Don’t be misled by the cheesy, generic poster for Kirk Jones’s Everybody’s Fine, in which a grinning Sam Rockwell, Drew Barrymore and Kate Beckinsale pose with Robert De Niro (airbrushed almost to the point of unrecognizable) for their characters’ family photo in front of a Christmas tree. It’s a marketing…
John Woo spent a decade navigating the big-studio minefield — longer than most foreign auteurs last in Hollywood before throwing in the towel. Beginning in earnest with an above-average Jean-Claude Van Damme programmer (Hard Target), Woo then produced one decent facsimile of his hyperkinetic Hong Kong neo-noirs (Face/Off), rose to…
Last week, I wrote about some of the atrocities Hollywood had inflicted on the climbing community in their attempts at portraying the dramatic. These movies are so painfully bad, they make you want to throw food at the screen, and the list doesn’t even include all the ridiculous uses of…
Hollywood and climbing generally don’t go well together. While there are occasional climbing-themed films that don’t suck, more often than not Hollywood movies centering on climbing are written by some desk-bound moron who probably doesn’t know the difference between an ice screw and an ice axe. The scripts are concocted…
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…
The Devil, apparently, lives in an out-of-the-way gingerbread Victorian, just past the cemetery, where college sophomore Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) is lured for overnight housesitting by an elegant, forbidding couple (Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov, both queerly over-intimate). Though its poster and opening-title freeze frames threaten ’80s kitsch, House of the…
The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, Oprah-endorsed post-apocalyptic survivalist prose poem — in which a father and his ten-year-old son traverse a despoiled landscape of unspeakable horror — was a quick, lacerating read. John Hillcoat’s literal adaptation, which arrives one Thanksgiving past its original release date is, by contrast, a long,…
Another poor, massive, uneducated African-American teenager lumbers onto screens this month, two weeks after Precious and obviously timed as a pre-Thanksgiving-dinner lesson in the Golden Rule. But unlike the howling rage of Claireece Precious Jones, The Blind Side’s Michael “Big Mike” Oher (Quinton Aaron) is mute, docile, and ever-grateful to…
In her broad outlines, Claireece Precious Jones risks sounding like the epitome of ghetto cliché: an obese, illiterate sixteen-year-old; mother to a four-year-old Down syndrome daughter and now pregnant again; physically and psychologically abused by her mother; repeatedly raped by her father, who is, also, the father of her own…
Recent American films about families, like last year’s Rachel Getting Married and Revolutionary Road, all too often pierce eardrums with unrelenting shrieks of dysfunction and misery. Amid the din, French filmmaker Claire Denis’s sublime 35 Shots of Rum stands out all the more for its soothing quiet (one character is…
Barnaby Furnas: Floods. Furnas is a New York artist who’s been exhibiting his work since 2000, and this exhibit, in the MCA’s Large Works Gallery, is made up entirely of his large abstract paintings. A unique feature of Furnas’s personal history is his early embrace of watercolors as his medium…
Every few years, Hollywood cranks out another fictional skiing movie. While the subgenre’s never hatched a bona fide blockbuster, there have been a few good films sandwiched in between the myriad variations of “Animal House on the slopes.” (Snowballing, anyone?) As with most sports movie subgenres, the catalog is a…
Tickets for Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire, the critically acclaimed, buzz-generating film that opens the Denver Film Festival on November 12, sold out a while ago; in fact, it was the fastest opening-night sellout in film-festival history (Westword will run a full review of Precious next week,…
Completing his multi-film vendetta against the world’s tourist trade, German-born director Roland Emmerich sends the mother of all storms to level the Washington Monument, the Eiffel Tower and a priest-filled Vatican City, among other locales, in his newest end-times thriller, 2012. From Independence Day (1996) to The Day After Tomorrow…
Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but for the title character of the pitch-black Chilean comedy The Maid, it’s closer to an infernal torment. For more than twenty years, Raquel (Catalina Saavedra) has worked as the hired help for an upper-class Santiago family, the Valdezes, whom she has served with…
Lars von Trier’s doggedly outrageous, fearsomely ambitious two-hander is so desperate to make you feel something — if only a terrible sensation of nothingness — that it’s almost poignant. Most simply put, Antichrist revels in the gruesome ordeal of a bereaved couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) who lose their…
Historical cataclysm produces conspiratorial thinking: Germany’s loss in World War I, the JFK assassination and 9/11 are all naturally understood as the stuff of unimaginable plots, unspeakable coverups and unseen forces. The guys who made The Men Who Stare at Goats can’t quite decide whether this syndrome is risible or…
It’s not hard to see how the director of Forrest Gump would be thought a good fit to adapt the dearly beloved (and much lampooned) Dickens tale that has survived nearly two centuries of retelling, if you count the Flintstone, Muppet and Barbie versions. Stuffed with simple souls winning over…
The Power of Then. Curated by Patty Ortiz, the former director of the Museo de las Américas who now runs the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio, this uneven group show explores the shared Latino experience, as in old-fashioned Chicano art — hence the reference to ‘then’ in the…
Currents. Traditional American Indian art is a well-established genre, and many Native artists still practice the old forms of weaving, pottery-making, metalwork and basket-making. But there are also contemporary artists among the tribes, and this group is the focus of Currents: Native American Forces in Contemporary Art. The exhibit was…
The inmate who renamed himself after a Hollywood action star has been incarcerated for all but a few months of the past 34 years — thirty of them spent in solitary — having strategically attacked a succession of guards, attendants and fellow inmates to parlay his initial seven-year sentence for…
Apart from the stray slasher flick, Halloween is traditionally a dead spot on the Hollywood calendar. This week’s big release? The Michael Jackson tribute film This Is It — creepy in its own right. But Universal Studios has been raiding its catacombs for DVD reissues. Let’s brush the cobwebs aside…
