There is something fairy-tale-like, but also deeply human, about Twin Falls Idaho, a gentle, beautifully realized tale of love and intimacy that marks the feature-film debut of identical twins Mark and Michael Polish. Michael directed the film, and both brothers wrote the script and star in it. It is what…
Shifu Howie Solow would shrug off the notion, but he’s easily the Boulder Baryshnikov of Shaolin Hung Mei Pai Kung Fu. Wiry and hard, with poised muscles, Shifu Solow is an ordained martial arts master, and it shows in the fluid snap, crackle and pop of his artful movements. Every…
Imagine yourself on the banks of the South Platte, lifting a Zang’s brew with one furry-tongued William McGaa — Denver’s actual founder, or at least that’s what he said — as the sun sinks below the Rockies skyline. Never mind that this McGaa, in the company of his three Indian…
The Center for the Visual Arts is celebrating its first anniversary this summer in an expanded space on Wazee Street. The CVA, which operates under the auspices of Metropolitan State College of Denver, was originally located around the corner on 17th Street, in the building that is now occupied by…
Big-time local ceramics talent Rodger Lang is currently the subject of Lines & Space & Time at Artists on Santa Fe, 747 Santa Fe Drive. Though it’s economical for a solo exhibit, with only a few groupings of pieces, the show does lay out examples of each of the major…
If Kevin Williamson has anything to say about it, the good works of noble movie schoolteachers like Mr. Chips and Miss Dove and Mr. Holland will be wiped out in one fell swoop. In their place, the creator of TV’s hormonal Dawson’s Creek series proposes an unmitigated horror: a high…
As a filmmaker, actor John Turturro clearly believes in drawing from personal experience: His directorial debut, the 1992 Mac (which won the Camera D’Or at Cannes), was avowedly based on his father’s life. For his second feature, Illuminata, Turturro takes a look at the theater, showing us the ambitions, fears…
Lo and behold the plight of the American gangster. John Gotti, the Dapper Don, has been sent down the river. His big-time heavy, Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, is famous and face-lifted for being a no-good dirty-rat stool pigeon. And Robert De Niro, the reigning deity of hoodlum heavies in films…
Thursday August 12 Author Patricia Hersh doesn’t just report on American teens in her book A Tribe Apart: A Journey Into the Heart of American Adolescence–she quietly weaves herself into the fabric of their lives, the result of which is a fascinating, immediate cultural study that reads like an especially…
When it comes to television, no one’s ever gone broke taking the low road. And when it comes to the Web, let’s face it: Taking the low road may be the only way to make a quick buck (we’ll be impressed with our Amazon stock when the company actually starts…
If you believe that “the truth is out there” but that it’s being smothered by diabolical forces, Dean Stonier can help you. Since 1980, Stonier, a congenial retired nutritionist, has served as the director for Global Sciences Congress, a Thornton-based collaborative that gathers the kind of inside-out info that Scully…
Well, it’s that time of year again–late summer, when the art world, which is centered in New York, essentially shuts down, with many galleries actually closing for the entire month of August. This hiatus is a response to the stifling heat and high humidity that engulfs the East Coast this…
If you’re tired of being bombarded by wall-to-wall news coverage of heinous crimes, tragic accidents and inane controversies, or of slogging through the nightly prime-time lineup of hospital dramas (in which half of the characters die), crime movies (in which the characters commit the acts that send their victims to…
Larry Kramer is perhaps best known as a pugnacious sort who regularly vilifies the editors of the New York Times and intimidates genteel talk-show hosts like Charlie Rose. In 1985, though, the gay activist and co-founder of ACT-UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) became famous for writing The Normal…
Do not be fooled: Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley and Peter Criss receive top billing in Detroit Rock City, but KISS doesn’t actually appear in the film until its final three minutes. And when the band does show up, its members clad in their de rigueur leather-and-greasepaint getups, it’s…
Filmmaker Bobby Bowfinger, the lead character in the intermittently funny Hollywood satire Bowfinger, starring Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy, has a dream. Nothing so grand as an Academy Award or even a table down front at the Golden Globes. No, when Bowfinger (Steve Martin) allows his fantasies to run wild,…
In truth, the miles between Hong Kong and Denver can’t be counted. So how does one individual reconcile such an insurmountable distance? M. Elaine Mar doesn’t exactly have the answer, but she’s living testimony to the process, a uniquely American rite of passage she chronicles on the most personal level…
Thursday August 5 Oh, those Russians–so romantic, so histrionic. It takes an even hand to navigate an orchestra through all of those ups and downs, and that’s what the Colorado Music Festival will get from guest maestro GYnter Neuhold, an Austrian wunderkind who’ll lead the festival orchestra–and his wife, piano…
Boulder choreographer Jerri Davis says she’s a lily-white girl from Idaho who grew up knowing little about domestic violence and the damage it can do. But several years ago, while she was studying dance at the University of Colorado, she decided to base a work on the stories of battered…
The Singer Gallery’s mid-summer offering, the absolutely fabulous John DeAndrea: Fragments, provides local viewers a rare opportunity to see the work of one of the greatest artists in Colorado, ever. DeAndrea was born in Denver in 1941 and raised in the old Italian neighborhood on the west side. “We lived…
The rising tide of William Shakespeare’s popularity reached its high-water mark recently with the hit movie Shakespeare in Love, a delightful tale that reshaped the Bard’s image from that of a paunchy though brilliant literary lion to one of a hot-blooded, if bumbling, dramatic poet. As refreshing as it was,…
It has been almost forty years since Eric Rohmer, riding the crest of the French New Wave, embarked on the first of his Six Moral Tales. The series would eventually include at least two classics–My Night at Maud’s (1969) and Chloe in the Afternoon (1972). Linked by theme and style…
