If you’ve ever gone line-dancing with a gaggle of amputees on crank and hallucinogens, you know something of the feeling engendered by viewing Alexander. This broad, bold and ambitious film by Oliver Stone presents itself as a fairly straightforward endeavor, but its rhythms quickly go strange while its participants hobble…
It’s the biopic of the year: Christian Bale is cadaverous industrial rocker Trent Reznor, prone to temper tantrums, brooding, inhabiting colorless environments and keeping your parents awake all night as he fronts the alterna-heavy-metal band known as Nine Inch Nails. Oh, wait…that’s not quite right. Christian Bale is, in fact,…
As the year stumbles toward its conclusion and critics begin penning their best-and-worst compendiums, here’s a holiday contender fit for the all-time Naughty List. Based on the John Grisham novel Skipping Christmas — which, face it, is less a novel than an impulse item stacked on bookstore checkout counters –…
Patrice Leconte’s Intimate Strangers develops from an intriguing premise: A troubled woman (Sandrine Bonnaire) making her first visit to a psychiatrist walks into the wrong office and starts pouring out her troubles to a baffled (but captivated) tax lawyer (Fabrice Luchini). Too beguiled to set things straight, the lonely lawyer…
Danielle West laid yoga mats on her living-room floor, put on some soft music and offered her clients a biscuit. The first thing to learn about dog yoga — doga — is that treats help provide the real Nirvana. Colonel Steve, my Lhasa apso, and Shortie, an Afghan/collie — along…
Thursday, November 25 No one really knows if Thanksgiving-morning exercise actually helps you stay trim or if it stimulates your appetite so much that you end up consuming even more evil, fat-laden Turkey-day calories at the dinner table. Perhaps you’ll break even. And for a simple donation of two non-perishable…
“I’m totally addicted to the arts. I’ve been doing it all my life,” says Louisville’s David Williams. But he’s just hinting at the depth and breadth of his artistic output. The term “Renaissance man” might sound overblown, but it almost falls short in describing the prolific creator: Over the years,…
FRI, 11/26 I tend to be a surreptitious shopper, sliding quietly through stores like a sylph on a mission, waiting for an item to communicate with me telepathically: “Here I am. Just what you need.” What I don’t need is help, and I don’t want it, either. Beware, shoptenders. Just…
SUN, 11/28 If the reception on your TV is as bad as the Broncos’ performance against the Bengals, or if beer is costing too much at the sports bar, then 1896 Theater Gametime has the perfect remedy. Starting today, Broncos fans can see Jake Plummer pass that game-winning touchdown on…
FRI, 11/26 This year, I’m going to put myself in the holiday spirit. No more procrastinating. I’m going to get out and enjoy all that the metro area has to offer. That always sounds good in theory, but this year I’m serious. I’m channeling Hannibal, and I have a plan…
FRI, 11/26 As a girl, Jenee Brown would sit in front of the TV in her Thornton home, watching the Rockettes strut in the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade. Back then, she fantasized about becoming a member of the leggy dance troupe. Now her childhood wish has been granted, and Brown will…
The definitive art history of Colorado has yet to be written, but even without a scholarly guide, it’s not hard to list the great ones. In terms of mid-century-modernist abstraction, for instance, it is widely known that Herbert Bayer, who lived in Aspen, and Denver’s own Vance Kirkland towered over…
There’s an interesting if uneven exhibit of abstract paintings and sculptures at the enormous Studio Aiello (3563 Walnut Street, 303-297-8166). Called Quartet, it includes the work of four artists: Andrew Speer, Chad Colby, Michael Burnett and Jonathan Hils. Speer, who is well known to many because he’s taught in the…
Charles Parson, Emilio Lobato, Jason Needham. The cavernous Lower Galleries at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities have been given over to the awe-inspiring Charles Parson: Landscape’s Sonnet, a huge solo that includes constructivist drawings, wall relief panels, sculptures and installations. As if that isn’t enough, Parson also…
Let’s start with the obvious: It embarrasses me to see a naked guy on stage. Not when he’s standing motionless, bathed in golden light and looking like a statue of Apollo, but when he’s wandering around a cluttered, filthy-looking room, spooning food out of a can with his fingers or…
These days, I can’t watch a Sam Shepard play without having my brain thronged with ghosts of Shepard viewings past. So as Chasm View’s Fool for Love unfurled in front of me, I found myself clicking off the expected elements in my head. A cheap motel room. Check. Somewhere in…
Angels in America: Part I: Millennium Approaches. Tony Kushner’s Angels in America is a complex, seven-hour masterwork about the lives of two couples and one quintessentially evil historical figure, and the inextricable way in which politics, history and private life intertwine. There’s also an angel, along with other supernatural and…
U.S. Postal Service workers who think they have it tough should probably get a look at Huo Jianqi’s Postmen in the Mountains. In this deceptively simple and surprisingly moving film set in the early 1980s, a weary Chinese mailman, his wide-eyed, 24-year-old son and their faithful, knowing dog take three…
Oh, that Johnny Depp. Played in some dime-a-dozen rock bands, did some average television, made a few cutesy little movies. Whatever. Yeah, he messes with his looks in a fun way sometimes, but otherwise he merely rides that nicotine-sunken-cheeks thing all the way to the bank. The guy’s popular, but…
The most shocking thing about Kinsey, the first film from writer-director Bill Condon since 1998’s Gods and Monsters, is how shocking it actually is. Within the confines of a standard biopic (A Beautiful Dirty Mind, you might call it), Condon refuses to play it straight — which is only appropriate,…
Jerry Bruckheimer has always insisted that he cares less about critical acclaim than commercial appeal. “We make movies for the common man,” he said almost three years ago, as Black Hawk Down was crash-landing in theaters. “The pictures that I’ve made over the last twenty years or so have been…
Penek Ratanaruang’s Last Life in the Universe, released last summer, takes the notion of the Odd Couple to dizzyingly philosophical heights, while the director, who earlier gave us the ingenious musical Mon-Rak Transistor (2001), speculates on time, space and narrative itself. The seemingly mismatched pair here are a meek Japanese…
