Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, a florid art shocker that Paramount welcomed into the world with the strained enthusiasm of a mutant baby’s parents, begins with U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) seasick, head in the toilet. The film is his prolonged purging, with Daniels coughing up chunks of his backstory…
Because they’re crafted outside the Hollywood system, you might assume that this year’s Oscar-nominated live-action and animated shorts stand in sharp defiance to conventional mainstream cinema. But the best of these ten entries are, in some ways, the most familiar — their most radical element being that they operate in…
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…
Slight, indifferently shot and entirely lacking in ballast, Harmony and Me’s sole justification for being is that it’s consistently very funny. Harmony (Justin Rice) has a life full of (ha!) discord; obsessing over his ex, Jessica (Kristen Tucker), he floats through a boring tech job, takes piano lessons and generally…
Detective stories imply that mysteries can be solved, or at least rationally explained. Even the most debased example confirms a universe in which guilt is determined and the guilty accorded just deserts. Such are the underpinnings of Romanian filmmaker Corneliu Porumboiu’s remarkably self-effacing and highly intelligent comedy Police, Adjective —…
In Pretty Woman, director Garry Marshall’s personal cinematic high score, the opening credits close (and the closing credits open) with the voice of a street freak, barely noticeable in wide shot, chanting an absurd mantra: “Welcome to Hollywood, land of dreams!” Twenty years later, Marshall dips into the same well…
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…
Opening with balalaikas, scurrying agrarians in collarless shirts and helpful intertitles announcing that Tolstoy was “the most celebrated writer in the world,” The Last Station threatens at first to be Tolstoy for Dummies as interpreted by Monty Python. Soon enough, though, this workmanlike adaptation of Jay Parini’s novel about Tolstoy’s…
As personal assistant to the U.S. Ambassador to France, James Reese (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) can keep himself in well-tailored suits and keep his terrific-looking kittenish girlfriend (Kasia Smutniak) in a nice Paris apartment. This is the basis for director Pierre Morel’s delicate study in transatlantic manners, From Paris With Love,…
In a recent column in the Denver Post, Bill Husted parses the theories of a CU prof who’s positive Avatar is a metaphor for Crested Butte’s battle against molybdenum mining on the Red Lady. (James Cameron apparently has a house in the area.) It got me thinking of other sci-fi…
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…
Animals and people are all jumbled up in the hyperactive Belgian puppet animation that is A Town Called Panic — most notably in its central ménage of Cowboy, Indian and Horse. The filmmakers, Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar, show little regard for scale and less for convention. Cowboy (Aubier) is…
Did you shoot my daughtah?” is the question posed, in flat-voweled Bostonian, in the trailer for Edge of Darkness. And Mel Gibson, much-bereaved and much-vengeful, from Hamlet to Ransom to Revolutionary America, sets out to settle another score. Gibson is Thomas Craven: veteran, homicide detective, lonesome widower. His daughter, a…
History Repeats The White Ribbon is Michael Haneke’s first German-language film since the original Funny Games (1997) and it’s his best ever. A period piece set on the eve of World War I in an echt Protestant, still-feudal village somewhere in the uptight depths of northern Germany, The White Ribbon…
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…
Remember Condoleezza Rice? Just over a year ago, she was the Secretary of State, as well as one of the most divisive figures in American political life. But after being washed out of Washington amid a Democratic tidal wave, she’s all but vanished. Her boss, President George W. Bush, remains…
If ever there were a true-life tale that laid bare the laws of South African apartheid in all their arbitrary lunacy, it’s the one dramatized in Skin, Anthony Fabian’s straight-ahead biopic of Sandra Laing, the visibly black daughter born in the 1950s to white Afrikaner parents as full of denial…
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…
Cults collide as Peter “Lord of the Rings” Jackson tackles Alice Sebold’s best-selling new-age gothic, the story of a rape-murder-dismemberment and its aftermath, narrated by its fourteen-year-old victim from heaven. The movie, starring Saoirse Ronan as the teenage Susie, is horrific yet cloying, sometimes poignant and often ridiculous. Published in…
Directors Allen and Albert Hughes were raised by an Armenian mother and African-American father. With such a background, it would be difficult not to have feelings about the church. The Hugheses’ fourth film, The Book of Eli, centers on the Christianity that was at the margins of their previous films—hypocritically misused by Bokeem Woodbine’s bush-crazy marine turned pulpit-pounder…
Yesterday’s honky-tonk hero, Bad Blake, arrives at a Clovis, New Mexico, bowling alley. It’s another in a string of low-pay, low-turnout gigs with pickup bands half his age, grinding the greatest hits out of an old Fender Tremolux, including his breakout — with the chorus “Funny how falling feels like…
[scattered flurries] from felt soul media on Vimeo.The Beating is an annual amateur ski and snowboard film festival held annually in Silverton. The 2010 edition came and went on the second day of the year, with Telluride’s Ben Knight emerging victorious with Scattered Flurries, embedded above. In just under four…
