The Spark Gallery (1535 Platte Street, 303-455-4435) typically hosts two shows at once, which is the ordinary practice for most co-ops. Unfortunately, more often than not, the shows are incompatible. I suppose this is the inevitable result of the vagaries of scheduling and the very heterogeneous membership at Spark. This…
Longtime married couples should attend the Denver Center Theatre Company’s Dinner With Friends, and so should young people in love. It’s a great date play. Not in the sense that it arouses desire or presents an idealized view of love, but because the playwright muses so knowingly on the topic…
The heroine of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s bold and bracing new comedy, Amélie, is Amélie Poulain, a doe-eyed crusader with the face of a porcelain doll and a sleek helmet of jet-black hair. From her high perch in Montmartre, where she works as a cafe waitress, Amélie secretly resolves to emancipate all…
It is difficult to imagine a more timely film than Focus; its message about intolerance resonates in a post-September 11 world in ways the filmmakers never anticipated. Adapted from Arthur Miller’s little-known 1945 novel of the same title, Focus looks at what happens to a society when basically decent people…
Like his many fantastic creations over the years, Lonnie Hanzon is a bit of magic himself: His credits sparkle like the bejeweled Christmas trees he’s shipped off, piece by piece, to Neiman Marcus in Dallas, or the meticulously detailed mechanical environments and displays he’s installed everywhere from the 16th Street…
As David Bowie sang “Heroes” at the recent benefit at Madison Square Garden, crowd shots of uniformed New York firefighters and police flashed across television screens. Spontaneous cheers confirmed these public servants’ new status as American heroes recognized for their collective response to terrorism. Only a short time ago, public-safety…
There cannot be man, woman, child or beast alive who does not know that on November 6, Fox will debut its new series 24. Long before the fall season was to begin, it had already been appointed the most anticipated and beloved show of the year–by critics who had seen…
The Human Factor: Figuration in American Art, 1950-1995, now showing at the Center for the Visual Arts, is every bit as compelling as the Denver Art Museum’s current Alice Neel exhibit. In fact, not only do both shows explore late twentieth-century representational art, but Neel even makes an appearance at…
Lisa Spivak has put together a show that’s so good you’ll think you’re at the Denver Art Museum’s Close Range Gallery rather than the Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design’s Phillip J. Steele Gallery (6875 East Evans Avenue). An economical survey of the region’s dean of modern sculpture, Robert…
Shakespeare’s Storms at the Buntport Theater reminds me of off-off-Broadway performances in New York City during the ’60s. It has the same funky, improvisational feel. Audience members — on the night I attended, there were about fifteen of us — sit in three rows in front of a wedge-shaped, stepped…
Joel and Ethan Coen’s periodic genuflections to classic Hollywood are inevitably accompanied by a knowing wink from one brother and a wry smile from the other. These devoted movie buffs’ versions of vintage gangster pictures (Miller’s Crossing) or the populist comedies of Capra and Sturges (The Hudsucker Proxy) are not…
David Grisman and Jerry Garcia met as young folk/roots fans cum musicians attending a Bill Monroe concert in 1964. Garcia, as you may have heard, went on to form the Grateful Dead; when the Dead began to incorporate more country elements into their music, they used mandolin ace Grisman memorably…
Like the lovable baseball catcher in Bang the Drum Slowly, like John Wayne’s poignant gunfighter in The Shootist, like hundreds of doomed movie protagonists before him, the hero of Life as a House doesn’t have long to live. By the second reel, you may find yourself wishing his time on…
Since its opening in 1892, the Brown Palace has experienced its share of oddities — including ghosts who check in but don’t check out. How else to explain the sudden, static-filled telephone calls from the ninth-floor suite where famed Denver socialite Louise Hill once lived…and died? Not only was Mrs…
First things first: The Telluride International Experimental Cinema Exposition (or TIE) is different. Now in its second year, the four-day fete offers a conceptual counterpart to the mountain town’s more famous movie-thon. While the Telluride Film Festival screens small films that have a shot at being picked up for wider…
On November 4, some 1,800 television personalities–actors, writers, producers, show-runners, network executives–will, finally, parade into a Los Angeles theater to award their peers and themselves for a job well done. They will, at long last, hand out the golden statues known as Emmy, just as it has been done every…
The current state of affairs in the world, involving the destruction of the World Trade Center, the war in Afghanistan and the use of bio-agents as weapons, has incidentally made some art exhibits edgier and more difficult than had originally been intended by their organizers. Especially problematic are shows with…
Looking Forward, Looking Black, in the Victoria H. Myhren Gallery at the University of Denver (2121 East Asbury Avenue, 303-871-2846), is a tremendously impressive traveling show that explores the perception of African-Americans in art. Most of the artists are African-American, and many deal specifically with racial identity. That’s certainly true…
A Skull in Connemara opens with two people talking in a shabby cottage in Leenane, a village on Ireland’s bleak western coast. The two are Mick Dowd, played by Lawrence Hecht and the aged Mary Rafferty, given shuffling, mumbling life by Kathleen M. Brady. Dowd is a handyman, and one…
Apparently, controversy abounded when Contact won the Tony for best musical in the year 2000. The show has no original tunes (the music ranges from Robert Palmer’s “Simply Irresistible” to Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin”), and though the cast dances itself dizzy, it never bursts into song. Critics, however, were rapturous. They…
If you’re a college freshman, don’t read this. Just grab your newfound peers and go see Richard Linklater’s new movie, Waking Life, then head off to one of those ethereal late-night dining establishments for which you’ll desperately pine once the real world gets ahold of you. Discuss. For others, this…
In the new low-budget indie comedy Haiku Tunnel, former temporary office worker Josh Kornbluth plays “Josh Kornbluth,” a temporary office worker who, early in the film, faces a premature midlife crisis — whether to stay a temp or “go perm.” After great hesitation, the company makes him an offer he…
