There’s an old adage that says by the age of forty, a man gets the face he deserves. If that’s true, then Clint Eastwood, the producer, director and star of the death-row thriller True Crime, must have committed a capital offense or two of his own. To call it “lived…
“I hope it’s better than The Truman Show,” said the woman in line behind me at the publicized “sneak preview” of EDtv. Afterward, a man in my row declared, “That was a lot better than The Truman Show.” Pretentious high-concept films like The Truman Show often garner accolades and let…
The last decade has been an extraordinary period for Iranian cinema. Restricted by minuscule budgets, filmmakers have been forced to fall back on exactly the qualities that Hollywood thinks it can afford to ignore: character insight, social analysis and unadorned storytelling. The success of Abbas Kiarostami, Iran’s best-known moviemaker, at…
Thursday March 18 Everything and anything on wheels will roll into Currigan Exhibition Hall, 1324 Champa St., this week for the All West Auto Fest, a four-day collectors’ extravaganza that gets under way this evening from 6 to 11. This is the show for customizers, featuring a beautiful Pandora’s engine…
Journalist David McCumber headed up to Montana to become a ranch hand–from scratch–with a book deal already in hand. But the resulting experience left him with far more than material for a manuscript. McCumber’s memoir, The Cowboy Way: Seasons of a Montana Ranch, the story of how, at the age…
Calling Don Becker a “writer/performer” seems hopelessly euphemistic, though it’s the term he uses himself. Middle-aged, one-armed and equal parts angry, loony, poetic and raucously funny, the onetime Denver stand-up comic turned performance artist has plenty of surprises on his creative hot plate. That includes Danger, Will Robinson, a work…
The role of photography in contemporary art hasn’t always been black and white. Although today photography is highly prized, as recently as thirty years ago, many in the art world–including the director of the Denver Art Museum–questioned whether it qualified as fine art at all. As the story goes, the…
You’d think that plays about dysfunctional families and “personal identity issues” would have run their course by now. Well, think again, Oprah fans. Just when it seemed as if America’s collective navel-picking and self-pity-partying were headed for the theatrical graveyard, along come a couple of local productions that resurrect our…
At the movies, the fun-loving temptress has been liberating the buttoned-up clod ever since Katharine Hepburn’s leopard made off with Cary Grant’s dinosaur bone in Bringing Up Baby 61 years ago. Maybe even longer, if you count pioneer vamp Theda Bara’s effect on a long succession of speechless men. In…
The Corruptor should come as something of a relief to fans of Hong Kong superstar Chow Yun-Fat, who were mostly disappointed with his American screen debut, last year’s The Replacement Killers. Among the producers of that action thriller was John Woo, who in the Eighties and early Nineties directed five…
Out-of-body, out of your mind–that’s the typical cynical response to any mention of the elusive out-of-body experience. Still, there are persistent folks out there who say there’s nothing enchanted, new-agey or just plain nuts about OBEs at all. Four of those folks, all published authors on the subject and firm…
You’re walking in the damp, warm woods, through patches of sunlight melting into shadows, when you see something ghostly rustling there among the leaves. It’s the product of an unspeakable atrocity–a lynching. But when you realize that the lifeless form swinging there was once a woman, you’re horrified all over…
Thursday March 11 It’s a fundraiser that makes it so easy to give, you’ll hardly know you’re doing it. Here’s the deal: All you have to do is go out to eat. Nearly 100 metro-area restaurants will participate in today’s Dining Out for Life event by donating 25 percent of…
When British artist Erica Daborn moved to Los Angeles in 1987, she came empty-handed. Leaving her work back in England, she arrived in the United States with little more than her art degrees from the Winchester School of Art and the Royal College of Art and a reputation for her…
Like any good tragedy, the Broadway musical Titanic begins by introducing us to characters who yearn, Icarus-like, to “fabricate great works” that will confer a larger sense of meaning on their day-to-day lives. Citing such manmade marvels as the Parthenon, the Great Wall of China and the Egyptian pyramids, Thomas…
As the majestic strains of Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” play in the background prior to the start of The Complete History of America (Abridged), you can hear some devilish laughter as the audience anticipates a sharply satirical take on our nation’s checkered past. But when three grinning…
Immodesty becomes Guy Ritchie, the British writer-director who makes a jovial debut on a Jovian scale in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. In this wayward gangster comedy set in London’s East End, Ritchie cooks up a gleefully improbable tale out of mismatched ingredients: a rigged card game, a hydroponics…
The hot splendors of Carlos Saura’s Tango are supported by a scrap of plot, and that’s all it needs. The soul-searching Spanish director of Peppermint Frappe and Taxi, who previously showed us his passion for dance with 1995’s Flamenco, leaps into tangomania like a man falling hopelessly in love–with no…
The Deep End of the Ocean starts out as a maternal horror movie and ends up as a family therapy session. Michelle Pfeiffer plays the photographer wife of a restaurateur (Treat Williams) and mother of two sons and an infant daughter. While checking into a jammed hotel for her fifteenth…
Thursday March 4 The wonderful world of radar guns and livestock scales comes alive today during something a little bit different–a Colorado Measurement Standards Open House. It’s being thrown in celebration of National Weights and Measures Week, which commemorates the March 2, 1799, passing of the first weights and measures…
Humor is the great curative potion for pain. It’s a concept we’re all familiar with, and it’s something Canadian director David Adkin has mulled over for a long time. In making his film We’re Funny That Way, featuring eleven gay and lesbian comedians speaking their minds on and off stage…
We usually think of scientists as a pretty dry and serious bunch. But a new exhibit at the Denver Museum of Natural History, Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway, based on Alaskan artist Ray Troll’s slightly weird vision of evolution, proves that even paleontologists–folks who spend their lives digging up and labeling…
