Perhaps more than any other male American star of his generation, Ben Affleck understands the narrative advantage of having Hollywood on your side. The Good Will Hunting co-screenwriter and co-star won an Oscar at age 25 in large part because he and collaborator Matt Damon, as struggling actors who created…
The full lineup of the 2012 Starz Denver Film Fest won’t be released until next week, but fans of the weird, dark and twisted elements of the festival’s programming got a sneak peek Friday when the festival’s Watching Hour lineup was revealed. This year’s batch of late-night favorites includes the…
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…
In the faux-found-footage horror anthology V/H/S (containing material directed by Joe Swanberg, Adam Wingard, Ti West and others), a crew of droogs given to videotaping its acts of vandalism is hired to break into a house and steal a VHS tape. Once inside, they find a corpse blanked out in…
Ever since Mars Attacks!, Tim Burton has mostly been in the adaptation business, rendering dark and be-curlicued Sleepy Hollows, Alice in Wonderlands, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factorys. With Frankenweenie, he adapts his own work — the first animated short he ever produced for a major film studio, and the…
17 Girls (17 Filles), set in the small, depressed French seaside town of Lorient, makes a big deal about having been inspired by a true story that took place in the small, depressed American seaside town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 2008: Eighteen high-school girls all turned up pregnant at the…
If you were watching the season premiere of The Amazing Race Sunday night, you may have noticed a team of long-haired, heavy-metal-looking guys. Mark “Abba” Abbattista is an entertainment lawyer who currently lives in Golden, and he partnered up with longtime friend and musician James LoMenzo — former member of…
History teachers come in all shapes and sizes. Stan Ellsworth’s form just happens to be bigger, scruffier and more charismatic than most. The brawny intellectual is just one of many reasons to check out American Ride, a television series that highlights the best stories you may have missed in high…
HGTV’s All American Handyman competition tests the skills of handymen and women throughout the country, and the winner gets a development deal with the network to star in a show. This time, three of the ten contestants were from Colorado — and Aurora resident Sonne Shields, 32, was ultimately pronounced…
Ten of the biggest new ski and snowboard films for this season will be screening this weekend at The Meeting Snowsports Film Festival in Aspen, an annual gathering of filmmakers, athletes and fans with events at the Wheeler Opera House and Belly Up. Films from Level 1 Productions, Teton Gravity…
Robert Mangold. The dean of Colorado sculpture, who’s been working for more than half a century, is the subject of this strong solo with the epic title Colorado Gold: The Many Facets of Robert Mangold at Z Art Department. The show represents something of a chaser to the major Mangold…
As someone who was in college when Napster happened, I’d love to see a period piece re-creating teen life during the last moments before technology began to change media consumption, communication, and the whole of social ritual. I wish The Perks of Being a Wallflower, written and directed by Stephen…
Early on in Rian Johnson’s time-travel thriller Looper, Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) sits at a diner and chats with his self from thirty years in the future (Bruce Willis). When the younger Joe asks the older one about the specifics of temporal displacement, the latter dismisses the question, telling his interlocutor…
Casting a tapered, vase-slender silhouette and speaking in a Transylvanian accent with a touch of Borscht Belt, Hotel Transylvania’s de-fanged Count Dracula is introduced in an 1895-set prologue while serenading his infant daughter. No menacing carnivore, this Nosferatu has sworn off fatty human blood, is more scared of humans than…
The aspen aren’t the only things that turn golden in the fall. The cultural scene also glitters, as arts groups large and small, high-brow and low-, celebrated and secret, start their new seasons. To get straight to the art of the most exciting events in the months ahead, we went…
“Death wasn’t being responded to as a public health problem,” David France says. “It was dealt with with sniggers. It was left to religious leaders to explain or respond to the epidemic. And they responded by calling it the wrath of God.” He adds: “That’s the hostility we all saw…
“I hate realism,” director Genndy Tartakovsky said last week over the phone. “In America, especially, we’re very narrow-minded as far as animation goes. There is only one kind of movie, and that’s that big, family-oriented, four-quadrant, please-everyone kind of film. But if I wanted realism, I’d watch a live-action movie…
For Now Showing, the fall arts guide inserted in the September 27 issue of Westword, we asked dozens of luminaries on the local arts scene — including winners of the Westword MasterMind awards — to answer three questions: – Aside from your organization (or yourself), who is doing the most…
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…
Pee-wee’s Playhouse, a Saturday-morning staple for Gen X-ers who were, at the time, way older than the time slot’s intended audience, represented the pure, uncut mainstreaming of the late-1980s art scene in New York’s East Village. The first season was even shot on the upper floor of a former neighborhood…
There’s something startlingly noncommittal about many of the initial reviews of The Master that leaked out following the impromptu screenings that writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson organized in 70mm-equipped houses across the country, and later in response to the film’s official bow at the Venice Film Festival. This is perhaps the…
The new, semi-gritty indie About Cherry is all about a semi-reluctant slide into the porn industry, and it’s also the first mainstream feature co-written by a busy porn actress, Lorelei Lee, otherwise famous for double penetrations and clothespin bondage. This shouldn’t strike us as very strange. Every screenwriter needs a…
