technically speaking, they’re supporting characters — in the dramatic scheme of the play, they don’t really advance the plot, they just provide a comic-relief subplot from the far duller story of the troubled courtship of Claudio and Hero. Yet their comical romance is what has made the play immortal. In…
It’s tempting to think there’s something twisted about her tale. After all, she was a mere 18 the first time she had sex in front of a camera–for money, small change that would soon enough blossom into a pile of cash–and did so only at the insistence of her boyfriend,…
Only in the movies could a kid who looks and acts like Jason Biggs be called a loser. Let’s see: charming conversationalist, big smile, washboard abs? Oh yeah, those’ll make a guy unpopular, for sure. About the only thing that’s surprising about Biggs’ character in Loser is that the filmmakers…
Peter Fonda is the top-billed star of Thomas and the Magic Railroad. The plot involves Fonda and Thomas the Tank Engine steaming across the country, with Steppenwolf blaring on the soundtrack, to Mardi Gras, a stash of dope taped under Thomas’ cow-catcher. They have an acid trip with New Orleans…
T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock wondered whether he dared to eat a peach. But Valley residents need not ask themselves so soul-searching a question. For the next two weekends or so, we need only ask ourselves if we dare to pick a peach. Or several pounds of peaches.Wickenburg’s Date Creek Ranch –…
This year marks the 10th anniversary of what some regard as the finest, and others the only, major accomplishment of the Bush administration: the day — June 26, 1990 — when ol’ George Senior signed the Americans With Disabilities Act into law. Various events are being held around the country…
In the course of two hours, Neil Gaiman speaks 10,000 words (or damned near, when transcribed), and it seems a shame to waste a single one, since there is not an uh or y’know among them. Even the most eloquent writer gets lost in thought every now and then…uh…y’know? But…
There’s a saying in Latin that goes, “Ars longa, vita brevis.” Translation: Art is long, life is short. Inside the Tonatierra Center in downtown Phoenix, that sentiment rings true for the pieces hanging on the walls, but not for the majority of the work that its creators paint. Two weeks…
The exhibition catalogue accompanying Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art’s latest offering, “do it,” makes no bones about it. The show’s title, notes catalogue essayist Bruce Altshuler, is designed to bring to mind the nostalgic rallying cry of radical Vietnam War protestor and Yippie co-founder Jerry Rubin, as well as the…
Rather than asking if this senseless and expensive new film from wunderkind entertainer Robert Zemeckis is devoid of merit (it is), or “worth seeing” (it isn’t), we should instead take the movie’s title — What Lies Beneath — as a direct question. Indeed, what does lie beneath? Possible answers include:…
Antonioni and Bergman, I get. Show me Buñuel or Godard, Tarkovsky or Marguerite Duras, and you won’t see me knit my brow. David Lynch is a snap. I can even sort of see where Stan Brakhage is coming from. When it comes to cryptic cinema, I’ll sit there and find…
So you’re a live-theater nut, and you’ve seen Vampire Lesbians of Sodom at Planet Earth and Born Yesterday at Theater Works, and you’ve had dinner at Murder at Greystone Manor, and you think you’ve exhausted every option in town this lean summer season. You needn’t despair and start searching your…
Mr. Peabody had the advantage. He and Sherman could just hop into the WayBack machine if they wanted to chat with some of history’s best and brightest. For the rest of us, it’s just not so easy. We can try to marry a beautiful nose-wiggling witch or sit huddled in…
Bryan Singer did not read comic books as a young boy, because he couldn’t read them. As a kid, he was slightly dyslexic and, therefore, unable to follow the dialogue as it bubbled across panels and pages; quite simply, Singer says now, comic books confused him, so the Jersey boy…
Not many materials have had the schizophrenic life that plastic has. In the khaki-toned years following World War II, it looked as fresh and desirable as spun candy, a dream come true for industrial designers trying to create forms for an array of new and old functions. But as plastic…
