There are countless well-loved Christmas movies, but Thanksgiving movies are a rarity. I’m not much of a fan of 1995’s Home for the Holidays, but I often steer people toward What’s Cooking? (2000), Gurinder Chadha’s delightful, too-little-known multi-cultural Turkey Day comedy. In case you’ve already seen it, though, here are a few more Thanksgiving titles: [...]
They met in 1999 when south Tempe resident Conrad J. Storad was promoting his award-winning children’s book, Don’t Call Me Pig, at Border’s Books & Music in Mesa. Lynda Exley, also a southTemperesident, was the store’s public-relations manager, and they struck up a friendship. When Exley left Border’s, the two went separate ways for more [...]
All it means, really, is “object,” yet somewhere along the line in American pop culture the word “thing” came to mean something scary, a monster, a freak. Maybe it says something about humans that it’s what’s undefined, not consigned to a pigeonhole, which raises our collective gooseflesh. There were Lovecraft stories like “The Thing on [...]
“From the studios and producers of The Blind Side.” That’s how Dolphin Tale is being marketed. This may strike you as a tenuous aesthetic connection, but it’s savvy advertising—Dolphin Tale, loosely based on true events, is another story of a wounded foundling becoming a star. The young dolphin in question is injured when she runs [...]
Made in a less-expensive, not-so-lush form of computer-generated animation, 2005’s Hoodwinked! was a fractured retelling of the Little Red Riding Hood myth. It was filled with wacky references to other fairy tales, something like Shrek but without the same effortless wit. The voice cast was good and the film certainly had its moments, but on [...]
Nick Phillips filled some idle summer hours with a technology camp at Arizona State University. He created his own level for a video game known as Half-Life 2. Although parents often cringe at the thought of their child being zombie-locked into video games for days on end, the fact is kids are catching the technology [...]
Of the many geeky enthusiasms of my boyhood, that for the Planet of the Apes movies was second in intensity only to Star Trek. So despite the disappointment I, like many fans, felt over Tim Burton’s 2001 version of Apes, I was still childishly excited about the new film, Rise of the Planet of the [...]
It’s understandable if you don’t feel much enthusiasm at the prospect of taking your kid to The Smurfs. You may fear you’re in for a pretty cloying hour and a half. Created in the late ‘50s by the Belgian comic artist Pierre “Peyo” Culliford—as Les Schtroumpfs; the term Smurf was a Dutch rendering—the tiny, blue-skinned [...]
Opening this weekend is Winnie the Pooh, a new Disney feature chronicling the adventures of the title teddy bear and his various pals in the Hundred Acre Wood. I must admit that I come to the Disney incarnations of these characters with a bias. The low-key, quietly witty original stories, by A. A. Milne, and [...]
A little over 10 years ago, mostly at the urging of a friend, I wrote my first novel. It took me about a year, including some lengthy interruptions, and though it was challenging at times, I greatly enjoyed the process. When the book was (more or less) done, I gave it to read to a [...]
