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…
Reunited with Charles McKeown, his co-writer from Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Terry Gilliam has created another Ultimate Po-mo adventure crammed to a fault with big ideas and bigger images that mutate a grungy contemporary London into a living heaven and hell. The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus is…
For years, Hollywood has wrestled with adapting C.D. Payne’s 1993 novel Youth in Revolt — which actually was three novels collected under one title, and so the possibilities were endless, given 500 pages of material to mine. In 1996, Fox filmed a pilot starring Chris Masterson as Nick Twisp, the…
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…
Hoping to entice Jeff Bridges to voice a washed-up surfer dude in the 2007 children’s movie Surf’s Up, the filmmakers sent the actor a video of an animated penguin declaiming a few of his lines from The Big Lebowski. They probably didn’t need to work that hard: An avid surfer,…
It’s a sure sign that Hollywood has truly run out of ideas when they start mining ski culture for not one but two upcoming movies. Last week, Chris Outcalt showed you the trailer for Hot Tub Time Machine, which actually has the potential to be 1) funny and 2) the…
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…
“Everything’s already happened to me,” admits Harry Caine, the blind, middle-aged filmmaker in Broken Embraces. “All that’s left is to enjoy life.” ¡Sí! His own sights set low these days in his latest movie, reformed bad boy Pedro Almodóvar has at least hit on a vivid metaphor for his diminished…
There’s no city-clogging traffic jam in Nine, the musicalized version of Federico Fellini’s movie-about-moviemaking urtext 8 1/2, but the result feels like the celluloid equivalent of a twelve-car pileup. An assault on the senses from every conceivable direction — smash zooms, the ear-splitting eruption of something like music, the spectacle…
Does Nancy Meyers hate women? The thought ran through my head not very long into It’s Complicated, Meyers’s biennial stocking stuffer about the romantic trials and tribulations of obscenely privileged and narcissistic Southern Californians. Once more into the breach goes Meyers to show us what women really want, this time…
Last month fellow blogger Eric brought you his top 10 ski movies of both the good and bad variety. Here’s a look at a soon-to-be-released flick that might end up deserving a spot on ski movie lists in the it’s-so-bad-it’s-good category. Coming out in March, Hot Tub Time Machine stars…
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…
“Colonialism is always part of the expansion of capitalism,” opines Bolivian vice president Álvaro García Linera in The End of Poverty?, director Philippe Diaz’s devastating, radical critique of the colonialist enterprise as inextricable from the current global economic model. While most state-of-the-world docs are content to map the state of…
The money is on the screen in Avatar, James Cameron’s mega-3-D, mondo-CGI, more-than-a-quarter-billion-dollar baby, and, like the Hope Diamond waved in front of your nose, the bling is almost blinding. For the first 45 minutes, I’m thinking: Metropolis! — and wondering how to amend ballots already cast in polls of…
The joke’s on someone in Werner Herzog’s awkwardly titled Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Possibly Abel Ferrara who, exploding in fury when he learned that the German conquistador was planning to remake his 1992 career movie, opined that Herzog and his accomplices (among them, an original Bad Lieutenant…
In the last few weeks, my compatriot-in-bloggery Candace Horgan took you through a nice solid retrospective of climbing movies both good and bad. And, a few quibbles notwithstanding (K2 is good? Honestly? And where’s Cliffhanger?), I think she nails it. But she might have to make room for a new…
