In 1991, New York City native Julie Dash made Daughters of the Dust, a gorgeous pastiche of a film dense with African symbolism and a distinctly feminine spirituality. Set in the 1890s on a remote South Carolina sea island, it documents life among members of the Peazant family, Gullah people…
Anyone even remotely interested in tracing the course of contemporary art in Colorado over the past few decades will want to take in a pair of marvelous shows that focus on major, established local artists. But move fast–they’re closing soon. The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art is feting venerable painter…
Before you declare once and for all your utter disinterest in the private lives (not to mention the private parts) of public figures, take a gander at British playwright Alan Bennett’s intellectual farce, Kafka’s Dick. Far more than an underhanded jab at a deified writer’s supposed anatomical shortcomings, Bennett’s play…
In the days when radio was king, Americans seemed as united in spirit as at any point in their history. True, much of what was broadcast was merely sweet-sounding, thinly veiled propaganda (FDR’s Fireside Chats, for instance, weren’t much more than feel-good campaign messages). But the big-band music that came…
Give all the folks who finally got The Object of My Affection to the multiplex credit for perseverance. In the course of its decade-long journey from page to screen, this much-troubled tale about the unrequited love affair of a heterosexual social worker and a gay first-grade teacher has gone through…
In writer-director James Toback’s quicksilver sex comedy Two Girls and a Guy, Robert Downey Jr. plays Blake Allen, a struggling New York actor who lives in a spacious loft in SoHo he probably can’t afford. He’s a pampered prince who has worked out for himself a cozy romantic subterfuge: He…
Peter Howitt’s Sliding Doors is a romantic fantasy blessed with such intelligence, charm and lethal wit that most viewers probably won’t notice that its hip and plucky heroine, an embattled London publicist named Helen, is played by an American actress affecting a clipped British accent. What they will notice is…
When Glen Hanket and his bride, Susan, went on their honeymoon, they didn’t go to Paris or a Caribbean island, or even to Niagara Falls. Instead, they took a year off from their workaday lives to walk from Maine to Oregon, picking up roadside litter along the way. Hanket, usually…
Thursday April 16 If you like your bluegrass slightly slick and not so whiny, the Nashville Bluegrass Band has your number. The Grammy-grabbin’ quintet, which includes one small pickin’ legend after another, blends the old-time traditions pioneered by the likes of Bill Monroe with more updated interpretations by artists such…
When you drive through the Curtis Park neighborhood, kids are the first sign of life you’ll see. They’re everywhere–all sizes, shapes and colors, running down the sidewalks, sharing bikes and bubble gum, hollering, laughing and watching over one another. It’s a good sign. It means that there are families in…
There haven’t been many negatives this past year for local lovers of photography. The hail of impressive shows began last spring with an exhibit at the Emmanuel Gallery that brought together some of Denver’s best talents. Then came a display of photography superstars from the collection of Hal Gould at…
By virtually every account, the Broadway musical is booming. At last tally, a score of productions were playing to near-record crowds on the Great White Way. Of course, this spate of musical entertainment contains its share of theme-park shtick meant to attract starry-eyed out-of-towners and a fringe group of slumming…
Moviegoers who’ve grown immune to Christopher Walken’s dark charms won’t be breaking the doors down to buy a ticket for Suicide Kings. Its centerpiece is an all-out, full-throttle dose of the Walken weirdness as he portrays a semi-retired New York mafioso who’s kidnapped by a quartet of privileged but street-stupid…
When it comes to gamesmanship and the testosterone wars, no writer in America is more obsessed than David Mamet. Whether his combatants are duking it out in a seedy Chicago real estate office (Glengarry Glen Ross) or fighting for survival in the Arctic wastes (The Edge), the story remains the…
If nothing else, the current edition of Michael Moore’s continuing self-love fest does have a great subject: the desperation hidden inside a “thriving” U.S. economy. While politicians and financial wizards point to unemployment on the wane and profits on the rise, Moore notes that the largest employer in the country…
Thursday April 9 The Evil Companions Literary Award, presented annually by Colorado State University’s Colorado Review to a poet or writer with ties to the West, goes this year to author Dorothy Allison, whose stark, straightforward style first caught readers right between the eyes in Bastard Out of Carolina, a…
From the late ’20s to the early ’40s, Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom was the swing-dance capital of the world. All of the best big bands played there, sometimes competing against one another in wild battles of the bands and always propelled by dancers on the smoky, sweaty floor. The mass of…
Paul Davis takes the mike. He’s wearing loose plaid shorts, he lunges when he walks, and his glasses are smudged. “‘Clocktower Physics!!'” he announces, then continues: “Motion! Emotion! Men and women/are in motion. They are not defining God./They are PIERCE-nosed boys and TATTOOED girls/under the clocktower. They hang out an…
A quick inventory of the Shakespearean actor’s stock-in-trade includes qualities such as an expressive voice and body, a fertile imagination, and a devotion to spiritual truth tempered by a carnival barker’s sense of showmanship. But when it comes to portraying any of the four major Shakespearean tragic roles (Hamlet, Lear,…
At first glance, the Shop’s tiny stage seems a poor choice to house a production of Irish playwright Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa. In fact, the cramped confines of the storefront theater appear especially ill-suited to the emotional climax of Friel’s masterpiece, which calls for five unmarried Irish sisters to…
It has been thirty years since compulsive fussbudget Felix Unger began clearing away the moldy bread crusts, stale cigar butts and melted candy bars from the New York apartment of dedicated slob Oscar Madison, thirty years since Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau joined a battle of wills and a farce…
If American movie moguls really thought like Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, they’d probably spend more time blowing up Federal Reserve banks than calculating first-weekend grosses. As it is, instead of buying inflammable fertilizer and fuel oil, the moguls are selling it–in the form of satires about presidential misconduct and…
