In Stephen Frears’s new comedy High Fidelity, leading man John Cusack is forever looking the camera (and us) in the eye and explaining what’s wrong with him today, or why he was unhappy yesterday, or how his first girlfriend dumped him back in the seventh grade. Gazing into the lens,…
Not so long ago, The Skulls would have starred Tom Cruise — but in which role? He could have been either lead; the one he didn’t choose could have landed in the lap of, say, James Spader or Rob Lowe. One can easily imagine Cruise as Luke McNamara, the beefy,…
Ron Jeremy is simultaneously the best-known male actor in adult films and the porn star who’s hardest on the eyes. At 47, he’s relatively short of stature, admittedly obese and so hirsute that his nickname is the Hedgehog — a name that neatly summarizes his erotic appeal. Yet during his…
Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer lead a double life. Some of the time they make music for children and families, other times they play to an adult audience. When the versatile duo — as adept at rope tricks, yodeling and American Sign Language as they are at being studio musicians,…
It seems like the entire art world has gone potty. Denver’s curators and gallery directors alike are crazed these days, since there are more than fifty local art exhibits in which ceramics take center stage going on right now. It’s enough to make our heads spin like a kick wheel…
The modest Philip J. Steele Gallery does double duty as the entry lobby for the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design. But despite this limitation, it’s often a place to see interesting shows put together by gallery director Lisa Spivak. The current show makes the case. Richard Notkin: Passages:…
A few weeks before he was supposed to send his newly written play to a Seattle theater company, Robert Lewis Vaughan experienced a sudden change of heart. The Colorado Springs native (now a New Yorker) says that he had a “gut feeling” that he should submit the drama, which is…
The screen is Jim Jarmusch’s playground. Or so it appears. The quirky director of Down by Law and Mystery Train has attracted a following as loyal as the Quentin Tarantino cult, because his stuff, too, is hip, ironic and resolutely contrary. Jarmusch seems to take a kid’s unqualified pleasure from…
Is America ready for Hong Kong’s action style? Certainly there are many fans of the more balletic, guns-and-martial-arts, fly-through-the-air movies that have inspired everyone from Quentin Tarantino to the Wachowski brothers. And yet Hollywood seems to have had trouble marketing the concept. Yes, John Woo gets high-profile projects, but the…
O! Sweet vulture of love! Picking through the bones and sinew of doe-eyed fools the world around! How exquisite is thy rending, how blissful the release! Spirits in crimson rivulets swirled, souls as carrion shredded! Two vibrant hearts made still as one, to sate thy gnashing beak! Blessed bloody bird,…
Even the press kit is up front about it: Whatever It Takes is less a film than a product of marketing research and demographic considerations. It might as well have been written on a bar graph, so fetishistic is it about making sure it appeals to teens and their parents…
Chip Ward moved to Grantsville, Utah, in the 1970s, looking for an unsullied place to drop out of the rat race and raise a family away from it all — but somehow it didn’t turn out that way. Instead, he found out that even on the edge of the Great…
What’s wrong with James Stewart? As photographer L.B. Jefferies, the wheelchair-bound hero of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Stewart would rather spy on his neighbors than make out with Grace Kelly. In what must be cruel Hitchcockian irony, Stewart, laid up with a broken leg, is bored by Kelly’s romantic overtures…
A new day has very apparently dawned at the still-nascent Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, which is housed in a former fish market in Sakura Square. And the many changes are obvious from the moment visitors hit the brand-new front doors. Some may recall that I have relentlessly criticized MoCAD…
The cryptic phantom institution the Invisible Museum is currently presenting No Zone, sponsored by the Goldfarb Foundation. It’s the second of three exhibits from the IM to be presented at the Market Street Gallery at Guiry’s. The last time, the subject was small abstract sculpture; this time it’s experimental photography…
An opera based on a Russian silent film would seem the sort of artsy endeavor that invites dismissive sneers from musical and movie buffs alike. But with its abundance of artful understatement, a score that out-lilts most songfests and a touching story that examines age-old questions with modern frankness, Bed…
The rough conversation and odd behavior permeating War might prove a tad disconcerting for those whose image of Ireland is of modest pastel houses and gently rolling cobblestone streets snuggled together under clouds of cottony mist. Billed as “a contemporary, slice-of-life comedy,” Roddy Doyle’s work simmers with everyday discontent, vulgar…
Among the qualities that make Fred A. Leuchter Jr. a buffoon who’s also an accomplice to evil, his desperate hunger for attention is the most obvious. He’s like the hick-town wallflower who’s always getting lured into the visiting hustler’s backseat for a quickie. When the state of Tennessee asked Leuchter…
It’s okay. You can say it. Just five little words. Don’t be shy. “I…am…a…wrestling fan.” You certainly wouldn’t be alone if you said it. Recent surveys show that as many as one in four Americans watch professional wrestling, and the World Wrestling Federation routinely has the number-one rated program on…
The film is called Erin Brockovich, but it might as well be titled Julia Roberts. Never before in the actress’s erratic career has a film been so custom-made for her; it’s as though a screenwriter has been replaced by a seamstress who knows Roberts’s every curve. No matter that she…
All of Ireland is like a small town — everyone knows everyone else’s business and often makes it their own. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing: In Cork, Ireland’s largest county, that simply translates into a deeply invested tradition of volunteerism among the women, who consider spreading good works…
Best-selling author Bryce Proctorr has a fat publishing contract and a debilitating case of writer’s block. Fortunately, he’s just bumped into fellow writer Wayne Prentice, who has a career that’s stalled in mid-list oblivion and a manuscript no publisher wants. That’s the setup in Donald Westlake’s new novel, The Hook…
