First the good news: Despite this summer’s rash of double entendres, the title of the high school comedy/Gen-X nostalgia flick The Wood is not a dirty joke. The name’s as earnest and literal as the film itself and simply marks the setting as Inglewood, California, the Los Angeles ‘burb best…
You can tell the first wave of summer blockbusters have shot their wad when the studios start tossing out their second- and third-string films. Back in the old days, these would have been called “programmers”–thoroughly competent entries that reiterated all the conventions of their reliable, easy-to-market genres. Such is Lake…
The Blair Witch Project, the bone-chilling indie by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, is easily the scariest horror picture of the Nineties–a movie that can take its place among the most potent and inexorable of modern shockers, like Night of the Living Dead or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Three…
Eyes Wide Shut, the final motion picture from the late, great Stanley Kubrick, is easily the most anticipated adult film of the year. It’s The Phantom Menace for grown-ups. Kubrick made only thirteen features in his 46-year career, but his death in March (just after the movie’s completion) and the…
Come look at the freaks. Come look at the geeks. Come look at God’s mistakes… So opens Side Show, a Tony Award-nominated musical based on the story of conjoined twins and vaudeville stars Daisy and Violet Hilton, whose fifteen minutes of enduring fame came in Tod Browning’s 1932 cult-classic film…
Thursday July 8 Jazz has another phenom of a female vocalist to contend with: Kansas City singer Karrin Allyson is racking up the kudos left and right these days while knocking out great albums on the Concord Jazz label. So why have you never heard of her? Who knows–Allyson’s substantial…
At last year’s party, the strap-on dildo Mary Uzi was wearing snuck out, pushing up her skirt to reveal a pinch too much. Uzi, a local adult-business owner and performer, was feigning a cowgirl-gone-naughty on an elevated stage. Her outfit came complete with boots, a hat, a tiny vest and…
The title of the current exhibit at the Metro State Center for the Visual Arts, Chairs! Chairs! Chairs!, may suggest to some that what we’re in for is a design show–or perhaps a display of artist-made furniture. But it’s neither. Instead, CVA director Sally Perisho has assembled the work of…
There’s not much point in staging a stodgily reverential, doublet-and-hose version of William Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. The slapstick piece about two sets of twins separated at birth is patterned after a Roman-comedy model that was hackneyed when Shakespeare borrowed it and has been beaten to death ever since…
Do you feel snug and secure in your cozy suburban life? Are you happy in your picture-perfect home, with your carefully manicured lawn, your kids and your soccer games and barbecues? Do you feel safe? Well, the creators of Arlington Road, the ponderous new thriller starring Jeff Bridges and Tim…
For Morgan J. Freeman (a young writer-director, not the heralded actor), comic timing couldn’t get any worse–or better. That’s because one of the unhappy teenagers in Freeman’s second feature, Desert Blue, is a melancholy girl dressed in moody black who likes to detonate homemade bombs. The Columbine High School massacre…
It’s about time we had a talk. Yeah, you know, that talk. The one about how uncomfortable and strange it is to be a young human male, how raging and unforgiving the hormones, how fragile the ego, how mysterious the female form. You see, well, how do I say this?…
London-born novelist-screenwriter Hanif Kureishi doesn’t have Margaret Thatcher to kick around anymore, as he did so incisively and effectively in My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, but his concerns have not wandered too far afield. Rather, he’s softened the hard edges. Universal issues still inspire him, but…
Up in Evergreen, rumors of Trey Parker are exaggerated, but not greatly. The co-creator of South Park grew up here, went to high school here, made home movies here. And now that his demented characters–from a singing “Christmas Poo” to Starvin’ Marvin, the mail-order refugee–have gone mainstream, everyone is sure…
Leaphorn swiveled his chair to face the map that dominated his wall behind his desk. It was a magnified version of the “Indian Country” map produced by the Automobile Club of Southern California. Smaller versions were used throughout the Four Corners territory for its details and its accuracy. Leaphorn had…
Thursday July 1 As festivities leading up Sunday’s annual Pikes Peak International Hill Climb begin to reach that feverish pitch, the Denver Press Club Lunch on Deadline Series joins the fracas in a typically dignified manner: Today’s luncheon guests are race car drivers Rod Millen, a four-time overall hill climb…
Mary Chenoweth, who died on January 14, at the age of eighty, was one of the most important and accomplished artists to ever have worked in Colorado. But that’s not the impression you’ll get from the ineptly arranged and incompetently organized memorial exhibit Mary Chenoweth: Collage of a Life’s Work,…
A college professor turned full-time party host purses his lips to mitigate his simpering enthusiasm. He declares that in Denver, throwing the bash of the season requires more than just careful planning, flawless execution and a politically correct guest list. In order for his suburban soiree to be a resounding…
Brimming with the ingratiating sentiment of a John Ford movie and radiating with the honeyed elegance of an Albert Bierstadt painting, The Girl of the Golden West works its charms gradually, culminating in a touching finale that lends a heartwarming glow to Giacomo Puccini’s rough-and-tumble romance. Softly crooning “We’ll never…
It won’t take long for anyone familiar with the television original to notice that something is not right with the listless Barry Sonnenfeld-directed film version of Wild Wild West. Yes, the film features Will Smith in the role of James West, with Kevin Kline as his cerebral sidekick, Artemus Gordon…
To hear Spike Lee tell it, Summer of Sam means to be a panoramic view of the summer of 1977 in New York City–when temperatures shot into the high ’90s and power blackouts set nerves on edge, when the party agenda included snorting coke at Studio 54 and copulating with…
Woe be to the scribbler who presumes to rewrite a master–unless he is so deft that his invasion of privacy produces something new and exciting. Enter British writer/director Oliver Parker, who has the nerve to meddle with Oscar Wilde’s sublime farce An Ideal Husband–and the skill to pull it off…
