Can you make a satisfying high-tech thriller for $60,000? You can if you’re 28-year-old Darren Aronofsky, late of Harvard and the American Film Institute’s directing program, and you get everyone you know to chip in a hundred bucks on the prospect that if the picture makes a profit you’ll be…
Do we really need to see the great Kevin Spacey fuming and fussing in one of those we-do-things-my-way-or-we-don’t-do-them-at-all roles? In The Negotiator, he’s playing Chris Sabian, an expert hostage negotiator for the Chicago police, whose job it is to talk down Samuel L. Jackson’s Danny Roman, another police expert who…
Thursday July 23 When a bluesman of Charles Brown’s stature cancels a show due to illness, major disappointment results, along with best wishes for a speedy recovery. But for local roots-music lovers, all is not lost: Cajun fiddler Michael Doucet and Beausoleil will sub for Brown in a return engagement…
Who does a good fan dance these days? The now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t days of Sally Rand popped like a bubble decades ago in favor of more hardcore pursuits. But Denver swing kid Michelle Baldwin is so certain the time is right for burlesque to make a comeback that she’s banking on…
Denver puppeteer Annie Zook looks like a laid-back, middle-aged librarian from Kansas. But on closer examination, you’ll see mischief in her eyes, and when she speaks, there’s a hint of a squeak that just might turn into a fairy-tale character’s voice at the slightest provocation. Zook, who plays host this…
Sean Scully occupies a peculiar niche in the history of recent art. An unabashed modernist, he came of artistic age in the 1980s, an era dominated by an anti-modernist zeitgeist. The assault on modernism generally, and on abstract painting in particular, came from both the front and the rear. While…
It’s difficult to imagine anyone other than Christopher Plummer playing the title character in William Luce’s Barrymore. In addition to maintaining his performer’s lock on the role since the play premiered at Canada’s prestigious Stratford Festival in 1996 (a few months later, the production moved to Broadway, where Plummer won…
What happens when a man is forced to choose between the well-being of his children and the sanctity of his good name? Should John Proctor, the main character in Robert Ward’s opera The Crucible, preserve his sons’ inheritance by bending to the stiff-necked morality of Salem’s witch-hunters? Or should the…
The first half-hour of Steven Spielberg’s magnificent and terrifying war epic Saving Private Ryan unfolds at bloody Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944, and is likely the most graphic re-creation of men in battle ever committed to film. Petrified GIs huddling in the wave-bashed landing craft vomit into their…
Hal Hartley’s gallery of troubled eccentrics already features two bickering brothers in search of their lost father (Simple Men), three mix-and-match couples afflicted by identical love woes in three far-flung cities (Flirt) and the unlikely triptych of sexually obsessed virgin, bewildered amnesiac and ex-porn star (Amateur). How do you top…
Don’t ever call the Blue Knights a marching band. Averaging about 126 members, give or take one or two, the Knights are a drum and bugle corps, the cream of the field-performance genre, and nothing but. To call them anything else would border on insult. What’s the difference, exactly? A…
Lisa Lusero’s boyish, austere body is a draftsman’s sketch of curves and angles, plain-faced with round glasses and an eighth of an inch of fuzz covering its scalp. But in the course of her one-woman theater piece Impossible Body, performed without props or costumes (and sometimes even without stage lighting),…
Thursday July 16 It’s summer, so loosen up. Try things on. Kick back. You can do all those things and still take in some culture. At the Changing Scene, 1527 1/2 Champa St., Summerplay, the longstanding downtown theater’s annual showcase of one-acts written by local playwrights, gets under way tonight…
You may want to wash your hands after taking in the trio of oddball (a polite but accurate term) conceptual exhibits that fill the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art this summer. While none are visually edifying, all three challenge conventional, and even unconventional, ideas about the nature of art and…
By virtually every account, the 18-to-34 age group is the fastest-growing segment of the opera-going public. Although no one can explain exactly why Baywatching channel-surfers from the MTV generation are hooked on an art form once renowned for its corpulent prima donnas and sleep-inducing histrionics, two local opera companies are…
Billed as the first commercial film written, directed and co-produced by American Indians, Smoke Signals could be a sign of the truth-telling breakthrough they have deserved ever since John Wayne’s cavalry undertook to slaughter the “savages,” Jay Silverheels played sidekick, and Jeff Chandler was cast as Cochise. With the possible…
The last place you want to visit in mid-winter is gray, freezing Buffalo, New York. The last people you want to see in the last place you want to visit are Jimmy and Janet Brown, a pair of comic demons so indifferent, so surreally out of touch, that they scarcely…
In The Mask of Zorro, Anthony Hopkins plays the eponymous masked hero as if he were doing Shakespeare. He’s trying to turn a kitsch hero into a real one, and his efforts are so weirdly off-key that you don’t know whether to applaud or titter. This dolorous Don Diego de…
Thursday July 9 Ben Sidran–the same Ben Sidran who played alongside Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs in an early rendition of the Steve Miller Band, the same Ben Sidran who holds a doctorate in American studies, and the same Ben Sidran who’s written definitive books about jazz musicians and documentary…
Not everyone gets famous playing with model dinosaurs in their garage. Special-effects godfather Ray Harryhausen may be the exception: Not only did he begin his career that way while still a teen in his hometown of Hollywood, but in the process he managed to change the face of the FX…
Artist, radio personality and professional speed-talker Bill Amundson has built a career out of just being Bill, which in his case means being a self-deprecating, compulsive, middle-aged Midwesterner of Norwegian descent with a distinct inability to either shut up or stop drawing. What comes out–and out and out and out–is…
A cultural notion emanating from New York–as do so many–is that the art world closes down for the summer. While this may be true in that city, which wealthy collectors, gallery owners and artists alike abandon for the seashore during the dog days, out here in the hinterlands summer is…
