When Joe Quesada, writer and illustrator of comic books, went to work as a freelance contractor for Marvel Comics three years ago, he found the so-called House of Ideas in ruin. The comic-book industry was, as Quesada recalls, “going down the toilet”: Every month, 10 to 15 percent of readers…
If they teach the work of Todd Solondz someday, assuming he’s not already in the curriculum somewhere, the lectures are bound to be rather short. To grasp the material without actually attending, just bone up on a little bargain-basement Freud, a whiff of primal therapy and a sprinkle of Jerry…
In case the season has you feeling shamefully joyous, here’s a stark little oasis of misery to remind you that America sometimes sucks and its denizens aren’t all heroes. Featuring painstaking attention to the copious warts of this big, proud country, Monster¹s Ball moseys down South to issue the staggering…
Actor Jamie Horton has been a critical and audience favorite at the Denver Center Theatre Company for almost two decades. He began as a charmingly eccentric young leading man; his current incarnation is as a chuckling, self-satisfied, middle-aged professor in Spinning Into Butter. Horton, however, has long had a second…
Author Carl Hiaasen is stuck in the swamp. It’s not that the south Florida native can’t imagine setting his satires about greed and crime in other locales. It’s just that the 48-year-old Miami Herald columnist and former investigative reporter realizes that his soggy state is a moldy gold mine for…
Although Ron Judish Fine Arts is a commercial gallery, it seems more like a full-fledged museum because it presents permanent displays and unbilled offerings alongside its featured attractions. On more or less permanent display are a robust Emmett Culligan sculpture, a ceiling-hung, photo-based installation by Bob Coller, and a group…
It’s been kicking around since the early twentieth century, but there’s no denying that nature-based abstraction has experienced a big-time revival in the 21st — as evidenced by the oh-so-many art shows that include this kind of work right now. The trend is so widespread that it’s even shown up…
There are weaknesses to the musical version of Mark Harelik’s play The Immigrant. The dialogue is sometimes flat-footed. The plot holds few surprises, and there’s no real arc to the action. The songs are uninspired, and one of the four castmembers has a voice more powerful than pleasant. As a…
Nobody really expects a musical to have incisive dialogue, profound meaning or an interesting plot — though some of them do. But what a musical really can’t do without is music (clever lyrics help, too), and the stuff Carol Hall composed for The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas is, for…
Those who spend Sunday morning in church — or every morning watching The 700 Club — will likely embrace the new Welsh film Taliesin Jones as an affirmation of Christian faith. Agnostics, drunkards and horse players will probably see it as evangelical propaganda. Never the twain shall meet. By any…
It’s astonishing just how open Screen Gems has been about showing Slackers to the reviewing press well in advance of deadlines. Dim, youth-oriented sex comedies like this often slip into theaters under cover of darkness. Not that critical appraisal really matters to such films; if it did, Freddie Prinze Jr…
When visiting the National Western Stock Show, make sure your first stop is the booth selling replicas of Old West lawmen’s badges. Wearing one commands respect…and apparently demands free items. At this year’s Stock Show — the 96th incarnation of the annual event that fills Denver’s air with reminders that…
“I’m not a struggling writer,” says Stephen J. Cannell, “–‘struggling’ in the sense that it’s hard for me to do it.” Nor is he having a tough go of things financially. Cannell, who’s promoting his seventh novel, The Viking Funeral, is among the most successful writer-producers in the history of…
It caused me to spend a restless night thinking about the apparently intractable problems of race relations in America, so I have to assume Spinning Into Butter succeeds as a play on some level. On the other hand, I found large chunks of playwright Rebecca Gilman’s dialogue intensely irritating –…
Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art was founded in part to provide a venue for shows like the spectacular 5 Abstract that opened this past weekend. That’s because this exhibit gives major artists from Colorado the kind of serious attention that only a museum show can deliver, something that 500-pound gorilla…
Since coming on as director of the Art Students League of Denver (200 Grant Street, 303-778-6990), Leona Lazar has been on a campaign to expand and diversify the art school’s programs beyond its mainstay of painting classes. One of the new programs is ceramics. “Last summer, we became very serious…
Talk long enough with any television exec over 55, and sooner or later he’ll get around to mentioning the La Brea Tar Pits, that enormous shimmering stinkhole in Los Angeles where the liquefied remains of some 660 species of organisms still burble. These old-timers, with skin light brown and pockets…
Ray Lawrence’s Lantana is high-toned Australian soap opera, which is to say that its philandering police detective and its grief-stricken psychoanalyst are a bit quirkier than their all-too-familiar televised counterparts. Its unhappy wives, gloomy husbands and alienated teenagers are more carefully constructed than similar characters in less ambitious movies. This…
All of those war epics the big movie studios have rushed into release are certainly meant to reflect the present national mood, and if We Were Soldiers or Behind Enemy Lines or Black Hawk Down also happen to strike it rich, that will be fine with the box-office bean counters…
After pedaling down the street, the skeleton pauses to slurp a sports drink — and the yellowish liquid starts to splash down through his interior. No, you’re not watching some Hollywood slasher-flick spoof, although the film is sometimes as colorful. Instead, The Human Body is a lavishly produced IMAX film…
When you’re on top of the heap in the world of found-object-assemblage art, it’s quite possible you have actually seen everything. Consider sculptor Donald Lipski: When vacating his studio in an old movie theater in Brooklyn, he filled three tractor-trailers with stuff he’d packratted away since he began picking up…
It should be so easy to hate this man sitting on a couch in a high-priced hotel suite, this man sharing his bottle of Evian. He is, after all, a demon dressed head to toe (or tail?) in slate gray, the Satan of Cinema. Attacking him has long been regular…
