The subject — or rather, the object — of Christine Fugate’s unsettling and surprisingly poignant documentary The Girl Next Door is one Stacy Valentine, a pneumatic blonde from Oklahoma who recently concluded a brief but reasonably lucrative career as a porn star. The film spans two years, and for that…
November may mean Thanksgiving to most of us, but in the film biz it means a rush of “serious” films trying to gouge an impression into the short memories of Oscar voters. Men of Honor has Academy Award bait written all over it. If you were to use the latest…
At first glance, the new Japanese import Non-Stop seems to be a crude knockoff of German director Tom Tykwer’s wonderful Run Lola Run, but Non-Stop was released in Japan (under the title Dangan Runner) in 1996, two years before Lola was shot. Could Tykwer have seen the film at a…
Denver is becoming home to a peculiar literary subset: black doctors who moonlight as mystery writers. In 1996, author Robert Greer, a professor of pathology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, published the first of three Denver-based mysteries featuring bounty hunter CJ Floyd. Now, local surgeon Pius Kamau…
Under its many-layered, controversial and stolidly postmodern roof, the Denver Central Library houses many treasures. But one of the most fascinating — a vast collection of historical photographic images of the West — may also carry the lowest profile, though the library, which maintains a remarkable digitized collection of over…
Mark Masuoka took over as director at the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver on January 1, 2000, and he quickly transformed the place from what had looked like the city’s largest co-op into something that could pass, on a good day, for a bona fide museum. But less than ten months…
Interpretive Visions, at the Camera Obscura Gallery, is a solo exhibit featuring black-and-white photos by Loretta Young-Gautier. The show includes older photos dating back to the 1980s, as well as a batch of new ones. Young-Gautier studied with local black-and-white masters Ron Wohlauer and Ray Whiting. Like them, she has…
Eleven-year-old Miguel knows all too well that his journey into manhood will begin only when his father takes him on the family’s annual sheep-herding trip to the Sangre de Cristo mountains. When the crucial decision day arrives, though, Papa says Miguel must remain behind, forcing the disappointed youth to endure…
Hampered by pacing problems and a couple of lackluster opening scenes, the Denver Center Theatre Company’s production of The Show-Off doesn’t hit its stride until the end of Act One, when a mother-daughter debate over love and marriage kicks the proceedings into high gear. Penned by veteran vaudeville entertainer George…
Let’s get this out of the way right now, because so many of you will find this hard to believe: Yes, Mad magazine still exists. It is still being published 48 years after it was created by Harvey Kurtzman and William Gaines, neither of whom lived long enough to see…
The soon-to-be-talked-about sen-sations in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream include three or four flashing, near-subliminal montages that combine an eye’s iris and dilating pupil, an extreme closeup of heroin cooking in a teaspoon and a sucking hypodermic needle; a surpassingly frightening sequence in which Ellen Burstyn, in the midst…
The current release of French director Nicole Garcia’s Place Vendôme — which was nominated for eleven César Awards when it debuted in France two years ago — is yet another sign that the dropoff in French imports that plagued U.S. screens in recent years is reversing. This is roughly the…
The opening credits of Charlie¹s Angels hint at a movie that never appears in the film’s expurgated 94 minutes. The Mission: Impossible-style prelude suggests a live-action cartoon as directed by Robert Altman: A camera stalks the aisles of a jumbo jet, capturing snippets of scenery, from the bitchy, fey flight…
Denver isn’t likely to be confused with the City That Never Sleeps; rather, our mile-high municipality seems to enjoy a good night’s rest, as evidenced by the dearth of late-night entertainment. Shawn Ford and Jason Cooke, co-partners in Vertigo Productions, hope to change that with a new series of live…
Colorado is booming, and so are its mystery authors, although nobody seems to have a solid clue as to what causes detective fiction to thrive in the Rockies. “It’s the air,” claims Boulder wordsmith Margaret Coel. A general growth in the state’s population has something to do with it, along…
Less than a year ago, when I learned that Mark Masuoka was set to take on the director’s job at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver on January 1, 2000, I told him, “May God save your immortal soul.” Masuoka gave out a ready guffaw, but I wasn’t even half-kidding…
Open Press, the fine print-making shop, is currently featuring a handsome group show in its gallery. Relief Prints refers to a process of making prints with blocks, either wood or wood-faced linoleum, that have been carved with patterns in relief. The blocks are then inked and finally pressed onto paper…
For much of the past year, pundits the world over have wondered whether John Barton’s Tantalus would be a millennium-defining hit or flop. Much like the nature of Greek myths themselves, British theater legend Peter Hall’s twelve-hour-plus production proves less absolute, drifting between scenes of wonderment and rhetoric, feeling and…
Before others could reject him, Michael Chabon had convinced himself no one wanted to read an epic novel about comic-book creators, mythical Jewish monsters called golems, New York in the 1930s, daring escapes from Lithuania, Nazis, and the Empire State Building’s elevator system. He wanted to write the book–desperately, one…
Any moviemaker who ventures into the sewers of New York City corruption will find Sidney Lumet’s wet footprints. In classics like The Pawnbroker, Serpico and Q&A, this streetwise film master has explored, among other things, individual morality in the face of big-city vice and individual transcendence of ethnic conflict. Other…
The stark simplicity of A Time for Drunken Horses, one of the few films that has slipped out of post-revolutionary Iran to the West, does nothing to obscure its emotional power or the complexity of the geopolitical issues underlying it. Filmed on location in wintry Kurdistan, it is the heartbreaking…
Italian-Americans may be glad to note that Two Family House, which centers on the Italian community in Staten Island, features not a single gangster, gun or ring to be kissed. They might be even happier if the film had also chosen not to depict the men as fat, pasta-eating, quick-tempered…
