Childsplay. For this show, the floor of Walker Fine Art has been covered with rough-hewn playground equipment made of wood and bronze. And despite the show’s title, all of it has been made for, and scaled to, adults, who are meant to interact with the individual pieces. The mostly kinetic…
The cult that’s assembled around 2001’s Donnie Darko, which gets the Film on the Rocks treatment on Wednesday, August 12, seems motivated more by the size of writer/director Richard Kelly’s ambitions than by the goals he actually achieves. Simply put, the story of a troubled teen (Jake Gyllenhaal during his…
It was the best of movies, it was the worst of movies — which is to say, there’s half of a great movie in Julie & Julia. But since Meryl Streep has already starred in one titled Julia (Fred Zinnemann’s penultimate feature in 1977), perhaps it was merely necessary to…
In the Loop doesn’t necessarily mean you’re in the know. In Armando Iannucci’s movie, a satire of the run-up to war with a Middle Eastern country, it means that all the poor bastards are stuck in a loop, making the same bad decisions and tragic mistakes over and over again…
Charles Parson. This must-see sculpture solo titled Charles Parson: Personal Echoes on the Horizon, at Golden’s Foothills Art Center, begins out front with a trio of hieratically composed tubular metal sculptures — basically gongs. The viewer/participant is meant to strike the gongs with clappers that are chained to them. This…
The opening frames of Pressure Cooker, a documentary debuting at Starz FilmCenter on Friday, July 31, serve the same sort of dish as Hell’s Kitchen, Fox TV’s restaurant survival test. Wilma Stephenson, a culinary-arts teacher at Frankford High School in inner-city Philadelphia, is seen barking at her cooking students like…
After devoting his first two films as director, The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, to getting laid and having kids, respectively, Judd Apatow brings the circle of life to a close with Funny People, which stars Adam Sandler as George Simmons, a popular, Sandler-esque movie star diagnosed with…
An afternoon breeze blows through an open doorway under the opening titles of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata, portending a coming storm and the more violent winds of change about to uproot the lives of the movie’s characters. A bottled message cast from the shores of an economy whose implosion anticipated…
Charles Parson. This must-see sculpture solo titled Charles Parson: Personal Echoes on the Horizon, at Golden’s Foothills Art Center, begins out front with a trio of hieratically composed tubular metal sculptures — basically gongs. The viewer/participant is meant to strike the gongs with clappers that are chained to them. This…
Being a young actress in Hollywood can be a horror show even for performers who achieve something akin to stardom – a condition that’s temporary for all too many of them. Consider the case of Mischa Barton. She was a sizzling property in 2003 upon the arrival of The O.C.,…
In the lushly produced but dispiriting new comedy The Ugly Truth, Katherine Heigl stars as Abby Richter, a successful but hopelessly uptight TV producer who is also perpetually single. Ever efficient, Abby does background checks on the men she meets, and takes along on the first date a ten-point checklist…
A small mob of camels stampedes by a nomad’s tent, with something that might once have been a tractor eating the kicked-up dust. Inside, a young guy in a sailor suit sits on the rug, cheerfully recounting his death struggle with an octopus to the impassive middle-aged couple he’s hoping…
Damien Hirst. You’d have to be living under a rock — or have absolutely no interest in contemporary art — not to know that Damien Hirst is a superstar, and that everything he makes is worth millions of dollars apiece. The tight solo at MCA Denver (formerly known as the…
The astronaut drama Countdown is a curio from both a historical and filmic standpoint. The movie, co-starring James Caan and Robert Duvall, both pre-Godfather, arrived in 1968, a year before the initial moon landing, but at a point when it was clear the United States was on the verge of…
Don’t let the PG rating fool you: The dark arts are back with a vengeance in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the generally grim, occasionally startling and altogether enthralling sixth chapter in a movie franchise that keeps managing to surprise just when one would expect it to be puttering…
Jennifer Lynch — like Sofia Coppola on occasion — has been tarred with the unfounded claim that her films get made only because of who her father is. David Lynch serves as executive producer of Surveillance, Jennifer’s first film since the near-stoning she received after her 1993 debut feature, the…
The Magafan Twins. Ethel and Jenne Magafan were identical twins born in Chicago but raised in Denver. In the 1920s, their art teacher at East High School was so impressed with their talent that he paid their tuition to attend Denver’s School of Modern Art, run by Frank Mechau; they…
The Thief of Baghdad is an enormous contradiction of the auteur theory. The 1940 release credits three directors — Ludwig Berger, Tim Whelan and Michael Powell — and only the latter assembled a filmography of any particular note. Moreover, it’s likely that producer Alexander Korda and others contributed to the…
Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker is a full-throttle body shock of a movie. It gets inside you like a virus, puts your nerves in a blender, and twists your guts into a Gordian knot. Set during the last month in the year-long rotation of a three-man U.S…
Heterosexuals can’t understand camp because everything they do is camp,” opined an associate of the old Play-House of the Ridiculous, a New York theater known for its good-natured, anarchic sexual farce. Such, more or less, is the method of the new Sacha Baron Cohen extravaganza Brüno. Communist Poland supported a…
The Psychedelic Experience. The AIGA graphics curator, Darrin Alfred, has only been on the job at the Denver Art Museum for a year, and already he’s the author of a major blockbuster, The Psychedelic Experience: Rock Posters From the San Francisco Bay Area. Alfred selected around 300 posters from a…
Eddie Adams, the late photographer at the center of An Unlikely Weapon, which opens July 2, was a romantic of an especially cantankerous sort. He’s most famous for a Vietnam-era photo of a prisoner being executed in the middle of a street — but rather than reveling in the accolades…
