The first thing you focus on is their eyes. The animals in James Balog’s portraits seem to be — to borrow baseball’s colloquialism — staying within themselves: living in the moment, thinking clearly, and being completely comfortable with their animalness. Head-on and dynamic, the images challenge the catch-all designation of…
Janie Geiser doesn’t do just one thing. She doesn’t even do two things. Instead, her creative world seems to be constantly ascending: one thing leading to another, with every new element upping the ante just a little bit more. At the top, there’s a private world as small as it…
In a way, the historically important and aesthetically compelling Vanguard Art in Colorado: 1940-1970, which just opened at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, provides a background for Colorado Abstraction: 1975-1999, the spectacular two-part exhibit now playing at the Arvada Center. Taken together, these shows provide a good big-picture look…
Craig Miller, the curator of architecture, design and graphics at the Denver Art Museum, has a gift for putting together small yet thoughtful shows. One of three exhibits showing on the second floor is John Sorbie: Graphic Designer, a lovely exploration of this important poster designer’s career. The show coincides…
If talent, poise and charisma were the only qualities needed to triumph in theaters of war or pleasure, then the sparkling quintet in Swingtime Canteen could claim absolute victory after crooning and hoofing their way though an Act One medley of brassy Andrews Sisters tunes. But even though the heroic…
Snugged away in a remote fishing shack in northern Minnesota, a burly loudmouth named Junior laments to his fellow ice-anglers that citified “income poops” have made a mess of the frozen lake that he and his Woolrich-clad pals consider their sacred refuge. In addition to spawning schools of cappuccino-sipping, tofu-nibbling…
The premise is preposterous, the final score inevitable and the record reading on the feelgood-o-meter totally predictable. But Mystery, Alaska comes furnished with some winning quirks and charms — including a very funny bit concerning premature ejaculation at twenty degrees below zero. So even if you don’t really believe that…
In general, period films are not what you would call a commercial sure shot in the current marketplace — unless, of course, the period in question is the 22nd century or some “long, long ago” that resembles the 22nd century. In Plunkett and Macleane, director Jake Scott — son of…
There is nothing gratifying about watching a bullet blast through a woman’s skull. Exploding helicopters and splattered cattle are utterly indefensible. And few would smile at the image of a little boy being obliterated by a flashy missile. So why is David O. Russell’s Three Kings such rousing entertainment? This…
Like many who have endured sexual abuse as a child, Jasmine Sailing grew up to become a troubled adult with low self-esteem. Like her abused peers, she also grew up equating sexual situations with pain and fear, sought solace in drugs and wound up in abusive relationships well into adulthood…
It is not easy typing while you are wearing a charm bracelet bearing the Ten Commandments — in condensed form, of course, since the King James version doesn’t fit on half-inch discs. But Thou Shalt Not Mind a Little Discomfort When the Flea-Market Find Is So Fabulous. On the other,…
The Arvada Center is presenting the epoch-defining two-part exhibition Colorado Abstraction, 1975-1999, which fills the entire two-story facility. Last week I reviewed Part I, a breezy look at the key abstract painters and sculptors who emerged in the 1970s. This week I look at Part II, which presents the artists…
Last year, the Carol Keller Gallery opened in the main space of a converted Highland area garage at 1513 Boulder Street and leased a few rooms to the Colorado Photographic Arts Center, a 35-year old Denver institution. But last month, they switched places. To kick off the switch, Keller has…
In his best plays, Tennessee Williams uses vivid imagery and poetic dialogue to evoke feeling — instead of explaining it to death, which is the preferred method used by many of today’s psychodramatists. In fact, as illustrated by Germinal Stage Denver’s Noh theater-style production of Suddenly Last Summer, Williams’s powers…
Like the union of the two main characters in The Marriage of Bette and Boo, the Bug Theatre Company’s production is a hauntingly sad, absurdly comic look at domestic strife that lasts a little too long for its own good. Pacing and structural problems notwithstanding, director Donna Morrison’s version sometimes…
Grownups, take heart. Even if you misspent your summer at the movies pigging out on reheated space adventure, slob humor and stubborn old ballplayers who won’t hang up their spikes, all is not lost. A powerful and intelligent film called American Beauty has volumes to say about the way people…
Trust Allison Anders and her old running mate Kurt Voss to come up with a piquant, carefully observed movie about tarnished hope, overfed vanity and half-baked scheming on the treacherous L.A. music scene. They know the territory. In 1988, the ex-UCLA Film School classmates wrote and directed Border Radio, one…
Have you heard? The only tools a nice fellow needs to repair the damaged psyches of an entire town are a guilty conscience and a dash of insight. That, at least, is the premise of Lawrence Kasdan’s silly new social parable, Mumford, in which the eponymous hero poses as a…
As American film has increasingly dominated the world’s cinemas and once-healthy European film industries have grown unable to sustain themselves, the idea of multi-national co-productions, with funds supplied by producers from a variety of countries, has become the norm. This trend was well-established in the ’80s, making it tough to…
To be Asian-American is to be in a constant state of diffusion. It’s a perspective distorted by opposing cultures, all falling under one identity-flattening aegis. For the average non-Asian-American, the banner carries a quality of exoticism, stoicism and mystery, but for those who walk in its shoes, it’s life –…
Soon after his Oscar-nominated turn as Tina Turner’s abusive husband in What’s Love Got to Do With It?, actor Laurence Fishburne decided that no matter how well-paid or sought-after he became, he wanted more creative freedom and control over his career. So, like many high-wattage actors, he bypassed Tinseltown’s power…
Although 1999 may not be the last year of the century, as sticklers for accuracy have pointed out, it is the last of the 1900s. So it seems only natural to reflect on the century — or at least the last part of it. That’s exactly what the Arvada Center’s…
