Andy Warhol’s Dream America. Hot on the heels of its smash hit, Chihuly, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center is presenting yet another blockbuster devoted to the work of a household name in contemporary art: Andy Warhol’s Dream America. The exhibition was curated by Ben Mitchell of Wyoming’s Nicolaysen Museum…
At the opening of The Constant Gardener, Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles’s adaptation of the novel by John le Carré, we hear a conversation before we see it. The screen remains black, still running credits, as a man and a woman negotiate a departure. Slowly, the scene dawns, revealing the couple…
Cineastes swooned over Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai’s 2000 film In the Mood for Love, a slow-as-molasses melodrama about two tediously formal people whose spouses are having an affair with one another. Thrown together by circumstances, they find themselves falling in love but, determined not to emulate their cheating…
Remember Nick Cannon? For a while there, he seemed to be the next big young heartthrob, right after starring in the marching-band movie Drumline and the remake of the ’80s comedy Love Don’t Cost a Thing. When Dave Chappelle joked that his son was leaving him for Nick Cannon, people…
Viewers of those VH1 nostalgia countdown shows are familiar with the term “awesomely bad,” denoting a song that one hates to love because it’s unintentionally tacky and awful, yet there’s something about it that won’t let you dismiss it entirely. It’s also a fine way to describe The Cave, but…
Many of those who saw the Disney superhero spoof Sky High were impressed by the debut of Steven Strait. Playing the brooding school bully Warren Peace, who hurls fireballs at our heroes before showing his more sensitive and heroic side, Strait displayed a moody rock-star charisma and an impressive range…
2005 Biennial BLOW OUT. This is the third in a series of biennials presented at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art. In the past, participation in these biennials was limited to artists from around here; for the 2005 version, it’s been expanded to include artists working in most of the Western…
Terry Gilliam’s last film featured the former Monty Python troupe member as an eccentric, demanding and difficult director prone to destroying his ambitious projects before a single frame of footage was ever shot. “If it’s easy,” he says in the movie, “I don’t do it.” Alas, this was not a…
The problem with making black-lacquered high school satire is this: Heathers came out in 1989, and it pretty much did the trick. There’s always room for an excellent addition to the genre, and in 1999, it appeared in the form of Alexander Payne’s Election, a film blessed both with a…
The trouble with pornography is that while it sells itself on the authenticity of the sex act, everything else about it is usually artificial, and very blatantly so. The hair color of the leads, most of the female body parts, and especially the situation: When was the last time you…
Wage slaves, unite! Mike Judge’s Office Space, released in 1999, combines the terrors of Franz Kafka with the hopeless workaday fatigue of Dilbert in a pointed satire about cubicle life. The beleaguered hero, Peter (Ron Livingston), is tormented by a parade of identical supervisors; his co-worker Milton (Stephen Root) wards…
2005 Biennial BLOW OUT. This is the third in a series of biennials presented at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art. In the past, participation in these biennials was limited to artists from around here; for the 2005 version, it’s been expanded to include artists working in most of the Western…
Like hundreds of creative Southerners before them, Phil Morrison and Angus MacLachlan have Thomas Wolfe in their bones. The media notes for Morrison’s first feature, Junebug, don’t mention Wolfe, and the 37-year-old NYU Film School graduate makes a point of distinguishing between literary inspiration and what he, like Paul Schrader,…
Sure you want to be inside Sophie Jacobs’s head? The poor woman’s cabeza is so stuffed with guilt and fear, so tormented by grief and what might be delusions, that to spend even five minutes in there poses an obvious risk to your own sanity. At least, that’s the way…
Surfers, skateboarders and desert racers have all had their moment at the movies recently. Now the motocross crowd gets its turn. Supercross, which provides a glimpse at what its makers call “the second-fastest-growing motorsport in the U.S., behind only NASCAR,” is anything but a dramatic masterpiece. But it features enough…
Even today, British kids grow up listening to stories about life during the London Blitz and the hardships their parents and grandparents endured during the Second World War. American children, by comparison, would be hard-pressed to tell you what nations fought on which side. It’s one of the many weaknesses…
Some art-house programmer would be wise to schedule a double bill of The Aristocrats, Paul Provenza’s talkumentary about the dirtiest joke ever told, and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, writer-director Judd Apatow’s near-brilliant movie about a grown-up geek who simply lost interest in trying to get laid. Both offer countless giddy variations…
Red Eye may not seem to be your typical Wes Craven movie. It’s not really horror, there are no marketable monsters, and unlike Cursed, Scream 3, and other recent Craven offerings, it’s actually an enjoyable time at the movies. But heroine Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams) is very much in the…
2005 Biennial BLOW OUT. This is the third in a series of biennials presented at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art. In the past, participation in these biennials was limited to artists from around here; for the 2005 version, it’s been expanded to include artists working in most of the Western…
“I always cannot understand why girls don’t wanna be with me for a long time,” says Timothy Treadwell, subject of the documentary Grizzly Man. “I have really a nice personality — I’m fun, I’m very very good in the…umm, well, you’re not supposed to say that when you’re a guy,…
The old John Wayne-Dean Martin hayburner The Sons of Katie Elder wasn’t a very good movie the first time around — Dino and a cowboy hat go together about as well as Sinatra and bib overalls — and John Singleton’s jokey, urbanized rehash, while not bad, isn’t likely to snow…
Pity the daily newspaper critic who must review The Aristocrats without using such phrases as “A longshoreman’s arm up a little girl’s ass,” “Then my wife goes down on my son while the dog’s licking his balls,” “My grandmother’s covered in my cum,” and “Is it shit before piss, or…
