By their very nature, fundamentalist religions demand conformity. Original thought and personal aspirations are subordinated to duty and ritual as prescribed by scripture — be it the Bible, the Koran or the Torah. Members who do not strictly adhere to the precepts of the faith are ostracized, shunned, even expelled…
What’s your pick for the most ridiculous movie ever made? The Conqueror, starring John Wayne as Mongol emperor Ghengis Khan? How about The Manitou, in which the grizzled head of an Indian medicine man sprouts from Susan Strasberg’s neck? The musical remake of Lost Horizon surely deserves a couple of…
Titus, Julie Taymor’s gorgeous film version of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, may be the most lavish release of last year…and also the most perverse, on nearly every front. It’s easy to see why there has never been a feature version of this tragedy. Of the most commonly mounted Shakespearean plays, at…
In a long, silent scene at the end of Big Night, a man expresses his deep and conflicted love for his brother by cooking an omelette and placing it in front of him. In American Pie, a horny teenager masturbates into an apple pie his mother has left on the…
Like any creative type, Steve Wilson dreams of the day when he can “create a place where a group of artists can come together to do their work.” Judging from the kind of energy that’s radiating from the Robert E. Loup Jewish Community Center these days, the teacher and director…
Well, after two years of local preparation, the National Council for Education in the Ceramic Arts 2000 meeting came and went last week in only a few days. But if NCECA’s gone, it’s not forgotten. Temporary though it may be, it’s left behind a legacy in the form of more…
World of New Colors, which closes Saturday at the Bayeux Gallery in the Golden Triangle, is a solo show devoted to the work of Philadelphia-based textile artist Marcia Hewitt Johnson. Johnson creates geometric abstractions with pieces of cloth joined together using quilt-making techniques, as in the two-panel “New York New…
The group of Denver natives and Southern Methodist University graduates that formed HorseChart Theatre Company a few seasons back made it their mission to produce plays that “do not make a spectacle of the obvious.” While past productions have tested edgy boundaries and occasionally transported theatergoers to seldom-seen territory, the…
In Stephen Frears’s new comedy High Fidelity, leading man John Cusack is forever looking the camera (and us) in the eye and explaining what’s wrong with him today, or why he was unhappy yesterday, or how his first girlfriend dumped him back in the seventh grade. Gazing into the lens,…
Not so long ago, The Skulls would have starred Tom Cruise — but in which role? He could have been either lead; the one he didn’t choose could have landed in the lap of, say, James Spader or Rob Lowe. One can easily imagine Cruise as Luke McNamara, the beefy,…
Ron Jeremy is simultaneously the best-known male actor in adult films and the porn star who’s hardest on the eyes. At 47, he’s relatively short of stature, admittedly obese and so hirsute that his nickname is the Hedgehog — a name that neatly summarizes his erotic appeal. Yet during his…
Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer lead a double life. Some of the time they make music for children and families, other times they play to an adult audience. When the versatile duo — as adept at rope tricks, yodeling and American Sign Language as they are at being studio musicians,…
It seems like the entire art world has gone potty. Denver’s curators and gallery directors alike are crazed these days, since there are more than fifty local art exhibits in which ceramics take center stage going on right now. It’s enough to make our heads spin like a kick wheel…
The modest Philip J. Steele Gallery does double duty as the entry lobby for the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design. But despite this limitation, it’s often a place to see interesting shows put together by gallery director Lisa Spivak. The current show makes the case. Richard Notkin: Passages:…
A few weeks before he was supposed to send his newly written play to a Seattle theater company, Robert Lewis Vaughan experienced a sudden change of heart. The Colorado Springs native (now a New Yorker) says that he had a “gut feeling” that he should submit the drama, which is…
The screen is Jim Jarmusch’s playground. Or so it appears. The quirky director of Down by Law and Mystery Train has attracted a following as loyal as the Quentin Tarantino cult, because his stuff, too, is hip, ironic and resolutely contrary. Jarmusch seems to take a kid’s unqualified pleasure from…
Is America ready for Hong Kong’s action style? Certainly there are many fans of the more balletic, guns-and-martial-arts, fly-through-the-air movies that have inspired everyone from Quentin Tarantino to the Wachowski brothers. And yet Hollywood seems to have had trouble marketing the concept. Yes, John Woo gets high-profile projects, but the…
O! Sweet vulture of love! Picking through the bones and sinew of doe-eyed fools the world around! How exquisite is thy rending, how blissful the release! Spirits in crimson rivulets swirled, souls as carrion shredded! Two vibrant hearts made still as one, to sate thy gnashing beak! Blessed bloody bird,…
Even the press kit is up front about it: Whatever It Takes is less a film than a product of marketing research and demographic considerations. It might as well have been written on a bar graph, so fetishistic is it about making sure it appeals to teens and their parents…
Chip Ward moved to Grantsville, Utah, in the 1970s, looking for an unsullied place to drop out of the rat race and raise a family away from it all — but somehow it didn’t turn out that way. Instead, he found out that even on the edge of the Great…
What’s wrong with James Stewart? As photographer L.B. Jefferies, the wheelchair-bound hero of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Stewart would rather spy on his neighbors than make out with Grace Kelly. In what must be cruel Hitchcockian irony, Stewart, laid up with a broken leg, is bored by Kelly’s romantic overtures…
A new day has very apparently dawned at the still-nascent Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, which is housed in a former fish market in Sakura Square. And the many changes are obvious from the moment visitors hit the brand-new front doors. Some may recall that I have relentlessly criticized MoCAD…
