Despite his reputation as that rarest of creatures — a Hollywood intellectual — new evidence suggests that Steve Martin reads…prepare yourself…thrillers and spy novels. Or at least that’s the only conclusion one can draw from the “story by” credit the comedian receives on Traitor, an uneven yet engrossing terrorist thriller…
Until the untimely death of singer/guitarist D. Boon at the end of 1985, the Minutemen were one of the most exciting and creative bands of their era. The documentary We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen — which kicks off a four-part film series called Our Band Could Be…
About Us… et al. In the West Gallery at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art is About Us…, put together by freelance curator Mark Addison, who brought in two dozen works of conceptual realism by a raft of internationally known artists in addition to pieces from his own collection. Addison…
The Rocker bears the decidedly unmistakable odor of something made in 1983 and left on the shelf a good 25 years. Which isn’t to suggest that it’s fetid product in need of tossing out: Parts of it are genuinely delightful, and Rainn Wilson doesn’t squander his first feature-film starring role…
When I heard that Quentin Tarantino handed the Grand Jury Prize for best feature to Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, telling the audience that the movie “put my heart in a vise and proceeded to twist that vise until the last frame,” my jaw went…
In its final ten minutes, Hamlet 2 is little more than chaos, noise and nonsense, and those are ten perfectly enjoyable minutes. It’s hard to knock any sequence that climaxes with a musical number titled “Rock Me, Sexy Jesus,” done up nice and Grease-y. Problem is, the eighty or so…
About Us… et al. In the West Gallery at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art is About Us…, put together by freelance curator Mark Addison, who brought in two dozen works of conceptual realism by a raft of internationally known artists in addition to pieces from his own collection. Addison…
Perhaps this review should begin with a disclaimer: Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Woody Allen’s 39th film as writer-director, will do little to endear itself to the happily-ever-after crowd or those who consider acts of infidelity punishable by impeachment. Leave it to Allen to make a romantic comedy in which all the…
Bottle Shock, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January, is a great concept populated by great actors that works hard to make its audience feel great! Only, sadly, it’s far, far from a great movie — a little too sweet to the taste, almost sickly so. Indeed, it’s…
About Us… et al. In the West Gallery at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art is About Us…, put together by freelance curator Mark Addison, who brought in two dozen works of conceptual realism by a raft of internationally known artists in addition to pieces from his own collection. Addison…
The last time I interviewed Woody Allen, at his editing suite on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, he was preparing the release of Match Point (2005), a dark morality play about an ambitious — and ultimately homicidal — tennis instructor working his way up the rungs of London society’s rigidly defined…
On the surface, Pineapple Express offers precisely what it advertises: a roll-’em-up, smoke-’em-up, blow-’em-up bromantic comedy from the freaks and geeks who have made Judd Apatow’s brand of stunted-man yuks a global franchise. Once more, Seth Rogen’s red-rimmed, half-shut eyes peek out from beneath his tousled Jewfro, which sits atop…
Even as the first girders were laid in the mid-1960s, something about the World Trade Center inspired fantasies of lustful conquest. As James Marsh’s documentary Man on Wire tells it, a mischievous French teenager was sitting in a dentist’s office in 1968 when a magazine image caught his eye. It…
A young female writer of romantic novels decides to turn to the supernatural for her next book. As she struggles with writing, throwing away page after page of work, she begins having a series of strange and unsettling experiences. Before long, she’s drawn into a dark, horrific alternate reality, populated…
About Us… et al. In the West Gallery at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art is About Us…, put together by freelance curator Mark Addison, who brought in two dozen works of conceptual realism by a raft of internationally known artists in addition to pieces from his own collection. Addison…
Making notes in 1949 for a review of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, George Orwell wrote that “Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be…while holding untenable opinions.” Which is a nice way of saying that Waugh, a world-class satirist of everyone from the rich down, was also…
A glint in his eye and a grin on his lips, artist Don Bachardy looks into the camera and explains the dynamic of his three-decade relationship with the late literary icon Christopher Isherwood as if it were a fairy tale. “His role,” says Bachardy, “could be described as that of…
About Us… et al. In the West Gallery at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art is About Us…, put together by freelance curator Mark Addison, who brought in two dozen works of conceptual realism by a raft of internationally known artists in addition to pieces from his own collection. Addison…
I was thirteen when Stephen Sommers’s 1999 remake-in-name-only of The Mummy came out — just about the ideal age. Sommers is definitely some kind of junk-addled auteur, and if The Mummy didn’t achieve its obvious goal of topping Raiders Of The Lost Ark, it was close enough as far as…
Swing Vote is an election-themed comedy that’s about twice as smart as you expect it to be and still only half as smart as you wish it was. The clever premise, which would have seemed like pure science-fiction no more than eight years ago, concerns a U.S. presidential election whose…
I haven’t seen much at the movies in the past two years that has given me as much unbridled comic pleasure as the sight of Will Ferrell as the win-at-any-cost NASCAR driver Ricky Bobby, calling on Jesus, Tom Cruise and Oprah Winfrey to put out the psychosomatic flames engulfing his…
Catherine Breillat hitches her wagon to the hottest of European stars, Asia Argento, in a highly entertaining adaptation of French dandy Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly’s mid-nineteenth-century novel Une vieille maîtresse — once notorious for its treatment of a young libertine’s erotic obsession with a homely 36-year-old woman. Set on the cusp…
