Fonsia Dorsey and Weller Martin are old. They have, like so many elderly people, been abandoned to the American health-care system and have landed in an old folks’ home where they meet one Sunday afternoon. He’s a crotchety codger, she’s a peevish fuddy-duddy, and, for two hours plus intermission, they…
Fantasy is at its best when it ennobles our reality, and in this year’s cinema no fantasy towers above The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. The second installment of J.R.R. Tolkien’s dark and delightful yarn is here adapted just as handily as last year’s The Fellowship of the…
Martin Scorsese’s latest epic of the streets, Gangs of New York, means to show us how a great metropolis was forged in the mid-19th-century caldrons of unbridled greed, ethnic violence and civil war. It means to give us the city as wild frontier — without the usual cowboy hats. This…
Adaptation is the most overrated movie of the year (of all time?) by people who should know better. Film critics have either been suckered in by its gimmick (Being John Malkovich screenwriter Charlie Kaufman can’t adapt a book for the big screen and winds up writing himself into his screenplay,…
It had to happen eventually: the adorably scattered Sandra Bullock and the self-deprecatingly charming Hugh Grant paired in a romantic comedy. As predictable as Miss Congeniality and almost as broad, Two Weeks Notice is an undemanding, by-the-numbers romance that is made bearable only by the presence of its two ingratiating…
Light. As far as modifiers go, it’s far from our favorite: light Miracle Whip, light rock and — heaven help us — light beer. But as a plural noun, light can be rather nice, especially around holiday time. In fact, the season’s lights displays set our hearts glowing with the…
Until the day comes when Phoenicians can crack open a beer in the middle of an opera or sip a martini at the symphony, the options for getting simultaneously buzzed and entertained are not only limited, but predictable. “You either go to clubs and see bands, or you go to…
Of all the movies you could be spending your December with — and there are many good choices, from Oscar-bait to better-than-expected sequels like Santa Clause 2 — why would you want to end up at Drumline? “Hey, dear, wanna go see the new Scorsese flick, or maybe one of…
Maid in Manhattan, in which Jennifer Lopez goes from pauper to princess, comes not from a screenplay but from a handful of self-help books and fairy tales and fashion magazines cut and pasted together in a glossy montage committed to celluloid. Characters, made from the highest-grade cardboard and resplendent in…
If you already know that female and male humans employ somewhat different strategies for relieving themselves of liquid waste, you’re in for no surprises in Rob Schneider’s latest look-at-me-I’m-so-cute comedy, The Hot Chick. Every few minutes a dumb pee-pee gag rears its little head, usually as Schneider bumbles around half-clad…
Ancient Egyptians worshiped the cat. Cats have never forgotten this. But most cat owners are okay with feline servitude. If you’re the type who selects friends based on your cat’s opinions, know well the “Smell of Hell,” or buy 50 pounds of litter at a time — time to pack…
Our evergreens are shipped in. Our snow is fake. Chestnuts don’t roast very well over a chimenea. And sleighs and reindeer don’t do the desert. But there is a genuine way to celebrate the Yuletide in the Valley, courtesy of our neighbor to the south. And a truly enormous event…
Chris Powell is a nice guy. A really, really nice guy. So nice that his friends call him Senator Powell, because he’s always shaking hands and kissing babies. Cosmopolitan magazine thinks Chris is more than just nice, and to prove it, it’s just named the 24-year-old fitness trainer “Arizona’s Hunkiest…
Notes from a network executive’s forthcoming biography, pilfered from the desk of an editor at a major publishing house. This was hard to read, as it was scribbled in crayon on the back of a copy of Highlights taken from a pediatrician’s office. From page 412: “Last week, I met…
On the first Friday night of every month, the art galleries in downtown Phoenix, big and small, as well as many artists’ studios and temporary art spaces, open their doors to the now thousands of people who come through on self-guided tours. Since the mid-’90s, nonprofit volunteer organization Artlink has…
Tammie Hanson-Ferguson doesn’t cry until after I turn off my tape recorder. For more than an hour, she sits with me at Christopher’s Fermier and talks about her brother, Wade Jess Jordan, who was gunned down by Mesa police last December. Hanson-Ferguson never sheds a tear while she describes her…
After garnering a bushel of positive critical notices less than two months ago for his work in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love, Adam Sandler now squanders his newfound respectability with another one of his cookie-cutter “lovable loser” vehicles, Adam Sandler’s Eight Crazy Nights. Only two elements set this apart from…
The terror is real — that of Miramax executives, anyway, as their Dimension division refused to screen its new creature feature Wes Craven Presents: They for critics, lest we go all crazy and tell you about it. But just to show a sporting attitude, let’s offer up some potentially useful…
For the past 16 years, artists have been getting together to discuss the capitalist feeding frenzy that happens every December, and wondering aloud about the meaning of it all. Behold The 17th Annual Bad X-mas Pageant, an event that is becoming a downtown tradition. Jeff Falk, one of the founders…
At the center of many good hard-boiled novels is an elusive object of pursuit, à la The Maltese Falcon. But in the case of Plainclothes Naked — wherein author Jerry Stahl blends gruesome but slapstick violence, bizarre scenarios and perversely witty writing, then sprinkles it liberally with crack — the…
