If you Google the phrase “Danzig shopping for cat supplies,” you’ll find links to phone-cam shots of former Misfits singer Glenn Danzig crossing a grocery-store parking lot while wearing a Danzig T-shirt and carrying Fresh Step. He’s a striking figure, and, with his pale, vampiric aspect, totally incongruent with the…
There’s an un-fun tendency in American life to fictionalize our national heroes as rigid statue-people who only speak as though they are delivering commencement addresses, with a kind of unlovable, Al Gore-ish anti-charisma that would inhibit anyone in real life from becoming a national hero in the first place. Own…
The first few minutes of Lincoln play out like a parody of the expectations of Steven Spielberg’s detractors. The Great Emancipator rests like a humble Solomon upon a hard wooden chair, surrounded by freely mixing black and white soldiers of that great war of his. One black soldier dares to…
Attention, Eon Productions, Daniel Craig and Heineken: James Bond is not a beer drinker! Sure, I know. Getting all worked up about the new James Bond installment is like freaking out about a new Tim Burton movie: Past glories don’t justify contemporary relevance. The year 2012 marks fifty years since…
That the American cinema is deader than Dillinger is a fact no right-thinking observer unwilling to be laughed out of the room would even think of denying today. To do the current round of think-piece writers one better, we will add that not only are the movies dead, but they…
Let’s get one thing straight from the start: I am a woman over thirty, and Labyrinth is one of my all-time favorite movies. In honor of the upcoming Labyrinth Quote-Along on Thursday, November 15, and Friday, November 16 (it’s part of the International Film Series at the University of Colorado…
Basalt-based photographer/filmmaker Pete McBride is offering a sneak peek at his new film The Water Tower today, with the unveiling of a teaser trailer for his documentary that follows Golden-based climber Jake Norton’s Challenge 21 team to Mt. Kenya and its vanishing glaciers. See also: – Chasing Water, Truck Farm,…
Although the variety of flicks at the Starz Denver Film Festival lets movie lovers tailor their own fest, the marquee events serve as signposts — and this year’s opening night feature, A Late Quartet, and Big Night spotlight, Quartet, underwhelmed compared to the $2.5 million gift from Anna and John…
Clyfford Still. For the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, director Dean Sobel has installed a career survey of the great artist that starts with the artist’s realist self-portrait and features his remarkable post-impressionist works from the 1920s. Next are Still’s works from the ’30s, with some odd takes on…
Lisa Ohlin’s Simon and the Oaks has all the superficial elements of compelling drama but none of the interiority; it looks like a good movie without ever actually feeling like one. Try to imagine low-rent Spielberg set in Sweden: whimsical children with intertwined fates, Nazis looming on the horizon, and…
If Hollywood’s rut du jour is the origin story as bid for franchise immortality, you can’t say that Skyfall — the 23rd “official” James Bond film in fifty years — isn’t on trend. Eight years ago, in Casino Royale, Daniel Craig’s first outing as Bond, we learned that 007 owes…
The Loneliest Planet begins with a close-up trained on the body of a beautiful woman, naked and trembling. It’s not what it sounds like. Nica (Hani Furstenberg), on a pre-marriage honeymoon with fiancé Alex (Gael García Bernal) in rural Georgia, is in the midst of a makeshift shower. As Nica…
Ever wonder why zombies are so popular? Or why you have to destroy their brains to kill them? Or even what modifications your trusty Subaru might require in order to become an effective zombie apocalypse escape vehicle? All these questions and more will be addressed tomorrow, November 7, at the…
The heart of the noir genre is the hardboiled detective, but your typical noir doesn’t pit him against furries and Lucha Libre wrestlers. For that, you need a farce noir, and that’s exactly what you get with The Honey Cooler, debuting tomorrow, November 7, at the Hi-Dive. Farce and noir…
Colorado-based filmmakers won four of the top prizes at the 2012 Banff Mountain Film Festival in Banff, Canada on Sunday, including three awards to the Boulder-based Sender Films crew – all for films featured in the Reel Rock 7 video compilation and film tour – and one to Carbondale-based director…
“If I can avoid putting anything from the movie in the movie poster, then I’m doing okay,” says artist Jay Shaw. His film- poster art, which has taken off over the past year as he’s worked with Austin collectible art boutique Mondo, rarely includes characters, actors or anything from the…
When mountain climber and adventurer Erik Weihenmayer — who happens to be blind — set out to climb Mt. Everest more than a decade ago, a lot of people thought he was crazy, or worse: a danger to himself and others. They couldn’t believe any responsible guide would take him…
The Rocky Mountain Women’s Film Festival, now in its 25th year, brings a strong, diverse selection of films to the region this weekend for viewing, discussion and celebration. The longest-running women-centered film festival in North America, it will showcase both fiction and non-fiction work starring, written, directed and filmed by…
Denver has zombie walks, zombie proms, zombie races, zombie car washes and zombie fashion shows, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a pair of Denver filmmakers have launched an ambitious zombie documentary. Alexandre O. Philippe and Robert Muratore, the pair behind the Star Wars doc The People Vs…
Andy Berg. A neo-abstract expressionist from Golden is the star of Andy Berg: Dialogue with the Unconscious at Rule Gallery. Though Berg got his training in the 1980s at the Kansas City Art Institute, life took him in other directions until 2009, when he began to exhibit his paintings again…
Movies about drugs and alcohol may be a dime(bag) a dozen, but James Ponsoldt’s Smashed is as much about recovery as it is about addiction, with Ponsoldt successfully making the case that the twelve steps can sometimes be more difficult than whatever necessitated them in the first place. Kate’s main…
The yammering about “Oscar gold” and Denzel Washington’s potential three-peat will soon reach a deafening pitch, but such noise can only embarrass a fine character study like Flight, whose prevailing tone is a heavy, elemental melancholy. The mood is there from the opening pan across the Orlando airport under gray,…
