Wes Craven’s Scream, which opened almost exactly a year ago, was the surprise hit of an overcrowded Christmas season. In part, the success was a triumph of counter-programming: In the midst of a glut of classy Oscar contenders, Scream was the only teen horror film. And it was helped by…
Thursday December 4 ‘Tis the season to be shopping: Art, which allows you to act the part of a cultural dilettante and still be a blatant consumer, makes the chore of holiday shopping more palatable–so put on your stuffed shirts, look down your noses and hit the shows. Openings tonight…
It’s been a hectic few weeks for Carol Keller, director of the Emmanuel Gallery on the Auraria campus. When she hasn’t been scrambling to protect a permanent collection of photographs from art thieves, she’s been pulling a few capers of her own–in her case, perfectly legal ones. First, the thievery…
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is an ideal microcosm of the contemporary Broadway musical. It’s based on a story written by someone else (the complete text may be found in the Book of Genesis, Chapters 37 through 50); it borrows from several popular musical genres (including calypso, country-Western and…
Thirty years ago, Richard Schechner created the Performance Group in New York, an avant-garde company whose shows were riveting because of their carefully rehearsed spontaneity. What was important in Schechner’s productions was the unpredictable series of events that took place between actor and audience, and the art form he created…
The bizarre documentary Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist asks us to believe that the late Mr. Flanagan, who regularly nailed his penis to a block of wood, hung himself upside down for untold hours and gladly submitted while his sex partner force-fed him scoops of Alpo,…
In Kiss or Kill, the migration of Hollywood’s old drama of lovers on the lam to the Australian countryside seems to be a mixed blessing. Nikki and Al, the fatalistic young couple in Bill Bennett’s rambunctious new effort, descend from famous runaways like Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney in You…
Thursday November 27 Get a load off: You can have too much of a good thing, and it never becomes more evident than on Thanksgiving Day, when the dinner table, covered with mounds of food, suddenly resembles a fire sale at Macy’s. Doesn’t your belt tighten around your waist just…
Just in time for the holidays, the Denver Art Museum has raised the curtain on its seven-year, $7.5 million facelift. Judging by the crowds–more than 13,000 visitors showed up on the first weekend alone–many people have found it worth the wait. But we may have to wait a little longer…
Give Barbara Walters credit. Or maybe it’s Sigmund Freud who deserves the accolades. While we’re at it, let’s not forget the hordes of celebrities now clamoring to publish their memoirs or autobiographies. All of them must be taken into consideration when attempting to explain the contemporary worship of every famous…
Disney Studios has had a near-monopoly on feature animation for almost sixty years now, and near-monopolies are almost as destructive as full-on monopolies. Twentieth Century Fox is to be applauded for going up against the giant mouse; one only wishes that its first effort were itself more to crow about…
You can’t exactly call Alien Resurrection a pleasurable experience, but, then again, you wouldn’t say that about its predecessors, either. Directed by the Frenchman Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who previously co-directed Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children with Marc Caro, this fourth installment in the Alien onslaught is once again designed…
In Flubber, Disney’s new and improved version of The Absent Minded Professor, that famously bouncy green goop is still powering cars through the clouds and transforming lab nerds into high-flying basketball stars. But now the stuff also has personality–in gobs. It splits into a hundred little green dancers and does…
Clint Eastwood has reached the stage of life when he can sit down at the piano and doodle jazzy riffs whenever he feels like it. Without fear of failure or banishment, he can direct fair-to-middling movies from crappy bestsellers like The Bridges of Madison County. He can exercise the broadest…
John Grisham’s The Rainmaker lulls you into the mindset you get while reading a bestseller at the beach. What a sad thing to say about a Francis Ford Coppola movie! Rather than heighten your awareness the way The Conversation or The Godfather did, The Rainmaker makes you feel lazy and…
Thursday November 20 Songs in the key of Broadway: Nothing gets ’em going like a Broadway standard–something the Colorado Symphony Orchestra learned well during last year’s sold-out Broadway showcases. This year the CSO goes whole hog for the Great White Way with an expanded Bravo Broadway Two pops program, which…
Just what is well-known Denver artist Roland Bernier implying when he calls his current show at the Mackey Gallery Casting Pearls? Is the audience–the gallery-going public–the swine? “The title is taken from one of the pieces in the show which literally pairs pearls and swine, so I wasn’t trying to…
When A Chorus Line first splashed onto the Broadway stage in 1975, its creator, Michael Bennett, was routinely hailed as a genius, an innovator, and the best and brightest choreographer on the American musical scene. Some even felt that he was heaven-sent. At the heart of his more successful shows…
“But what I really want to do is direct!” reads a T-shirt popular among actors. Even though performers always aspire to creative control, playwrights were actually the theater’s first “directors.” It was only when productions began to tour (and plays were thereby wrested from a writer’s clutches) that actors began…
A glance at the cast list for the new Sidney Lumet hospital drama Critical Care might lead you to expect an embarrassment of riches. Instead, the results are often just plain embarrassing. How could a film starring James Spader, Helen Mirren, Albert Brooks, Kyra Sedgwick, Anne Bancroft, Jeffrey Wright, Wallace…
In 1756, Voltaire wittily observed that “this agglomeration which…calls itself the Holy Roman Empire is neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” Likewise, of Nick and Jane it might well be said that this abomination which calls itself a charming romantic comedy is neither charming, nor romantic, nor a comedy…
When last we glimpsed the ruthless international assassin known as the Jackal, 24 years ago, he was a dead ringer for the suave British actor Edward Fox and he was hot on the trail of Charles de Gaulle, armed only with cunning and a sniper’s rifle concealed in a suitcase…
