What role does the artist play in a world that equates fame with ability? Are creative types required to defer to the paying public’s likes and dislikes? Or are they duty-bound to subvert and question convention, no matter what the cost? Despite some rough going early on, those questions ultimately…
When David Loper has trouble retrieving a crucial computer file for a valued client, he does what any office drone would — he decides to pull a hard copy of the file from the company’s central file room and fax it off as soon as possible. Shortly after he learns…
At first, you don’t want to admit it, because it seems somehow wrong–just too easy. After all, the woman on the other end of the phone line is not that woman seen every Sunday night on HBO, lamenting the sad, sorry state of her love affairs. She’s not an actress…
Some may find reason to embrace the romantic comedy Woman on Top as the nonsensical, sweet-tempered fantasy of two South American filmmakers who don’t understand life in this country very well but grasp all the magical powers of Brazil. After all, Brazil ranks second only to fashionable Tibet on every…
This song explains why I’m leaving home and becoming a stewardess,” says Anita Miller (Zooey Deschanel) to her well-meaning, overbearing mother as the soundtrack begins to swell with the low hums of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. Just a few seconds earlier, Elaine Miller (Frances McDormand) had insisted she wouldn’t…
There’s nothing like a fine, melodramatic oater flickering on the big screen to make you feel young again. Makes you want to don chaps and spurs and a Roy Rogers chapeau and ride the range with laconic Gary Cooper and heroic John Wayne, don’t it? Now, thanks to Denver Art…
Come on over to Susan Wick’s place. The Crayola-hued walls are her palette, and the rest of the stuff — Wick’s stuff, to be precise — is subject to her whimsy, and it all rambles through the upstairs gallery at the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver. Everyday Ideas Entertain Me: A…
The first shows of the important fall season are just getting under way, and already there’s an exhibit that is essential viewing for everyone: the scholarly and exhaustively titled Time and Place: One Hundred Years of Women Artists in Colorado 1900-2000, which is the season opener at the consistently interesting…
Its last call for Critical Mass, the summer group show thats not about ethnic identity. The exhibit runs through the weekend at the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver. Organized by MoCAD director Mark Masuoka, the show aims to be inclusive of women and racial minorities while at the same time showcasing…
He’s produced some 65 Broadway shows, served as a boardmember and the American producer for Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and single-handedly changed Colorado’s cultural landscape by building the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. Beginning this weekend, however, Donald R. Seawell, in conjunction with the RSC, will unveil what…
Almost Famous is the movie Cameron Crowe always wanted to make–and the movie he tried to keep from making as long as he could. The writer-director insists he didn’t want to make a film about his wonder years as a Rolling Stone writer in the 1970s, because he didn’t want…
In recent years, the fabulous Chilean expatriate director Raoul (sometimes Raul) Ruiz has moved from shoestring-budgeted features that could qualify as avant-garde to increasingly opulent movies with major art-house stars and a shot at mainstream success. Not yet sixty, he has made more than sixty films since his 1968 debut…
There’s a trio of duets in Duets. The film is set in the world of karaoke singing, but the title really refers to three sets of paired-off actors performing pas de deux to the tune of John Byrum’s Golden-Age-of-Television-ish dialogue. Only one of the three duos shakes fully to life,…
There’s nothing like wandering through a building that’s still under construction, with its three-dimensional skeleton of wood, plumbing and electrical conduits and smell of new lumber. This month, the Denver Foundation for Architecture offers a chance to experience what only contractors and construction workers usually see, in a special tour…
The childlike joy felt when something green pops through the earth where a seed’s been planted is about as basic as burping. We’ve all been there. Many of us will be there again. But when the pure art of gardening — a kind of introspective, personal thing — intermingles with…
It’s hard to believe that it was only last November that the city’s voters gave the Denver Art Museum the go-ahead to construct a badly needed new wing by selling $62.5 million in bonds. And although there have been no physical changes on the southeast corner of West 13th Avenue…
Two solo shows now at the Spark Gallery take up the topic of realism — but each takes a clearly different path. Occupying a full two-thirds of the gallery, Robert Gratiot: Recent Paintings is made up of a group of striking hyper-realist compositions. Gratiot is particularly interested in meticulously reproducing…
A month ago, R.J. Cutler thought he found a home for his child, one that would coddle and nurture his baby until it was ready to stand on its own two legs without wobbling or falling. A month ago, it all seemed so simple to the Oscar-nominated producer-director, who was…
Humans and their stories, my, oh my. Somehow, the familiar themes just keep coming around, again and again, ad infinitum. Of course, most of them have already been captured and processed by Shakespeare. From the bitter young man to the crazy old king, from the flirty young thing to the…
Here’s the beginning of The Way of the Gun that you will not see, because it was written but never filmed: Two men, Parker and Longbaugh, urinate in an open grave in front of mourners, beat up a priest, steal organs meant for transplant and shoot a dog. The introduction,…
There are countless reasons to visit the Metro State College of Denver Center for Visual Arts’ new exhibit spotlighting twentieth-century Colorado women artists, decade by decade. As gallery director Sally Perisho points out, one major goal for the show is “to paint a clear picture of how these women struggled…
These days, Denver homebuyers fall into two categories: the rich, and the filthy rich. Everyone else has to buy a home in Aurora, or Arkansas, or Englewood — like me, for instance. Last December my family moved into a modest brick Tudor, circa 1931, that came with all the quirks…
