The romanticized commitment phobia that keeps Judd Apatow in gilt-fixtured man caves is brought down to earth (or Park Slope, anyway) in this inventive indie thriller from Murderball co-director Dana Adam Shapiro. Monogamy follows thirty-something Brooklynite Theo (Chris Messina) as he simultaneously slogs through his day job as a wedding…
Paul, it should be noted up front, is not the third installment in the so-called Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy featuring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, though there are indeed servings of both. Note the one key missing element: Edgar Wright, who directed and co-wrote with Pegg both the 2004…
A gleeful celebration of non-stop doping, Limitless offers up a dim Better Living Through Chemistry fantasy that refuses to rain on its own pill-popping parade. With long, disheveled locks and matching facial scruff, novelist Eddie (Bradley Cooper) struggles with writer’s block until he runs into his ex-brother-in-law, Vernon (Johnny Whitworth)…
By our informal count, there are about forty explosions in the two-minute trailer for Battle: Los Angles — which breaks down to about one explosion every three seconds. That number gets even more impressive when you take into account that the explosions don’t even really get started until about one…
My, how time flies. We can’t believe we’re already into the eleventh episode Jersey Shore, but it’s true. Don’t worry, if you missed the first ten, there was lots of tanning, fighting, clubbing, gyming and drunking. Oh, and fighting. We open this particular day to a virtually empty house–the ladies…
Facebook dove into the movie streaming arena with The Dark Knight yesterday and people flipped out: Netflix’s stock, in particular, took a significant dive. But what evidence do we have that this will actually work on a large scale?…
Tonight, The Denver Public Library’s Rare and Rarely Seen Hitchcock series comes to a close with a screening of Marnie. One of the director’s final films, the movie deals with a psychologically damaged union between characters played by Sean Connery and Tippi Hedren. Their strange marriage reaches an emotional breaking…
Emilio Lobato and Sangeeta Reddy. Mixed-media artist and painter Emilio Lobato is surely near the top of anyone’s list of abstract artists in the region. His work relates well to that of the late Dale Chisman, as both artists studied with Mary Chenoweth at Colorado College. His latest creations, many…
Emilio Lobato and Sangeeta Reddy. Mixed-media artist and painter Emilio Lobato is surely near the top of anyone’s list of abstract artists in the region. His work relates well to that of the late Dale Chisman, as both artists studied with Mary Chenoweth at Colorado College. His latest creations, many…
As aficionados of Puppy Bowl can attest, attaching stories to the comings and goings of animals is surefire entertainment. Veteran nature filmmakers Dereck and Beverly Joubert pitch their documentary, The Last Lions, as a single-mother weepie-thriller about a lioness and her cubs with an impassioned psychological commentary, majestically intoned by…
If Jane Eyre is not the greatest of the Great Books with a permanent position on required-reading lists, it may be the most frequently filmed: At least ten cinematic versions of the story have been made, dating back to the dawn of the silent era — more, if you count…
Cheerfully diffident, garrulous yet uninflected, blithely self-absorbed, the mumblecore brand proliferates: Last year’s star vehicles Greenberg and Cyrus introduced the concept of mega-mumble. The low-budget musical Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench pioneered mumble-chord; Tiny Furniture was part psycho-drumble, part sit-cumble. Premiering with the latter at last spring’s South…
In a way, there’s nothing sadder than obsolescence, a thing no longer useful left to fall into misuse and disrepair — and there’s maybe no better example of that than the pay phone. That’s why, for the past couple of weeks, we’ve been highlighting one Sad Payphone of the Week,…
Given the rigid tropes that govern pretty much all high-budget movies about high school, it’s sometimes hard to believe that the people who write and direct them ever actually went to high school. You’ve got the group activities fictional students inexplicably give a shit about, the 25-year-old actors who look…
Sammi, the psychotic drama bomb is back–and within the first thirty seconds of this episode, Ronnie has already returned to his usual sniffling shit-show behavior. Between his slamming of sliding doors, turning pale, mumbling and pouting, Ronnie is a tantrum-throwing mess. The Situation makes everything worse by imitating the chokehold…
Hulu’s latest thematic bundling of its online TV content takes the form of a bracket trying to determine the best show on TV. It’s a great idea, generally, but it depends on fan voting. So, get excited for the finals showdown between Glee and Modern Family. As with all brackets,…
Last night, something happened that might have long-suffering Boulder art-film lovers rocking in their plush seats with joy: The bright, shiny Boedecker Theater at the Dairy center for the Arts opened to the public for its first state-of-the-art digital screening, featuring the 50th-anniversary restored version of Jean-Luc Godard’s classic Breathless,…
It’s probably safe to say that your worldly possessions won’t be destroyed in an apocalypse on December 21, 2012 (659 days from this publication date, if you weren’t counting), as professed by conspiracy theorists cashing in on the end of the Mayan calendar. And 2012: The True Mayan Prophecy, a…
In The Adjustment Bureau, screenwriter George Nolfi’s directorial debut (an extremely loose adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1954 short story “Adjustment Team”), Matt Damon plays David Norris, a Brooklyn-born, bar-fight-prone congressman rocketing to the front of a Senate race apparently on the strength of his charisma and the idealism of…
Ink still wet on his MIT degree, Matt Franklin (Topher Grace) is back in hometown Los Angeles, waiting for his future to clarify itself while he loiters behind the counter at Suncoast Video, hawking VHSes of Harry and the Hendersons because it’s, like, totally 1988. Inspiration comes when Matt re-encounters…
Last night, Hollywood engaged in its yearly back-pat, bestowing little gold statues on those who brought the greatest dignity to the big screen last year. Amidst all that pomp and circumstance, it can be easy to forget that, as amazing as Natalie Portman was in Black Swan, she was also…
While the rest of America was at home watching the film establishment’s glitzy annual circle jerk, where it elaborately congratulates itself on a year of acceptable filmmaking, my girlfriend and I were in an otherwise empty Chez Artist watching one of the worst indie films I expect to see this…
