Stuffed full of fantasy comics, addicted to action and steeped in digital technology, the frenetic moviemakers Andy and Larry Wachowski have done what they must–create an eye-popping, morph-mad, quasi-mythical sci-fi flick that will thrill computer nerds as it kicks serious ass. The Matrix also presumes to (ahem!) think deeply–although this…
Jimmy Cagney brought the same electric physicality to gangsters that he did to song-and-dance men. He gave a bright-eyed mug like his character in Public Enemy extraordinary powers of attraction and repulsion. In The General, Brendan Gleeson enacts a real-life criminal chieftain–Dublin’s notorious Martin Cahill–with a belly-hanging-out buffoonery that is…
Back in a dark corner of America’s post-war baby boom, a small contingent of kids grew up in a manner directly counteractive to the suburban ethos that ruled through the ’50s and ’60s. They’re known as the “red diaper babies”; their parents were left-thinkers active in the civil-rights movement and…
Twenty years ago, Harlem nightclub singer Sandra ReAves-Phillips decided to put together a one-weekend show to honor her musical heroes. Two decades later, she’s still serving as the one-woman cast of a tribute to America’s best blue-note singers, The Late Great Ladies of Blues and Jazz. “It’s a labor of…
Thursday March 25 In an age when there’s an art walk each month to suit every taste, you have to figure the time is ripe for an Art-Walk-Your-Dog-&-Coffee event that puts out the welcome mat not just for you but for the family pooch, too. Three businesses at the intersection…
The landscape has served as both artistic inspiration and subject matter for thousands of years, dating back to Neolithic cave painting. And today the landscape’s allure is just as strong, even if the pieces it inspires are often far from traditional. Like landscape-driven art, Eight Ounce Fred, a funky little…
Infused with more theatricality–and more songs–than any other play in the Shakespearean canon, yet lacking a plot substantial enough to undergird the work’s inlaid histrionics, The Tempest has for centuries fascinated, confounded and inspired directors charged with making sense of the Bard’s valedictory. At times a philosophical discourse about reality…
Somewhere in the mad rush to ensure that our children will know more than we did at their age–even if they don’t yet have a clue what to do with all that knowledge–what often gets overlooked is an idea as old as humanity itself: The encouragement of a child’s creative…
There’s an old adage that says by the age of forty, a man gets the face he deserves. If that’s true, then Clint Eastwood, the producer, director and star of the death-row thriller True Crime, must have committed a capital offense or two of his own. To call it “lived…
“I hope it’s better than The Truman Show,” said the woman in line behind me at the publicized “sneak preview” of EDtv. Afterward, a man in my row declared, “That was a lot better than The Truman Show.” Pretentious high-concept films like The Truman Show often garner accolades and let…
The last decade has been an extraordinary period for Iranian cinema. Restricted by minuscule budgets, filmmakers have been forced to fall back on exactly the qualities that Hollywood thinks it can afford to ignore: character insight, social analysis and unadorned storytelling. The success of Abbas Kiarostami, Iran’s best-known moviemaker, at…
Thursday March 18 Everything and anything on wheels will roll into Currigan Exhibition Hall, 1324 Champa St., this week for the All West Auto Fest, a four-day collectors’ extravaganza that gets under way this evening from 6 to 11. This is the show for customizers, featuring a beautiful Pandora’s engine…
Journalist David McCumber headed up to Montana to become a ranch hand–from scratch–with a book deal already in hand. But the resulting experience left him with far more than material for a manuscript. McCumber’s memoir, The Cowboy Way: Seasons of a Montana Ranch, the story of how, at the age…
Calling Don Becker a “writer/performer” seems hopelessly euphemistic, though it’s the term he uses himself. Middle-aged, one-armed and equal parts angry, loony, poetic and raucously funny, the onetime Denver stand-up comic turned performance artist has plenty of surprises on his creative hot plate. That includes Danger, Will Robinson, a work…
The role of photography in contemporary art hasn’t always been black and white. Although today photography is highly prized, as recently as thirty years ago, many in the art world–including the director of the Denver Art Museum–questioned whether it qualified as fine art at all. As the story goes, the…
You’d think that plays about dysfunctional families and “personal identity issues” would have run their course by now. Well, think again, Oprah fans. Just when it seemed as if America’s collective navel-picking and self-pity-partying were headed for the theatrical graveyard, along come a couple of local productions that resurrect our…
At the movies, the fun-loving temptress has been liberating the buttoned-up clod ever since Katharine Hepburn’s leopard made off with Cary Grant’s dinosaur bone in Bringing Up Baby 61 years ago. Maybe even longer, if you count pioneer vamp Theda Bara’s effect on a long succession of speechless men. In…
The Corruptor should come as something of a relief to fans of Hong Kong superstar Chow Yun-Fat, who were mostly disappointed with his American screen debut, last year’s The Replacement Killers. Among the producers of that action thriller was John Woo, who in the Eighties and early Nineties directed five…
Out-of-body, out of your mind–that’s the typical cynical response to any mention of the elusive out-of-body experience. Still, there are persistent folks out there who say there’s nothing enchanted, new-agey or just plain nuts about OBEs at all. Four of those folks, all published authors on the subject and firm…
You’re walking in the damp, warm woods, through patches of sunlight melting into shadows, when you see something ghostly rustling there among the leaves. It’s the product of an unspeakable atrocity–a lynching. But when you realize that the lifeless form swinging there was once a woman, you’re horrified all over…
Thursday March 11 It’s a fundraiser that makes it so easy to give, you’ll hardly know you’re doing it. Here’s the deal: All you have to do is go out to eat. Nearly 100 metro-area restaurants will participate in today’s Dining Out for Life event by donating 25 percent of…
When British artist Erica Daborn moved to Los Angeles in 1987, she came empty-handed. Leaving her work back in England, she arrived in the United States with little more than her art degrees from the Winchester School of Art and the Royal College of Art and a reputation for her…
