If contemporary Texas politicians were as endearingly funny as the small-town folk who bustle to and fro during Red, White and Tuna, then having a whole bevy of Texans in the White House someday might not seem so unsettling. It’s easy enough, for instance, to snicker at the small-minded observations…
The besmirched hero of Sweet and Lowdown, Woody Allen’s valentine to swing-era jazz and the furies of creative temperament, is a fictitious ’30s guitarist called Emmet Ray. Self-absorbed but brilliant, crass but lyrical, Emmet is the embodiment of the notion that a great artist needn’t be a good guy or…
Boo hoo! Frank McCourt had a miserable childhood! Honestly, who can say their childhood wasn’t impoverished in some way…or in many ways? That Mr. McCourt survived and eventually published his inescapable memoir is nice, of course, and the book is indeed a poignant and crafty piece of work. Nonetheless, it…
In Cradle Will Rock, his third directorial outing, Tim Robbins takes on an almost insurmountably ambitious project: the re-creation of an era into which characters imaginary, obscure and famous are woven into a tapestry representing the texture of the time. It’s a tall order. E. L. Doctorow was able to…
It’s easy to see how Play It to the Bone, writer-director Ron Shelton’s latest comedy-drama, got started. Shelton obviously wanted to do for boxing what he’d already done for baseball in Bull Durham, golf in Tin Cup and pick-up basketball in White Men Can’t Jump. But somewhere along the way,…
Director Chen Kaige is best known in the U.S. for Farewell, My Concubine, the most successful Chinese production ever released here. As many pointed out at the time, the Oscar-nominated 1993 epic of modern Chinese history may have been wholly Chinese in both content and viewpoint, but it was still,…
Although some people really are crazy, “crazy” is a relative term. Does it apply to someone who feels he might spin off into outer space and never be able to get back down to earth? Or is it only crazy when you have to cling to the nearest table or…
Abbott Fay thinks skiers lamenting this year’s late and scant snowfall ought to quit bellyaching. Farmers and ranchers throughout the West already know that drought is a cyclical occurrence, after all. Fay, a semi-retired Grand Junction history professor who has written the entertaining A History of Skiing in Colorado, knows…
Stuart Perkin’s wife left him for another woman. Four years later, he still wasn’t over it — despite three “really sexual” relationships that proved Sue hadn’t dumped him over his lack of manhood (a typical though illogical fear). Finally the Denver filmmaker decided there was only one way to resolve…
There’s no denying that Real to Surreal, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver in Sakura Square, has garnered some negative word of mouth. Perhaps it’s the disappointment generated by the fact that it could have been a great show and is instead merely a good one. The exhibit represents…
RedShift Gallery, which combines a frame shop with a minimal exhibition space — just a few walls, really — has been framing for ten years and presenting art shows for the past five. But it’s only been in its current location in the Ballpark neighborhood for the past two years…
No matter how dedicated they are to presenting plays that provoke as well as entertain, most independent theater artists face the same middle-of-the-road, bureaucratic issues that plague large, established companies. That’s especially true when a troupe earns acclaim and immediately sets its sights on becoming “the next Steppenwolf” — referring…
Once upon a time in ancient Denver, when there were few contemporary art galleries and even fewer galleries showing unproven work, a ragtag crew of pirates fresh out of art school and unspoiled by the business of art banded together in search of a sturdy galleon with clean walls and…
When choreographer Deborah Reshotko launched her first Building Community Through Dance program in 1998, forty people turned out for Saturday-morning rehearsals. There were kids and teens, single moms from the Warren Village assisted-housing project, neighborhood grandmas and everything in between. Some were culled from outreach programs conducted by Reshotko and…
There are only a few days left to catch Hal D. Gould: Visual Legacy at the Camera Obscura Gallery. The important show highlights the long career of a significant figure in the world of local fine-art photography, and believe it or not, after fifty years of photography, this is Gould’s…
Of the readers who bought four million copies, in no fewer than thirty languages, of David Guterson’s 1995 bestseller Snow Falling on Cedars, many have been looking forward to the movie version. Others have been dreading it. For better or worse, this multifarious story about nativist bigotry, forbidden love, sons…
Those who choose to dismiss Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson’s dark (and darkly humorous) meditation on loneliness and regret in the San Fernando Valley, will probably see it as self-important and philosophically inflated — the kind of three-hour ordeal that university professors can dissect at their leisure while ordinary folks shy…
You hope for Dorothy Lamour, reclining against a palm tree in her sarong, when you hear the title The Hurricane. Instead, you get well over two hours of Denzel Washington huddled in a cell. In the poster art, Washington glowers, one bandaged fist cocked for a right to our jaw…
What do you mean, you don’t know yet? How can it be this close to New Year’s Eve — and not just any New Year’s Eve — and you still have no idea where you’ll be at the stroke of midnight? Actually, you’re probably better off not knowing. The best…
First things first: This is not the way Bill Michaels thought he’d be ringing in the new year. Not that there’s anything wrong with his fun run (and walk), the neatly titled Y2K-5K. But after importing one of the country’s best celebrations — First Night — to Colorado, and then…
In Albert Brooks’s summer comedy The Muse, a ravishing daughter of Zeus — in the person of Sharon Stone — gives a burned-out Hollywood screenwriter a fresh jolt of inspiration. For a price. Brooks’s desperate scribbler must first lavish Tiffany trinkets on his newfound benefactor, put her up at the…
Kyle Phipps plans to spend a lot of time on the 16th Street Mall this holiday season. To the eternal irritation of the mall’s overseers, however, he’s not going to be dropping much cash at the Pavilions or the Tabor Center. “I’m going to be doing what I’m doing now…
