There’s a fine line between artistic genius and pretentious wankery, and most cineastes will tell you that the films of Matthew Barney exist right around that line. Those who like his work usually admit that it’s almost too insufferably pretentious to bear; those with no patience for it generally acknowledge…
Snakes on a Plane represents the ideal of contemporary major-studio filmmaking, which is to say, major-studio marketing. Who needs word-of-mouth screenings or critics when you can sell the four-word pitch as written on a napkin? It points to a future that takes all the guesswork out of movie-going. A major-studio…
So you know how Parker Posey nearly always plays sarcastic, uptight smokers? In The Oh in Ohio, she finally stretches a bit: Here she’s a sarcastic, uptight career woman…who doesn’t smoke! Also, she wears her hair down, whereas it’s usually pulled back into some kind of tightly wound style more…
A one-night Denver premiere of Texas filmmaker Turk Pipkin’s Nobelity is scheduled at the Starz FilmCenter. A documentary that has been getting good buzz at film festivals and private screenings, it features conversations with nine Nobel laureates — including deceased nanotech pioneer Rick Smalley (Chemistry, 1996), cancer researcher Harold Varmus…
CHAIN REACTION. For the third time in two years, there’s a major show in town addressing how traditional Chicano art has progressed into what’s been dubbed post-Chicano art. This latest effort is CHAIN REACTION: Chicano/a and Latino/a Art in Colorado, which is being presented in the Vida Ellison Gallery on…
Veronica Mars: The Complete Second Season (Warner Bros.) Any concept along the lines of “high school hottie solves crimes” is bound to make for watchable TV, but who would have expected this? Equal parts 90210 teen soap, murder mystery, and comedy, Veronica Mars pulls you in with its sharp writing,…
A winning tale of sex, real estate and more or less immaculate conception, Quinceaera, as you might expect from a white-made drama about Latino life in Echo Park, threatens to be all about a pregnant teenager and a prodigal cholo in the hood. Yet this saucy, rowdy, heartfelt and terribly…
Jason Lethcoe’s book Amazing Adventures From Zoom’s Academy doesn’t particularly wow the reader with its prose, but the concept is solid — basically, Harry Potter with superheroes rather than wizards. The heroine, Summer Jones, is an awkward thirteen-year-old tomboy with a goofy father named Jasper who likes to tinker with…
No baseball fan who knows a sinker from a slider believes the grand old game should ever be played indoors — curses on your garbage-bag outfield “wall,” Minnesota Twins; good riddance, Houston Astrodome — and it sometimes rankles the purest of the pure that they must watch even a televised…
The Armory Group. In a summer art calendar that’s uncharacteristically filled with significant exhibitions, The Armory Group: 40 Years has got to be one of the most important of them all. The story begins back in 1966 in Boulder — specifically, in the fine-arts department at the University of Colorado…
Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier (Paramount) It’s all here, more or less: the 1979 theatrical cut of Francis Ford Coppola’s harrowing and still-hypnotic Joseph Conrad-in-Vietnam adaptation, the 49-minutes-longer-but-feels-24-minutes-shorter 2001 Redux edition, Marlon Brando’s entire 17-minute “The Hollow Men” monologue, even more “lost” and deleted scenes (including a spooky-shocking one, in…
Snort a few lines of Fame, screen Save the Last Dance a couple of times, and channel what you’ve learned from the bad-ass pose of a second-rate Eminem and you get Step Up, a dance romance with the originality of a paint-by-numbers set. First-time director Anne “Mama” Fletcher, the choreographer…
If Crash grew a pair of cojones, it might look something like Larry Clark’s cheerfully defiant Wassup Rockers, in which a pack of Latino skaters from South Los Angeles spend an afternoon marooned in the suburban jungle of Beverly Hills, cutting a swath through dense thickets of white privilege and…
World Trade Center is about just that — the attacks on, and the collapse of, the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. But 45 minutes in, a viewer might easily forget the movie is set during that nightmarish day. There is little talk of terrorism, and scant suggestion that a…
When the clueless U.S. men’s soccer team got dumped in the first round of the World Cup, American sports fans generally shrugged and went about their business. Aside from its popularity among millions of suburban schoolchildren, what most other earthlings call “the beautiful game” still arouses about the same passion…
The Armory Group. In a summer art calendar that’s uncharacteristically filled with significant exhibitions, The Armory Group: 40 Years has got to be one of the most important of them all. The story begins back in 1966 in Boulder — specifically, in the fine-arts department at the University of Colorado…
Brick (Universal) Rian Johnson’s feature debut as writer-director will wind up as one of the year’s best films. A film noir set in a modern-day high school, it’s Sam Spade roaming Ridgemont High. Kids get doped up and knocked up and even rubbed out while speaking pulp-novel slang, but the…
There is no modern-day antecedent to the movies Will Ferrell makes with writer-director Adam McKay, with whom Ferrell collaborated during their tenure at Saturday Night Live only a few years ago. To compare their offerings (Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and the new Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky…
If nothing else, give the makers of Beowulf & Grendel high marks for boldness and a certain playful irreverence. It’s a good bet that today’s movie-goers have all the respect in the world for eighth-century poetry, Norse legend and the tenets of early Christianity, but the real attraction of the…
Like the shambling VW van its hapless characters steer from Albuquerque to Redondo Beach, Little Miss Sunshine is a rickety vehicle that travels mostly downhill. How this antic extended sitcom from first-time feature-makers Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris left Sundance with an eight-figure deal and reams of enthralled press clippings…
Monster’s Ball producer Lee Daniels makes his directorial debut with Shadowboxer, and it couldn’t be clearer that he’s trying to follow his previous formula for success. Oscar-caliber actors? Check. Interracial sex? Plenty. A violent demise or two, all in the service of character development? Oh yes. But Daniels maybe could…
The old Lucas/Spielberg stunt of turning B-movie peekaboos into E-ticket thrill rides remains the industry standard — to the virtual exclusion of other multiplex fare, particularly when school’s out. But as not every kid who remade Raiders in Super 8 either gave up the dream or morphed into Michael Bay,…
