The notoriously plotless musical comedy Head became an object of cult worship almost from the moment of its release, in 1968; with each passing year, it amuses people even more as a telling artifact of ’60s pop culture. What less could we expect of a movie that stars the made-for-TV…
Abstractions on Paper. The current show at the city’s coziest little art shop, the Emil Nelson Gallery, is a fascinating group endeavor put together by director Hugo Anderson. The exhibit combines historic and contemporary works in the forms of watercolors, prints, drawings and photos by more than two dozen artists…
Beware the exclamation point. When found at the end of a title, it almost inevitably signals a level of self-hype rarely justified by the content of whatever it hopes to name. In the case of the movie Saved! — an amusing if facile comedy about a good Christian girl gone…
The real Melvin Van Peebles shows up just once in Baadasssss!, a fictionalized account of his making of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song in 1971, and it’s at the film’s end; he sits silent, grinning, clutching his ever-present cigar. But he’s all over this movie, in which his son Mario plays…
Devotees of the Boulder Outdoor Cinema all know the drill: You bring your own lawn chair. Or bean bag. Or yoga mat. If you’re strong and ambitious and think you might need a snooze, you bring your own couch. Whatever you choose to sit or lie upon, you get it…
Aaron Karp, Sushe Felix, Delos Van Earl, Lynn Heitler. There are four single-artist shows at the William Havu Gallery: Aaron Karp, Sushe Felix, Delos Van Earl and Lynn Heitler. The first is Aaron Karp, mostly made up of large paintings that illustrate the New Mexico artist’s classic style. Karp’s paintings…
Movie-goers familiar with the tides of recent Brazilian history will probably get more from Hector Babenco’s new prison movie, Carandiru, than the rest of us, because the filmmaker tells us so little about the society beyond the walls that helped shape the violent yet carefully ordered world within them. On…
As much of the civilized world now knows, the latest Harry Potter director is Alfonso Cuarón, best known for the explicit teen-sexual-awakening movie Y Tu Mam´ También. So it may come as little surprise that his Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban begins with the teenage wizard-in-training hiding under…
Ah, the peculiar genius that is Guy Maddin. Who else but the morose Canadian director, born and raised in one of the coldest cities in the world, would marry silent film, 1930s movie musicals, Prohibition, family melodrama, monster-movie gore and a critique of capitalist zeal in a surreal montage about…
Now in its seventh incarnation, the Aurora Asian Film Festival is a showcase for the burgeoning cinematic talents of China, Japan, Thailand, Cambodia, Taiwan and Bhutan. This year’s four-day festival will feature more than a dozen new films from Asia and the Pacific Rim, beginning Thursday, June 3, with a…
Abstractions on Paper. The current show at the Emil Nelson Gallery, is a fascinating group endeavor put together by director Hugo Anderson. The exhibit combines historic and contemporary works in the forms of watercolors, prints, drawings and photos by more than two dozen artists. The mood is classic modernist with…
The first time through, you might dismiss Coffee and Cigarettes as a filmmaker’s recess — playtime before the serious business of making a real feature. Jim Jarmusch never intended this new movie — a collection of eleven shorts made over the last two decades — to be a movie at…
Sitting through Raising Helen is an exercise in frustration, because somewhere inside this big heap of Hollywood nothing is a something (someone, actually) worth saving and savoring. Her name is Joan Cusack, always a supporting player but never a star, no matter her grace and warmth and charm even in…
Those people who live in small towns, they’re not like you and me. So naive, so innocent. And adorably quirky. Why, they’ve got so many lovable quirks you just wanna run up and hug ’em. Or, if you’re a filmmaker, perhaps you can make a movie about these simple folk…
This year’s renewal of Boulder’s popular Chautauqua Silent Film Series starts off with a showing of The Patsy (1928), King Vidor’s enduring comedy starring Marie Dressler and Marion Davies as a constantly feuding mother and daughter. Not to be confused with the Jerry Lewis talkie of the same name, this…
Abstractions on Paper. The current show at the city’s coziest little art shop, the Emil Nelson Gallery, is a fascinating group endeavor put together by director Hugo Anderson. The exhibit combines historic and contemporary works in the form of watercolors, prints, drawings and photos by more than two dozen artists…
The first few minutes of Shrek 2 are cluttered with more references to the movies than David Thomson’s thick, rich history text New Biographical Dictionary of Film. Watching it is like sitting next to an ADD patient with access to a remote control and a hundred premium cable channels; you…
Samurai have never been strangers to film; in fact, an entire genre has sprung from their legend, with plenty of attendant offshoots, cross-pollinators and beneficiaries (Westerns, slasher films, Star Wars). Lately, the feudal Japanese warriors have enjoyed a particular bounty of screen time: Last year brought us The Last Samurai,…
In 2004 A.D., as the five remaining members of the legendary Monty Python comedy troupe lie in coffins in a Vanity Fair spread to jeer at their own deaths, it’s really nice to have them back together commanding the big screen. Behold anew their wonderfully wiggy Monty Python’s Life of…
Aspiring filmmakers everywhere — many of them with better access to cameras and computers than to, say, actual talent — still daydream about being Kevin Smith. That’s because Smith’s tale is the ultimate indie success story of the 1990s, a fantasy come true starring a young striver who created a…
Abstractions on Paper. The current show at the city’s coziest little art shop, the Emil Nelson Gallery, is a fascinating group endeavor put together by director Hugo Anderson. The exhibit combines historic and contemporary works in the form of watercolors, prints, drawings and photos by more than two dozen artists…
In the mood to launch a thousand ships? Fine, but it’s gonna cost you. Feel like sacking the Temple of Apollo? Okay, but bring drachmas. Depending on who’s counting, the Warner Bros. pre-summer blockbuster Troy budgeted out at anywhere between $175 and $250 million, including the big wooden horse, assorted…
