This past weekend we fulfilled a journalistic dream, Anchorman-style, when we filmed a water-skiing squirrel named Twiggy performing at the Denver Boat Show. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a tiny woodland creature wearing a lifejacket and being towed behind a remote-control boat in a kiddie pool in the corner…
The beach-party movie has fallen from its former pinnacle of popularity, but it still has its fans. Take writer/director Zach Clark, for instance. His latest film, Vacation!, resurrects the classic beach-party film formula, updates it for the 21st century and then twists it into weird places that Frankie and Annette…
Becoming van Gogh. Timothy Standring, the Denver Art Museum’s curator of painting and sculpture, is the brains behind the very compelling, very interesting and, most of all, very successful Becoming van Gogh, on display now. When we think of van Gogh, we are actually only thinking of the work of…
Although they almost certainly have plans for striking new projects that expand our understanding of what documentaries can be, Bill and Turner Ross — the co-directors, -producers, -camera operators and -troublemakers behind Tchoupitoulas — could do posterity a service if they simply resigned themselves to replicating this one-night-in-New Orleans documentary…
Just so you know, it’s going to take a while,” says the CIA officer to his newly arrived colleague at the start of Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. The year is 2003, the place a secret prison (or “black site”) somewhere in the deserts of the Middle East or Asia,…
When you’re a film student, no matter how hard you try to deny it, you become a bit of a film snob. That’s how I felt when I went to see Hugo for the first time in the theater, and ten twelve-year-old girls sat in front of me. I rolled…
Did you know that when we use a Google search engine, scan Twitter feeds or compulsively reach for our smart-phones, we’re actually engaging evolutionary tools that have been with us for tens of thousands of years? And while these tools have aided our species survival, author Nicholas Carr argues that…
The nominees for Powder Magazine’s 2013 Powder Awards were announced last week, and Colorado film crews — including Denver-based Level 1 Productions, Boulder-based Stept Productions, and Crested Butte-based Matchstick Productions (MSP Films) and Two Plank Productions — are heavy in the mix in just about every category, including Movie of…
In 2012 Westword reported on the award-winning arty adventure films from the Carbondale-based collective of filmmakers known as Forge Motion Pictures nearly a dozen times — they just might be the hardest working film team in Colorado — and the crew is kicking off 2013 with a splash: over the…
When the words “true story” appear twice in a film’s opening disclaimer, it’s a guarantee that what follows will include at least one questionable fiction. The Impossible is inspired by the Alvarez Belons, a Spanish family of five who survived the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that claimed almost 300,000 lives;…
Rock and roll proves the coming-of-age crucible in Not Fade Away, Sopranos creator David Chase’s semi-autobiographical feature debut of shaggy hair, shagadelic beauties, and the joy and sorrow wrought from chasing, and failing to achieve, one’s dreams. Chase’s tale of showbiz striving has, in its basic form, been told before:…
“Like a lot of other stuff in my life, I sort of fell backwards into it,” says screenwriter Will Beall of his unexpected perch atop Hollywood’s A-list. Unexpected, because just five years ago, Beall was busy working for Tinseltown’s second-most famous employer, the Los Angeles Police Department, where he served…
David Chase looks like he wants to whack somebody. Not just anybody, mind you, but the middle-age guy with the bad dye job a few tables away from us in the Library Bar of the Regency Hotel. “Hiya!” bellows the dye job into his phone. “I’m sittin’ here watchin’ the…
For our New Year’s guide that was inserted in the issue of December 13, we asked thirteen of the town’s cultural tastemakers several questions — and the answers were entertaining, informative and, in many cases, enlightening. Although we posted their individual Q&As on Show and Tell last month, we’re doing…
On Saturday, Denver-based filmmaker Tristan Minton is premiering his new skateboard film H-DTS Mile High Alumni: Down to Skate at the BOPPO Warehouse at 4120 East Brighton Boulevard, Unit B13 ($5 at the door, screenings at 7 and 10 p.m.) The film stars Julian Christianson — a Westword Best of…
Jason Bosch won a MasterMind for his work with ArgusFest, showing important movies for trivial prices. And tonight, ArgusFest will be screening two more segments of Oliver Stone’s The Untold History of the United States. And as Bosch notes, “You don’t need to have seen the first parts to follow…
Salesmen are typically depicted in screen drama as the quintessential American phonies. That one set of phonies is being dramatically indicted by actors is an irony that we will leave hanging. Promised Land’s phony, played by Matt Damon, travels to small towns to sell the folks on fracking, the controversial…
Watching Django Unchained, it’s easy to imagine that Quentin Tarantino had such a blast making his last picture, the ebullient Holocaust fantasia Inglourious Basterds, that he decided to take his whole blood-spattered historical tent show on the road, this time putting down stakes in antebellum Dixieland. Although not technically a…
You can hear the people sing — really hear them — in the long-gestating screen version of that Broadway juggernaut Les Misérables. Countering the standard practice of having the actors in a film musical lip-synch their songs to pre-recorded tracks, director Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech) insisted that all of…
Most of the blathering this year about the death of film and film culture has already evaporated from the mind. But one gnomic pronouncement endures: Leos Carax describing cinema as “a beautiful island with a cemetery” following the world premiere of Holy Motors at Cannes. What are the contents of…
Quentin Tarantino has been Googling himself, and it’s starting to become a problem. The filmmaker, whose eighth feature, Django Unchained, opens on Christmas Day, is famously an analog evangelist: He writes his scripts in longhand; he bans cell phones from his sets and hasn’t owned one in years; he’s claimed…
Twenty years ago, Long Island teenager Amy Fisher became famous for shooting Mary Jo Buttafuoco — wife of her much older lover, Joey Buttafuoco — in the face. She served time in prison for the crime and has since attempted several media-attracting life reinventions as an author, porn star, Celebrity…
