Thursday September 11 The writing on the wall: From Toulouse-Lautrec’s Folies-Bergere can-can girls to the late Joe Camel, poster images have filled our modern cultural landscape with a graphic march of political and social messages along with purely commercial entreaties. The Colorado International Invitational Poster Exhibition, a biennial showcase sponsored…
“It was a hell of a decision to make,” says director Paul Hughes. “This is my life. The gallery is my identity.” But even so, Hughes is closing Inkfish Gallery, his life for over twenty years, at the end of the month. Back in 1975, Hughes was the regional manager…
Something has happened to the experimental theater. Time was when an alternative-theater piece was certain to be as iconoclastic as it was entertaining–when performance pieces opposed in form and content to mainstream theater practices and conventions would draw an audience for both their novelty and their political and social commentaries,…
This has been a rough year at the movies for British working stiffs, but a great year for feel-good stories of their redemption. In the art-house hit Brassed Off!, coal miners cut loose from their jobs by Thatcherite economics found solace and self-respect in the endurance of the company’s brass…
The Disappearance of Garcia Lorca aims to cover a great deal of ground. It renders, with picturesque splendor, Spain just before its civil war and the dramatic fate of impassioned, iconoclastic Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca during the rise of Spanish fascism. Still, no matter how earnestly it attempts to…
The Game is a puzzle picture, and beyond its premise, there isn’t much you can divulge without giving the show away. I’m not one of those critics who like to write Stop reading now if you plan to see this movie, so I’m tempted to wrap things up right now…
Thursday September 4 The Rio thing: Moonlight on water, feijoada and mangoes, miles of virgin sand, a gentle bossa nova, your lover’s eyes–they all fall gently into the romantic territory of Ivan Lins, a Brazilian pop composer/performer who pads like a boy from Ipanema in the footsteps of the late…
Painting is a very old-fashioned method of making art. After all, it’s been around for at least 15,000 years (as proven by cave paintings). Astoundingly, over those years painting has changed very little, except in terms of style. Otherwise, it’s done the way it’s always been done: An artist applies…
On the basis of having played a lovably meddlesome Beverly Hills teenager in Clueless and Batgirl in the latest McSequel of the dismal Batman series, young Alicia Silverstone hasn’t quite hit full stride. There may not be much time, but she’s trying. Excess Baggage looks very much like an attempt…
For a movie so enamored of its own peculiar charms (see also: Gump, Forrest), Alan Wade’s Julian Po can exert quite a tug on the audience. It’s self-consciously “literary” and shamelessly derivative, but the germ of mystery inside it pulls you along. It’s full of ersatz gravity and precious philosophizing,…
Thursday August 28 Queen of the roost: Once upon a time, all she wanted to do was have some fun, and she did–but former back-up singer Sheryl Crow has come full circle to settle comfortably on a music-business pedestal reserved for few artists, especially female ones. Now she’s running her…
New Mexico’s centuries-long traditions in the fine arts cast a deep shadow over Colorado art, both for better and for worse. It’s not that we don’t have our own strong traditions, particularly in painting and printmaking. It’s just that there’s so much going on in New Mexico that it often…
Director Bill Duke’s valentine to Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, the king of the Harlem numbers racket back in the 1930s, is called Hoodlum. But that hardly seems appropriate. If Duke and his backers at United Artists Pictures wanted to remain true to the spirit of the piece, they would have titled…
The low-budget phenom of the month is a 28-year-old Los Angeleno named Miguel Arteta, whose first feature, Star Maps, comes decorated with the usual indie-hero stories about borrowed cars, unauthorized location shots and crew lunches catered by Mom. It’s also encrusted with enough tortured metaphor to sink a sophomore lit…
If you’re nostalgic for the cockeyed let-it-all-out gabfests of the late John Cassavetes, She’s So Lovely will seem like dejà vu all over again. Cassavetes wrote the script more than a decade ago, and now his son Nick–whose first feature, Unhook the Stars, starred his mother, Gena Rowlands–has directed it…
Thursday August 21 Walk in beauty: There’s always someone marching to a different drummer, and in the local art community, it’s Cherry Creek North, where galleries go against the grain of the “First Friday” arts stroll and throw their own Third Thursday Art Walks. But that’s okay–it just gives us…
Time has a way of slipping by when you’re not looking, but don’t worry. While you’re distracted, studio executives are keeping their usual keen eyes on the calendar, tabulating the simple economic arithmetic of boomer nostalgia. Hmmm…1997 minus 1957 equals 40 years. Forty years of nostalgic forgetfulness multiplied by the…
When the beautiful entomologist rips open the chest cavity of a huge, bloodthirsty insect in the sci-fi nightmare Mimic, it turns into Thoracic Park. This movie, like Spielberg’s, features evolution gone haywire and dramaturgy gone to hell. In the prologue, the heroine–the reckless and courageous (or foolhardy and stupid) Dr…
It’s as old as sin, the story of the hopeless square liberated by the freethinker. It’s also as new as several current movies–including Shall We Dance?, wherein a weary suburbanite is revived by the fox-trot, and Dream With the Fishes, in which a suicidal businessman hits the glory road with…
Think Meryl Streep handled the raging white water and the redneck villains pretty well in The River Wild? Come now. That was child’s play. Still like the way La Femme Nikita blew those four-star Euro-creeps away in the middle of their pate de foie gras? Forget about it–namby-pamby, art-movie philosophizing…
Thursday August 14 Next of Keen: Cult favorites often get that way because of a quirk; for guitarist Robert Earl Keen, it’s an oddball brand of deadpan humor that’s just weird enough to elicit double takes wherever he plays. But on that second look, you’ll usually discover that Keen has…
The world of contemporary art has seen some bad days in the 1990s. It all started when an economic slump brought the art boom of the 1980s to a crashing halt in New York City, the epicenter of the global market. The severity of the resulting freefall is illustrated by…
