Grownups, take heart. Even if you misspent your summer at the movies pigging out on reheated space adventure, slob humor and stubborn old ballplayers who won’t hang up their spikes, all is not lost. A powerful and intelligent film called American Beauty has volumes to say about the way people…
Trust Allison Anders and her old running mate Kurt Voss to come up with a piquant, carefully observed movie about tarnished hope, overfed vanity and half-baked scheming on the treacherous L.A. music scene. They know the territory. In 1988, the ex-UCLA Film School classmates wrote and directed Border Radio, one…
Have you heard? The only tools a nice fellow needs to repair the damaged psyches of an entire town are a guilty conscience and a dash of insight. That, at least, is the premise of Lawrence Kasdan’s silly new social parable, Mumford, in which the eponymous hero poses as a…
As American film has increasingly dominated the world’s cinemas and once-healthy European film industries have grown unable to sustain themselves, the idea of multi-national co-productions, with funds supplied by producers from a variety of countries, has become the norm. This trend was well-established in the ’80s, making it tough to…
To be Asian-American is to be in a constant state of diffusion. It’s a perspective distorted by opposing cultures, all falling under one identity-flattening aegis. For the average non-Asian-American, the banner carries a quality of exoticism, stoicism and mystery, but for those who walk in its shoes, it’s life –…
Soon after his Oscar-nominated turn as Tina Turner’s abusive husband in What’s Love Got to Do With It?, actor Laurence Fishburne decided that no matter how well-paid or sought-after he became, he wanted more creative freedom and control over his career. So, like many high-wattage actors, he bypassed Tinseltown’s power…
Although 1999 may not be the last year of the century, as sticklers for accuracy have pointed out, it is the last of the 1900s. So it seems only natural to reflect on the century — or at least the last part of it. That’s exactly what the Arvada Center’s…
Printmakers Portfolio, at William Havu Gallery, is midway through a month-long run. The show is a brief look at the stylistic development over the past five years of Emilio Lobato, one of the best abstractionists around. Although there are only a few older prints in the exhibit, they’re enough to…
Throw a couple of polarized misfits on stage and let them rail about society’s refusal to accept them, and most theatergoers will likely say with a shrug, “That’s a shame. Welcome to the world.” If a playwright couches those same issues in the all-embracing language of family discord, though, audience…
Fifty-two years and a couple hundred pounds ago, Marlon Brando electrified Broadway audiences with his snarling, animalistic portrayal of the bellowing lout in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. In fact, Brando’s riveting turn as Stanley Kowalski spawned generations of imitators who wrongly believed that mumbling, scratching and raw emoting…
Since his TV show ended, Martin Lawrence has gotten more ink for his off-camera life than for his movie career. There’s nothing about Blue Streak that is likely to change that. And it’s a shame, because the basic plot — which sounds like something from one of Donald E. Westlake’s…
Joan Chen, director and co-writer of Xiu Xiu the Sent Down Girl, is best known as an actress: American audiences probably identify her most readily as the doomed wife in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor or as Josie Packard, the alternately evil and innocent character in David Lynch’s weird-o-rama Twin…
Half a decade ago, Boulder dance-scene veteran Danelle Helander did modern dance. Though marked by her own style and ideas, her work was still modern dance — nothing more, nothing less. But then her creative life as a choreographer took on an exotic new slant, spurred on by a percolating…
For the impoverished, ramen-noodle-eating guitarist dreaming of a better instrument, there’s a no-money-down way to improve the arsenal: trading up. The combination of a well-made ax and a guitar market that treasures its past means one man’s old workhorse is another’s cash cow. “That’s what guitar collecting is all about,”…
The three thoughtful exhibits that close this weekend at Rule Modern and Contemporary Gallery illustrate both the ingenuity and the taste of the gallery’s director, Robin Rule. What makes Rule clever is that she has converted her single-room space into three distinct galleries, which allows her to present three shows…
The small and recently remodeled ILK @ Pirate gallery is currently hosting Align, an elegant solo show featuring recent paintings by ILK co-op member Bill Brazzell. The paintings are non-objective; they refer to structural abstraction and use expressive geometric shapes. Most are composed of identical components assembled into grid patterns…
Talk-show blather and gossip-column imbecility notwithstanding, professional performers aren’t all celebrified brats who uniformly indulge in angst-filled tantrums, global bed-hopping and public displays of megalomania. Like athletes whose passion for the game extends well beyond the final whistle, most stage actors are more devoted to studying and perfecting the nuances…
Braving theatrical waters that have proved treacherous to the hardiest of companies, the Upstart Crow Theatre has produced nineteen consecutive seasons of uncut classic plays. Even more remarkable, on a recent opening night, the Boulder group drew a full house of spectators who seemed perfectly willing to fork over fifteen…
Whether it’s bad or good commercial luck that the thriller Stir of Echoes follows so closely on the heels of The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan’s wildly successful ghost-story sleeper, it’s bad critical luck. This film has some startling parallels with The Sixth Sense: Both concern psychic communication with the…
When Hector first formed nearly ten years ago, lots of names were tossed in the hat: Cowsville. Gary. Wilhelmina. But when someone suggested Hector, the lightbulb flashed in Tom Motley’s brain. Motley, a lone local cartoonist seeking to evolve into a many-headed graphic monster by establishing a collective comic strip,…
Games magazine once described the CU Trivia Bowl, an annual tribute to insignificance in which players tested their ability to remember factoids most people were proud to have forgotten, as the greatest trivia contest in the country. During its heyday, the Bowl, sponsored by the University of Colorado at Boulder…
Wouldn’t it be great if the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver became one of the great cultural assets of the region in the 21st century? Wouldn’t it be great if the powers that be there could get their act together? Although the museum’s current attraction, Western Vernacular: Colorado Installations, is very…
