Begging forgiveness from God and anyone else who will listen, a mortally wounded policeman staggers through the West Indian jungle and bemoans the “Africa of my mind” and “glories of my race.” The mulatto corporal, ever aware that his mixed-blood origins effectively brand him an outcast among his fellow islanders…
“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” Kris Kristofferson sings in his most beguiling song, “Me and Bobby McGee.” Stephen Frears’s The Hi-Lo Country tries in vain to be just as lyrical about love and liberty. In this twentieth-century Western, a cattle rancher named Pete (Billy Crudup) narrates…
Frank Rich thinks he’s found the keys to successful filmmaking: abstinence from women and dope. “Our motto was ‘Keep your hands off the ass and your brain off the grass,'” says Rich. “No masturbation, no sucking on the bong. A clear head and pent-up sexual energy are very valuable tools.”…
Like many old structures around Denver’s Capitol Hill neighborhoods, the Temple Events Center Uptown–in its heyday the third home of Congregation Emanuel, Denver’s oldest Jewish congregation–has seen better days. But if director Roger Armstrong has his way, the building’s public centennial celebration on Sunday won’t be just a tribute to…
Thursday January 21 The Colorado Symphony Orchestra honors Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. tonight with a SuperClassics Concert that’s contemporary, stirring and all over the musical map–but as CSO maestra Marin Alsop points out, the selections are the work of African-American composers, pay tribute in some way to the African-American…
Many collectors are interested in buying so-called museum-quality artwork. For a gallery owner, the trick is to convince potential clients that what they’re looking at could just as easily hang in a museum as in their own home. But Bill Havu, owner of the William Havu Gallery, came up with…
As an undergraduate at University College in Dublin, James Joyce once published an 8,000-word article on Henrik Ibsen’s final play, When We Dead Awaken, that prompted the father of modern drama to dash off a sincere letter of thanks to his ardent admirer. Moved and humbled by his literary hero’s…
A.R. Gurney is famous for writing middlebrow off-Broadway plays in which well-to-do WASPs comically mourn the passing of their cherished way of life. Past Gurney bromides examined such hallowed American myths as the old-boy network (The Old Boy, presented a few years back by the Director’s Theatre in Boulder), the…
Genius can be a terrible, destructive gift. Jacqueline du Pre, the brilliant British cellist who enraptured audiences in the Sixties and Seventies with her musical passion and intensity, lived a life of great renown and acclamation but also one of harrowing loneliness and emotional turmoil. Her story is movingly told…
Elevate The Jerry Springer Show a notch or two–in other words, dispense with the one-legged serial killers who are having sex with their blind mothers and other such nonsense–and you’ve got Willard Carroll’s Playing by Heart. Too harsh a judgment, some will say. After all, this well-meaning, relentlessly sincere ensemble…
In the archetypal dead-end town of Lawford, New Hampshire, cold-eyed men looking for trouble prowl the streets in 4-x-4s with chrome spotlights and loaded gun racks. The gloomy barrooms are not gathering places so much as solitary-confinement cells, and the most popular local sport is macho posturing. In wintry Lawford,…
The coldhearted among us have watched Camille die tragically on the late show and have seen Brian Piccolo run his last yard through the cancer ward often enough to understand the several hazards of Hollywood “disease movies”–false sentiment, synthetic emotion and tears for tears’ sake. It is with wariness, then,…
Thursday January 14 Things just cain’t be right in these parts in January without the Colorado Cowboy Poetry Gathering. Presented by the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, it’s the ultimate assemblage of all things folksy and philosophical that’s parallel to, if not quite in conjunction with, the National…
The word “wire” trips on itself right out of the gate: Fraught with imagery of fences and telephone poles, it’s all about boundaries–where one thing ends and another begins. But when it gets all twisted up, that’s when wire can become downright dangerous, as you’ll find when two different yet…
A 1992 Nobel laureate whose work is the extraordinary sum of disparate yet intertwining parts, black West Indian poet and playwright Derek Walcott grew up on a rare fusion of Shakespearean language and island patois that ultimately transcends all possible racial bonds. He’s always simply written as a man first,…
Somewhere under the glossy imbecility of Varsity Blues lurks an idea that could make a great American movie: a coming-of-age story in a setting where no one else has come of age, a place where the hero must find his way to maturity without a mentor. The setting, in this…
Because it revealed the coke-snorting, ego-fueled corruption of Hollywood in the early 1980s with such acid wit, David Rabe’s play Hurlyburly became a huge audience hit when it burst onto Broadway in 1984. Here was the inside stuff from the Left Coast, gotten up in a frenetic new language combining…
Thursday January 7 Okay, okay–maybe you don’t want to know. But just in case you do, an outfit calling itself Lean Weighs is conducting Body Fat Screenings at metro-area King Soopers locations throughout the month. For a $10 fee, they’ll break down your weight into fat, water and organ categories;…
As any artist will tell you, cooperative galleries can be flighty endeavors, easily ravaged by lack of organization and/or funds, in no particular order. So it’s encouraging to note that Core New Art Space, one of Denver’s most enduring co-ops, has managed to remain intact since it debuted with four…
Michael Connelly always knew he wanted to write crime novels; once dipped in the noir Los Angeleno universe of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, he was hooked on the detective genre for life. But Connelly had to go to boot camp before carving his own smoky niche in the gumshoe chain:…
The great attorneys of our time–Tom Cruise, Susan Sarandon, Tom Hanks–must now make room in the firm for a new partner. John Travolta, who in past lives has been a disco king, a hip hitman and a deep-fried presidential candidate, reinvents himself in A Civil Action as a greedy personal-injury…
Writer-director Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, the filmmaker’s adaptation of James Jones’s 1962 bestseller about the World War II battle for Guadalcanal, arrives in theaters with an almost unbearable weight of expectation. After graduating in the first class at AFI’s Advanced Film Studies program and working briefly as a…
