“It’s right out of a cheap melodrama,” one character remarks in From Up on Poppy Hill after a particularly extreme twist of fate — yet this film’s gentle storytelling manages to extract the emotional payoffs of melodrama without ruining one’s suspension of disbelief. A film about fathers and children, and…
Tattoo Nation documentarian Eric Schwartz isn’t inked himself — “I’m nicknamed ‘The Virgin,’ ” he admits — but when he started photographing tattoo conventions, he stumbled across an untold, half-century history of color and style inextricably linked to California. Unlike the permanent art they’ve created, these tattoo artists and their clients…
They do move in herds,” Sam Neill marvels, purportedly gazing at his director’s miracle dinosaurs but in reality directing his wonderment right into the camera — and right out at us, the viewers whose herdability made such smash successes of Jurassic Parks one and two. (Our failure to turn out…
The Place Beyond the Pines opens with a close-up of Ryan Gosling’s chiseled abdomen and heavy breathing on the soundtrack. Then, in a single, five-minute tracking shot, we follow Gosling’s character, Luke, across a fairground and into the tent where he and two other stunt motorcycle performers ride their bikes…
Soap operas are more wondrous and ridiculous than you may realize, especially if you’re under the misapprehension that soaps — especially daytime ones — revolve around nothing but steamy affairs, unplanned pregnancies and Maury-style DNA tests. In fact, we thought the same, until we started watching General Hospital to catch…
Four years ago, on assignment for The Comics Journal, I asked Robert Kirkman a tough question about his Walking Dead comic series, a question that now, after the TV adaptation’s third season finale, is still resonant: Why are all the strong female characters either crazy or dead? His response, from…
When Denver-based fine-art photographer Eric Schwartz set out to photograph people with tattoos, he didn’t expect to find a detailed history underneath the artwork. After a chance meeting with California tattoo legend Edward “Chuco” Caballero at a national tattoo show, the story for Schwartz’s first film, Tattoo Nation, began to…
If real life were like Wrong, Quentin Dupieux’s sweetly unnerving experiment in ambient fucked-uppedness, your phone would ring before you’ve finished this sentence, and the words you haven’t gotten to yet would be read aloud to you by a voice you’ve never heard before. Then, while you’re at lunch someplace,…
Again and again, movies show you killing, but it’s one in a thousand on-screen killings that might get you to feel something of what killing is actually like. The same goes for fucking, but there the numbers are worse: Whether it’s Hollywood’s quick-cut, nothing-below-the-waist bedroom montages, or the mechanized chug…
“All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun” goes Jean-Luc Godard’s quip. Add to that a few more girls and their bikinis, and you have the rough formula for Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, which looks like the most expensive Girls Gone Wild video ever made…
What must Bruce Willis have felt when he discovered that his seven or so minutes of G.I. Joe: Retaliation screen time offer much more agreeable Bruce Willis-ness than the entirety of A Good Day to Die Hard? Or that his cameo, shot two years back and rich with quips and…
In just a few days, The Walking Dead will close up shop for another season. The finale airs March 31, and whether you’re watching at home alone or attending one of the watching parties (like Not Quite Dead Sundays at Jake’s Food and Spirits), it will be the last last…
At first, it’s unnerving just how much writer-director Derek Cianfrance sounds like Dan, the character he wrote in Blue Valentine, as played by Ryan Gosling. It’s a sign of the close synergy between director and actor that marks his approach to films like his latest, The Place Beyond the Pines…
When the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema’s Tough Guy Cinema presentation of RoboCop hits on Monday, April 8 fans of the film are in for a treat. Not only do they get to see the finest dystopian sci-fi action film ever made on the big screen — complete with live, in-theater pyrotechnics!…
I’m among the petulant grumblers about super-popular movies getting prequels, gaining sequels and being retrofitted to appeal to current fans while grabbing up new fans with sexy, glammy, glitzy things like turbo-hottie actors and actresses and the expensive magic of CGI. But I grumble because I care, and over my…
Although Mile High Social, Denver’s newest reality show, is pegged as an honest project with a humanitarian bent, its creators were still amazed by how “real” the first casting call turned out. “I was surprised by how open the women were on camera,” Koncrete Media co-founder Dennis Flippin says. “It…
The Amityville Horror is the best-known haunting in American history, spawning multiple films, countless books and speculation to this day about what really happened more than thirty years ago. At this point, it seems like there couldn’t be any angle on the story that hasn’t been beaten to death –…
Art of the State. This juried effort at the Arvada Center has been attracting crowds, to say the least. The two-person jury comprised Collin Parson, Arvada’s exhibition manager and curator, and Dean Sobel, who, as director of the Clyfford Still Museum, is an art-world celebrity. Because of the curators’ stature,…
In 1988, the fate of Chile and its dictator came down to a ballot as simple as a middle-schooler’s Do-you-like-me? note. A referendum, demanded by international pressure, offered citizens a simple choice: a “yes” for allowing President Augusto Pinochet to return to office for another eight years, or a “no”…
Like the blood that gushes forth from the elevators of the Overlook Hotel, brilliant/ridiculous theories of what Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is really about have for years surged madly and memorably — especially online, where the Internet’s dead-ends, blind links and back-where-you-started arguments just might be another part of the…
Two sacred texts of the ’50s proto-counterculture have escaped the rapacious machine of cinema adaptation for a half-century. One is J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, which probably only would have worked starring Salinger himself, and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, that ecstatic recount of crossings and recrossings of North…
Private dramas unfold against the backdrop of broader historical terrors in Sally Potter’s absorbing coming-of-age drama Ginger & Rosa, set in London in 1962 as fears of nuclear war loom. For Ginger (Elle Fanning), the more central of the two eponymous teenage protagonists, the world — on both the micro…
