For better or worse, the wobbly wheel of sexual politics as entertainment appears to be shimmying out of control. Prurient as it may be, theatergoers’ interest in sexual power plays is hardly a twentieth-century phenomenon. Even 2,400 years ago, the subject occupied center stage in such bedroom farces as Aristophanes’s…
With all that is truly scandalous in the movies these days–namely the dimwit dramaturgy and the anything-for-a-buckism that passes for Hollywood entertainment–it is something of a shock to realize that Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita still has the power to offend. Proof is the book’s new movie adaptation, directed by Adrian Lyne,…
The 21st edition of the Denver International Film Festival gets under way at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the United Artists Colorado Center Theatre with an opening-night screening of The Theory of Flight, Paul Greenglass’s study of the friendship between a brooding artist (Kenneth Branagh) and a young woman with Lou…
Better call out the symbol police. And tell them to bring heavy weapons. Jesse Peretz’s First Love, Last Rites, a tale of young love and early disillusionment set in the overheated Louisiana bayou country, features an unseen rat gnawing away, all movie long, at the woodwork of a one-room house…
Go ahead. Drop a tab or two of windowpane before setting out to see Lance Mungia’s Six-String Samurai. A hit at Park City, Utah’s alternative Slamdance Film Festival this year, Mungia’s no-budget first feature is a trippy melange of many movies, everything from Mad Max to Star Wars to the…
Even passing rock fans know that there’s a precedent for mixing classical music and rock. The most obvious example is Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven”; a less successful example would be the entire career of the Electric Light Orchestra. And even if there weren’t an established bloodline, anyone who has…
Keeping a non-profit alive for 25 years is far from child’s play. The Children’s Museum of Denver spent its first couple of years in a truck carrying arts, crafts and science exhibits around Denver and Adams counties. In 1975 the museum settled in rented space on Bannock Street, where it…
Thursday October 1 On the brink of a new century, Angelique Kidjo is doing her best to fuse an aural deluge of old and new music styles from around the world into a pop genre that’s powerfully modern–and you can dance to it. Kidjo blends South African harmonies, synthesized hip-hop…
Words may be the currency of the 1990s in the same way money was the lingua franca of the 1980s. Never has this been more clear than in the political crisis that has reached a dramatic pitch in recent weeks. We’ve all heard President Clinton “parse” his words, while his…
Based on a familiar legend packed with graphic sexual references and written almost entirely in verse, David Ives’s play Don Juan in Chicago is a wholly fictionalized, occasionally amusing look at contemporary sexual mores. And if your idea of a rip-roaring good time includes listening to such thigh-slappers as “Do…
Ever-admiring of her husband’s pioneering spirit but increasingly contemptuous of his overriding ambition, a young wife reacts to one of her mate’s first scientific discoveries by murmuring, “In these moments with you, I understand the allure. They say that man was meant for the earth, but I think you are…
The ants in Antz show a lot of personality. The film is the best example yet of how a fully animated computer-generated feature can delineate facial movement. Toy Story (1995), the first such feature to be released, was brasher and more child-friendly, but Antz is more of a–how shall I…
As a professional lamenter of how “they just don’t make ’em like they used to,” I am always thrilled on those rare occasions when someone even tries to make ’em that way. So I am doubly thrilled that with The Impostors, writer-director Stanley Tucci has tried and richly succeeded. Those…
Have adultery, murder and greed all moved to the sticks? Once firmly rooted in the big city, the seven deadly sins have taken on a distinct country-and-Western twang in recent years, thanks to noirish, tough-minded scamfests like John Dahl’s Red Rock West and The Last Seduction, James Foley’s After Dark,…
Insofar as filmmaker Tony Gatlif’s justly admired “gypsy trilogy” is an exploration of his roots and a search for his nature–he was born in Algeria to gypsy parents of Spanish origin but was later polished at Paris’s L’Ecole des Beaux Arts–it comprises one of the most passionate and telling self-examinations…
The hero of John Waters’s gently subversive new romp, Pecker, is a happy Baltimore teenager of the same name whose primary pleasure is shooting neighborhood snapshots with an old thrift-shop camera. Girls on the bus preen for him. He captures dancers in the local strip club through a back-alley window…
Jackie Chan’s American fans–and I’m one of them–have suffered through a nervous 1998 so far. The momentum the star earned with the 1996 release of Rumble in the Bronx has seemed to dissipate steadily: An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, the first American production to employ Chan since the…
Leelee Sobieski is a mouthful of a name (forty years ago, studio moguls would have made her change it to something short and unassuming)–but get used to it, because the young actress behind it is going to be getting a lot of attention. She almost single-handedly carries A Soldier’s Daughter…
As a director of action thrillers, John Frankenheimer has been a peerless stylist for nearly four decades–without leaning on a pile of glitzy special effects. What’s more, his most memorable movies, from The Manchurian Candidate (1962) to The Birdman of Alcatraz (also 1962) to 1986’s wickedly entertaining, unappreciated 52 Pick-Up…
Thursday September 24 Developers who’ve made financial investments and volunteers who’ve put lots of sweat and emotional equity into the Uptown neighborhood are again showing off the fruits of their labor at the Eleventh Annual Uptown Sampler, from 5 to 9 this evening. A $16 button buys food and drink…
Steve Friesen has on his white gloves, and he’s struggling to find the words to describe the treasure in his hands. “It’s a chocolate brown,” he says, then, “Naah–maybe…buffalo brown. Would that be a buffalo brown?” That’s a bit closer. But how can you describe a particular color when so…
The Bible says Eve succumbed to the apple, but most women secretly know it was probably something more like a shoe. Fashion may be femininity’s most basic foible, something women embrace and spurn with equal zeal, but either way, gals just can’t seem to escape the effects of its powerful…
