When it comes to portraying the TV news biz, Hollywood is naturally drawn more to the glitz than the grit. Why make a big deal out of a fatal prison riot when you can have Robert Redford massage Michelle Pfeiffer’s foot? Who gives a damn about Latin American politics when…
Kenneth Branagh’s A Midwinter’s Tale is another sweet comic valentine to those batty but lovable show folk. So if you’re less than enthralled by the vanities and insecurities of actors, you may as well stop reading this and start shopping for another movie. Now that half the house has departed,…
Thursday February 29 Old-time religion: While the membership of Blind Boys of Alabama has evolved, the gospel-singing group’s name has remained intact for nearly sixty years, as has its pious intent. Best of all, when the boys fire up their voices to praise the Lord–Lord, what God-given, soul-stirring voices they…
It may be tempting for viewers to lump all abstract paintings that feature drips, runs, scratches and splashes into the abstract-expressionist camp. But look before you leap to any conclusions. Making the point that not all expressionist abstracts are abstract-expressionist are the nearly twenty gorgeous oils in the exhibit Sam…
Inside a moral vacuum is a bad place to be: Not only is it fraught with violence and suffering, it’s boring, too. But somehow that boredom is conveyed without boring the audience in The Lida Project’s consuming production of Edward Bond’s notorious urban horror story Saved. It all takes place…
Materialism is destructive, especially when its false ideals lodge in the breast of a man who is too good for them. In director Jeremy Cole’s beautifully realized staging of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman’s wrenching descent into madness and death speaks eloquently to the “winners and losers”…
French director Barbet Schroeder’s fifth American film, Before and After, strains to say something important about families–what binds them together, what tears them apart–in an age of moral ambiguity. In a more oblique way, this was also the subject of Martin Scorsese’s harrowing remake of the classic thriller Cape Fear,…
Have Messrs. Ivory and Merchant shown you into one too many drawing rooms? Just about had it with the Jane Austen craze? Up to here with Victorian-class warfare? How about the eternal feud between manners and desire? That’s okay. A lot of people feel the same way. But before you…
Thursday February 22 Oz capades: Imagine Dorothy, Toto and the rest lifted right off the screen and plopped down on an ice rink. That’s just what the creators of Wizard of Oz on Ice did, but with a few ingenious twists. Though the familiar movie characters and songs are all…
Given Colorado’s relatively small population and isolation from the centers of American culture, the high level of art the state has supported over the years is nothing short of amazing. In fact, there’s only one thing that prevents Colorado from dominating the artistic culture of the mountain west–New Mexico, which…
The archetypal tale of Beauty and the Beast takes many cultural forms. In all of them, a “beast” loves a “beauty,” wins her love and is then saved by her love from the curse that turned him into a beast. Edmond Rostand’s flagrantly romantic version of the story, Cyrano de…
However extravagant it may seem to say so, Ad Hoc’s production of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters is simply fabulous–hauntingly beautiful and ultimately even inspiring. It’s not perfect, because not all the actors are equally gifted. But those imperfections never detract from the production’s effect on the viewer: nothing less than…
My favorite public official, the profoundly corrupt James J. Walker, is said to have spent all his waking hours between 1926 and 1932 lolling in a first-base box at Yankee Stadium, visiting his tailor, brokering crooked deals in speakeasies and throwing dice in a back room at the old Central…
Assorted Hollywood hotshots are still going downhill fast in Aspen and Telluride, but for the most part they regard Denver as fly-over country. So when the Mile High City shows up in a movie–even a movie as scummy as Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead–it’s a good bet…
Wednesday February 14 Blues period: When a big band and the blues collide head-on, you can count on a full dance floor–that’s the main objective of Roomful of Blues, a Rhode Island-based combo with a revolving membership of great musicians. Over 25 years after guitarist Duke Robillard first formed the…
So recently has the Boulder Art Center been renamed the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art–it was only last spring–that the new metro phone books still list it by its former moniker. That’s a shame, because we should try to forget about the BAC as soon as possible. For much of…
The issues described in Inherit the Wind, now at the Arvada Center, continue to lurk in the news. There are still religious zealots all over America who would like to censor and control those who disagree with them about a wide variety of issues–including the teaching of evolution in the…
Sweetly sardonic, Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser takes as its subject the whole world of the theater. And from the abused and neglected support staffers to the stars in all their megalomaniacal glory, Harwood tells it like it is. The truths he uncovers are amusing, sometimes grand and, finally, disturbing. The…
China’s great filmmaker Zhang Yimou has never gotten along with his country’s ruthless government, and his stock recently dropped with his longtime leading lady, the ravishing Gong Li. But Zhang is absolutely dedicated to his art: Shanghai Triad is another astonishingly beautiful film in a line that includes Red Sorghum,…
To call John Woo a loose cannon is to understate the case. The former star director of the bloody, flamboyant, no-holds-barred Hong Kong cinema is a blazing wall of machine-gun fire and two halves of a severed freight train smashing together. Woo is helicopters bursting into balls of flame, fighter…
Wednesday February 7 Tuna melt: As a former member of San Francisco’s premier acid-rockers the Jefferson Airplane, Jorma Kaukonen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last month. But Kaukonen has spent more years doing his own thing–acoustic country blues–than he ever spent soaring with the Airplane…
Our local cultural institutions do a mostly inadequate (and sometimes dreadful) job of nurturing the art of our region. It’s not as though there isn’t enough exhibition space–not when the vacant The End show by Edward Ruscha has had five months to befoul the Close Range Gallery at the Denver…
