Reunited with Charles McKeown, his co-writer from Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Terry Gilliam has created another Ultimate Po-mo adventure crammed to a fault with big ideas and bigger images that mutate a grungy contemporary London into a living heaven and hell. The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus is…
For years, Hollywood has wrestled with adapting C.D. Payne’s 1993 novel Youth in Revolt — which actually was three novels collected under one title, and so the possibilities were endless, given 500 pages of material to mine. In 1996, Fox filmed a pilot starring Chris Masterson as Nick Twisp, the…
Allen True’s West. Allen Tupper True was Denver’s premier muralist during the first third of the twentieth century. Sadly, many of his commissions have been painted over or were lost when the buildings they were in were demolished. In an act of cooperation, the three big cultural institutions on the…
Hoping to entice Jeff Bridges to voice a washed-up surfer dude in the 2007 children’s movie Surf’s Up, the filmmakers sent the actor a video of an animated penguin declaiming a few of his lines from The Big Lebowski. They probably didn’t need to work that hard: An avid surfer,…
It’s a sure sign that Hollywood has truly run out of ideas when they start mining ski culture for not one but two upcoming movies. Last week, Chris Outcalt showed you the trailer for Hot Tub Time Machine, which actually has the potential to be 1) funny and 2) the…
Allen True’s West. Allen Tupper True was Denver’s premier muralist during the first third of the twentieth century. Sadly, many of his commissions have been painted over or were lost when the buildings they were in were demolished. In an act of cooperation, the three big cultural institutions on the…
“Everything’s already happened to me,” admits Harry Caine, the blind, middle-aged filmmaker in Broken Embraces. “All that’s left is to enjoy life.” ¡Sí! His own sights set low these days in his latest movie, reformed bad boy Pedro Almodóvar has at least hit on a vivid metaphor for his diminished…
There’s no city-clogging traffic jam in Nine, the musicalized version of Federico Fellini’s movie-about-moviemaking urtext 8 1/2, but the result feels like the celluloid equivalent of a twelve-car pileup. An assault on the senses from every conceivable direction — smash zooms, the ear-splitting eruption of something like music, the spectacle…
Does Nancy Meyers hate women? The thought ran through my head not very long into It’s Complicated, Meyers’s biennial stocking stuffer about the romantic trials and tribulations of obscenely privileged and narcissistic Southern Californians. Once more into the breach goes Meyers to show us what women really want, this time…
Last month fellow blogger Eric brought you his top 10 ski movies of both the good and bad variety. Here’s a look at a soon-to-be-released flick that might end up deserving a spot on ski movie lists in the it’s-so-bad-it’s-good category. Coming out in March, Hot Tub Time Machine stars…
Barnaby Furnas: Floods. Furnas is a New York artist who’s been exhibiting his work since 2000, and this exhibit, in the MCA’s Large Works Gallery, is made up entirely of his large abstract paintings. A unique feature of Furnas’s personal history is his early embrace of watercolors as his medium…
“Colonialism is always part of the expansion of capitalism,” opines Bolivian vice president Álvaro García Linera in The End of Poverty?, director Philippe Diaz’s devastating, radical critique of the colonialist enterprise as inextricable from the current global economic model. While most state-of-the-world docs are content to map the state of…
The money is on the screen in Avatar, James Cameron’s mega-3-D, mondo-CGI, more-than-a-quarter-billion-dollar baby, and, like the Hope Diamond waved in front of your nose, the bling is almost blinding. For the first 45 minutes, I’m thinking: Metropolis! — and wondering how to amend ballots already cast in polls of…
The joke’s on someone in Werner Herzog’s awkwardly titled Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Possibly Abel Ferrara who, exploding in fury when he learned that the German conquistador was planning to remake his 1992 career movie, opined that Herzog and his accomplices (among them, an original Bad Lieutenant…
In the last few weeks, my compatriot-in-bloggery Candace Horgan took you through a nice solid retrospective of climbing movies both good and bad. And, a few quibbles notwithstanding (K2 is good? Honestly? And where’s Cliffhanger?), I think she nails it. But she might have to make room for a new…
Allen True’s West. Allen Tupper True was Denver’s premier muralist during the first third of the twentieth century. Sadly, many of his commissions have been painted over or were lost when the buildings they were in were demolished. In an act of cooperation, the three big cultural institutions on the…
After undervalued supporting turns in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, North Country and Gone Baby Gone, dainty girl-next-door type Michelle Monaghan finally and deservedly snags a star vehicle to show off her chops. Against the roadside Americana of writer-director James Mottern’s well-shot desert drama Trucker, Monaghan flips the bird to vanity…
All’s Well That Ends Well Aside from Morgan Freeman, who makes a fabulous Nelson Mandela, there’s this to savor about Invictus, a rosy tale of racial reconciliation neatly wrapped in a triumphalist sports movie: The film is blessedly free of Obama parallels. Also, we could use a happy global moment,…
Standing O The most significant American artist before Andy Warhol to take “the media” as his medium, Orson Welles lives on not only in posthumously restored director’s cuts of his re-released movies, but as a character in other people’s novels, plays, and movies — notably, Richard Linklater’s deft, affectionate and…
I could watch this trippy animation of a snowflake developing from SnowCrystals.com all day. (It’s even better if you’re listening to a simulated FM3 Buddha Machine or two.)The website is the brainchild of snowflake expert Kenneth Libbrecht, a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology. Besides this and a…
Allen True’s West. Allen Tupper True was Denver’s premier muralist during the first third of the twentieth century. Sadly, many of his commissions have been painted over or were lost when the buildings they were in were demolished. Now, the three big cultural institutions on the Civic Center are jointly…
Could Dave Foley prostitute his talent to amuse any further without actually becoming a prostitute? In a plunging step down from emceeing celebrity poker, Foley provides a recognizable face to Jameel Khan’s picked-over Goodwill bin of workplace comedy, The Strip. Foley’s Glenn is manager of a down-market Radio Shack-type store…
