Diversions

Parents traditionally rejoice, and students are traditionally glum, and here in Arizona, both are traditionally pleased by the approach, on the distant horizon, of cooler weather. But however you feel about it, back to school time has undeniably arrived. The back-to-school experience, with its sense of lost freedom and imposed drudgery, and also with its promise of new and exciting experiences, has been the subject of countless movies.

Photographer Billy Hardiman headed to the cool country over the weekend for Flagstaff’s Hullabaloo celebration, an annual community festival that has raised over $75,000 for state non-profits since 2010. Among sponsors were...

The third entry in Sony’s Smurf series focuses on Smurfette, the lone female among the tiny blue-skinned residents of Smurf Village.

Many Valley restaurants have fed Howard Seftel without knowing it, at first.

Ozomatli guitarist and singer Raul Pacheco, asked over the phone about how his band manages to couch serious messages inside dance-ready songs, nicely sums up the band’s musical and political philosophy.

“It was, oh man...it was eye-opening,” says Lisa Vargas. “I have this idea that I want to do films, but I’d never actually been on a movie set before.”

Charlie Day is Andy Campbell, a milquetoast English teacher at an underfunded, underachieving, metal-detector-enclosed high school.

According to the Book of Exodus, after leaving Egypt the Jews spent 40 years in the desert. As of this year, the Greater Phoenix Film Festival is more than half way to the same tenure in this different desert.