Thursday October 23 Ready to roll: Glamour, glitz and miles and miles of old and new film from around the world are certain benchmarks of the Denver International Film Festival, returning to town for its twentieth go-around. As always, the fest features celebrity guests (actors Jack Palance and Bryan Brown…
The spectacular show The Collectors Vision marks the first exhibit presented under the auspices of Denver’s new Museum of Contemporary Art. And though it’s been a very long time coming, this show on the mezzanine of the 1999 Broadway Building has proven well worth the wait. The idea of a…
Veteran Madison Avenue ad exec Marshall Karp moved to Los Angeles in 1987 and garnered modest success writing for such TV shows as Amen, starring Sherman “George Jefferson” Hemsley, and Baby Talk, featuring Connie Sellecca and George Clooney. Four years before he devoted himself to such Hollywood shlock, though, he…
The one-act play is largely a twentieth-century phenomenon. Shakespeare evidently never wrote a one-act play to encapsulate his feelings and thoughts, even though his world may have seemed smaller to him than our modern, global network of communications does to us. Relying mostly on his knowledge of human nature, the…
Just when you thought you couldn’t stand to watch another movie about a household concealing a dark secret–or sit through another Thanksgiving reunion–along comes The House of Yes. Adapted from Wendy MacLeod’s award-winning play We Are Living in the House of Yes, it’s a black comedy of manners concerning a…
The twentieth edition of the Denver International Film Festival gets under way tonight, October 23, with a showing at the Continental Theatre of The Wings of a Dove, Iain Softley’s adaptation of the Henry James classic, and closes October 30 with The Ice Storm, novelist Rick Moody’s harrowing tale of…
Stylishness without substance can become wearying real fast. Twenty minutes into A Life Less Ordinary, the new movie from the producing-directing-writing team of Trainspotting and Shallow Grave, I was already into overload. It’s not that director Danny Boyle doesn’t have imagination. It’s just that sometimes imagination is all he has…
The true-life incident of the Cottingley fairies is so full of possibilities, so thought-provoking and hilarious at once, that it’s amazing it’s never been filmed before. Making up for lost time, the story has suddenly appeared (on its eightieth anniversary) simultaneously as the basis for two films. Photographing Fairies, with…
Here’s a wonder. The dirty little pleasures of Boogie Nights, which chronicles the follies and the fondest dreams of a group of L.A. porn stars in the late Seventies and early Eighties, have almost nothing to do with sex or debauchery. Instead, this sly and hugely entertaining flashback to the…
Thursday October 16 The Shaw must go on: Screwball comedy may have been hatched when George Bernard Shaw’s Misalliance first hit the stage earlier this century, with stuffy British underwear magnate John Tarleton for a protagonist and a Polish aviatrix as his unexpected foil. The same issues of the heart…
Those cold fronts that have recently swept down from Wyoming can mean only one thing–the start of the fall art season. And the forecast for this year’s exhibition climate? Batten down the hatches. Exciting shows are cropping up everywhere, even at the almost-always-overcast alternative spaces. And there are some big…
What did it all mean? That was the lingering question many audience members pondered one recent Saturday afternoon after Cirque du Soleil loosened its formidable grip on their collective imaginations. Holding the sell-out crowd spellbound with a captivating performance of its current touring show, Quidam, the Montreal-based troupe received two…
Classical theater, like classical music, is often regarded as something that must be tolerated, if rarely enjoyed. Many theater-goers routinely endure an entire evening of, say, Shakespearean drama or Wagnerian opera, dutifully applauding a performance more out of respect for its standing as a classic than for its ability to…
The Seventies were so awash in Fifties nostalgia that it’s surprising that Dan Wakefield’s 1970 bestseller Going All the Way is only now turning up in big-screen form. Of course, not all Fifties coming-of-age stories are the same: Unlike The Last Picture Show and American Graffiti–which pretty much dominated the…
Once again we are being bombarded by movies in which a new generation vents its anger at the sins, real and imagined, of the older one. The most eloquent of these outcries, I think, are David O. Russell’s vivid 1996 black comedy Flirting With Disaster, in which a baffled yuppie…
Jennifer Jason Leigh, who’s played everything from an acid-tongued Jazz Age sophisticate in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle to a drug-addled Nineties narc in Rush, has a lot to live up to as the heroine in the new adaptation of Henry James’s classic Washington Square. First there’s the literary…
Thursday October 9 Clay of the land: Not long after people discovered fire and started drawing with coals on cave walls, it’s likely that they learned how to squish mud into utilitarian vessels. Pottery, like fine art, has grown up considerably in the interim, but its functionality persists–and that’s the…
Clark Richert comes by his scientific bent honestly. His two older brothers grew up to be physicists, and his younger sister is a physician. Richert followed a different trajectory, studying painting at the University of Kansas, from which he received his BFA in 1963. But the bug was in his…
In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, an old woman has left the impersonal confines of a city hospital for the warmth of her remote cabin so that she might die quietly. Grace Stiles (Judy Phelan-Hill), a lifelong mountain dweller, has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and the ninety-year-old recluse…
The first act of Sam Shepard’s play Buried Child might have you wondering if the playwright wrote his drama shortly after watching the cult classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. At many points in Shepard’s story, it seems as though an ectomorphic, sledgehammer-wielding psychopath might leap out of the shadows, screaming,…
Seven Years in Tibet feels more like Seven Days in the Movie Theater. It refuses to come to life–not even when Brad Pitt, as hirsute as a yak, wanders the frozen Himalayas with an Austrian accent that probably gave his dialogue coach the hives. It’s an epic about how an…
Now that Oliver Stone has explained to us (at some length) that the CIA killed JFK, that Nixon was a paranoid loser, but not quite the paranoid loser his enemies have always imagined, and that violence in America is really a conspiracy between the celebrity-hungry public and the cynical mass…
