In May in the Summer, Dahlia (Arrested Development’s hilarious Alia Shawkat) is a lesbian tentatively trying to step out of the closet.In his brief remarks before the first public screening of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, Robert Redford praised the Sundance Institute’s ongoing filmmaker development labs as “our core,” noting…
“Wow. Lucky number 13, I guess? Kind of at a loss for words here,” stumbled Denver-based filmmaker Josh Berman of Level 1 Productions, accepting the prize for Best Movie last night at the 2013 Powder Awards in Park City on opening night of the Sundance Film Festival. “To actually spend…
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…
The mandate at Oakland’s Highland Hospital, as one doctor says during Pete Nicks’s attentive vérité portrait of the place, is to admit people “just as much for their social conditions as for their medical ones.” And as the same guy wearily acknowledges, “The ER’s not the place to manage someone’s…
A chiller about two abandoned little girls and their bond to the wraith of the title, Mama never delivers the primal terror its premise would suggest. Instead, the movie — the first feature by Andy Muschietti, who co-scripted with his sibling Barbara and Neil Cross — distracts with too much…
For the next ten days, all Hollywood eyes — and those of many a film-goer — will turn toward the frigid wilds of Park City, Utah, reportedly experiencing its chilliest winter in a decade. Their collective hope: to discover at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival (January 17 through 26) the…
We’re now a generation removed from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s brief, odd reign as the biggest star in movies. This Coppertone age lasted from 1990, when two of the ten top-grossing pictures were Schwarzenegger’s Total Recall and Kindergarten Cop, until 1993, when Last Action Hero — an attempt at a tonal gene…
When he died in December 2011, Kim Jong Il left behind more than a dynastic regime and a closet full of drab pantsuits. Jong Il, who ruled the hermetic North Korea from his father Kim Il Sung’s death in 1994 until his own passing seventeen years later, was a noted…
On Monday filmmakers Anson Fogel and Skip Armstrong of the Carbondale-based collective Forge Motion Pictures released Cascada, a new adventure short produced in partnership with NRS, the Idaho-based gear brand. The film documents a trip to the jungles of Mexico with photographer Tim Kemple and some of the world’s top…
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…
