It might take a major suspension of disbelief (or the ignorance of a space alien who’s never seen a movie) for the average ticket buyer to embrace My First Mister, the good-natured and eventually uplifting first feature film directed by actress Christine Lahti. Because the premise here is that a…
It’s all here: madness, mayhem and murder, in no short supply. The Hughes brothers, Albert and Allen, have always had a knack for horror, as evidenced by their edgy gangster flicks, Menace II Society and Dead Presidents (which they’ve stated were influenced by the styles of Brian DePalma and Martin…
Some guys have the kind of face that suggests they’ve been to hell and back. The narrow, steely eyes, graying hair and deep lines crisscrossing the countenance of a James Coburn or a Clint Eastwood can practically do all of their acting for them in any role that calls for…
When times get tough in the world, as they no doubt have, there are two things you can do to ease the stress: First — what a no-brainer — you can simply do something. And then you can eat, because there’s no better way to affirm to yourself that you’re…
Director/film scholar Peter Bogdanovich, actress Debra Winger and Slackers creator Richard Linklater will be among the guests at the 24th Denver International Film Festival. The city’s annual cinematic debauch gets under way Thursday at the Buell Theatre with an opening-night showing of Lantana, a tense psychological drama from Australia’s Ray…
Capturing the human form has a very long tradition in the visual arts, going back over 12,000 years. And despite the rise of abstraction and its progeny a century ago, artists are still drawn to the figure as a subject redolent with possibilities. Here in Denver, a number of galleries…
Every once in a while, a show at one of the city’s alternative spaces is as good as — or better than — any exhibit in a prestigious gallery or museum. Chain Reaction: new works by Gail Wagner, at the Edge Gallery through Sunday, October 6, is just such a…
Almost everyone has some idea what Edmond Rostand’s famed play Cyrano de Bergerac is about: a man with an enormous nose who, sure he can never win the woman he loves, selflessly woos her on behalf of a handsome, equally lovestruck compadre. The plot is so resonant, so filled with…
I suspect I’m in trouble when I’m told at the door that The Vow runs an hour and forty-five minutes without intermission. Is someone intending to put me through a transformational experience? I’m not very good at those. They tend to leave me helpless with laughter. Or are the creators…
On October 3, there appeared in The New York Times an article about how movie studios are struggling to find new villains in a post-September 11 environment. Writer Rick Lyman rounded up the usual suspects: a few film producers, a couple of screenwriters and the requisite amount of film scholars,…
Plot aside — way aside, as it’s almost a non-issue in a film that telegraphs its final scenes during its opening moments — Bandits is really about only one topic: the bald heads of Billy Bob Thornton and Bruce Willis. As Joe Blake (Willis) and Terry Collins (Thornton), two bank-robbing…
Thanks to his justly lauded work as action choreographer on The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, director Yuen Wo Ping is among the most famous creators of Hong Kong action in the U.S. In the wake of the latter film’s astonishing success, Miramax, with a prod from Quentin Tarantino,…
It’s not your old-fashioned chinoiserie, jade Buddhas and the like: In the European and Asian art markets, cutting-edge contemporary art from mainland China is the hottest thing on wheels — or oxcart. From the galleries of Beijing and Shanghai to the hallowed halls of Sotheby’s, this art — which may…
Think of jazz photography, and you must think of Herman Leonard, the shutterbug whose moody shots of the ’40s and ’50s jazz pantheon of 52nd Street and Harlem capture the soul of that musical era like the backlit wisps of smoke so often seen drifting through his famous frames. Those…
Like that of the academic world, national television and professional football, the art world’s season starts in the fall. Although a few pre-season openers were unveiled in Denver over Labor Day weekend, most of the 2001-2002 entries were set to open a week or two later. I don’t need to…
About thirty years ago, serious fine-art photographers began taking scenic shots that incorporated not only the magnificent landscape — the focus of their predecessors — but also glimpses of development’s litter. By now these poignant dichotomies, once so groundbreaking, are a standard of contemporary landscape photography, particularly here in the…
George Bernard Shaw was an iconoclast and troublemaker. In his plays, moral and intellectual combat tend to replace action, but the dialogue is so brilliant that the results are engaging rather than static. Plot isn’t central, nor is strict continuity. In Mrs. Warren¹s Profession, a gun makes an appearance but…
Theater is an art form capable of providing an astonishing variety of experiences. There are directors throughout the metro area transforming cramped, unlikely spaces and making magic with nothing more than a few dollars, a handful of actors, a decent script and some imagination. And then there’s Disney’s Beauty and…
Before he was editor in chief at Marvel Comics–which, by all rights, makes him the man who tells Spider-Man what he can do with himself and the X-Men where to go–Joe Quesada illustrated a comic book titled Ash. The title did not last long; there was, perhaps, little market for…
Combine teenage angst with suburban emptiness and you’ve got a movie formula with an appreciable advantage over some other current movie formulas — particularly in the eyes of those who believe the American family has disintegrated and most of us are headed for eternal damnation. This is not to say…
This may be a strange time to release a thriller about the dangers of corrupt law enforcement, but Training Day — with no explosions, no cheap thrills, no international conspiracies — is about as distant from current East Coast realities as possible. Still, that doesn’t mean it qualifies as escapism…
The most common job for professional handymen these days? Fixing all those home-improvement projects that amateur handymen have botched in their own homes. “That’s probably 50 percent of our business, fixing things that people make a mistake on because it looks so darn simple,” says Andy Bell, president of Handyman…
