A 1992 Nobel laureate whose work is the extraordinary sum of disparate yet intertwining parts, black West Indian poet and playwright Derek Walcott grew up on a rare fusion of Shakespearean language and island patois that ultimately transcends all possible racial bonds. He’s always simply written as a man first,…
Somewhere under the glossy imbecility of Varsity Blues lurks an idea that could make a great American movie: a coming-of-age story in a setting where no one else has come of age, a place where the hero must find his way to maturity without a mentor. The setting, in this…
Because it revealed the coke-snorting, ego-fueled corruption of Hollywood in the early 1980s with such acid wit, David Rabe’s play Hurlyburly became a huge audience hit when it burst onto Broadway in 1984. Here was the inside stuff from the Left Coast, gotten up in a frenetic new language combining…
Thursday January 7 Okay, okay–maybe you don’t want to know. But just in case you do, an outfit calling itself Lean Weighs is conducting Body Fat Screenings at metro-area King Soopers locations throughout the month. For a $10 fee, they’ll break down your weight into fat, water and organ categories;…
As any artist will tell you, cooperative galleries can be flighty endeavors, easily ravaged by lack of organization and/or funds, in no particular order. So it’s encouraging to note that Core New Art Space, one of Denver’s most enduring co-ops, has managed to remain intact since it debuted with four…
Michael Connelly always knew he wanted to write crime novels; once dipped in the noir Los Angeleno universe of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, he was hooked on the detective genre for life. But Connelly had to go to boot camp before carving his own smoky niche in the gumshoe chain:…
The great attorneys of our time–Tom Cruise, Susan Sarandon, Tom Hanks–must now make room in the firm for a new partner. John Travolta, who in past lives has been a disco king, a hip hitman and a deep-fried presidential candidate, reinvents himself in A Civil Action as a greedy personal-injury…
Writer-director Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, the filmmaker’s adaptation of James Jones’s 1962 bestseller about the World War II battle for Guadalcanal, arrives in theaters with an almost unbearable weight of expectation. After graduating in the first class at AFI’s Advanced Film Studies program and working briefly as a…
Ed Ward’s been hosting open-microphone poetry readings in the Denver area for more than twenty years, and not without good reason. His regular Friday night readings at the Mercury Cafe adhere loosely to the Neal Cassady “GO!” school of anything’s allowed, and Ward says that’s what makes them special. Poets…
First Night Colorado’s been all over the place since its inception in 1988–the event migrated from the then-quiet 16th Street Mall to the old Elitch Gardens to the Colorado Convention Center. Over the years, there have been walkabouts, fireworks finales and kaleidoscopic festivities crammed together under one roof, but a…
Thursday December 31 It’s one year short of the millennium, but that’s no reason to stay home: This year, think of New Year’s Eve as a preview for next year’s blowout. There’s no shortage of ways to test the waters: Kids get into the act early at the Children’s Museum…
In the media hoopla surrounding the Denver Center Theatre Company’s 1998 Tony Award for outstanding regional theater, most theatergoers didn’t notice that the award was given for a body of work that wasn’t even produced last season. More to the point, the coveted prize (which is awarded annually by the…
Geniuses often come across unimpressively in the movies. Amadeus presented Mozart as a giggling fop. Both Kirk Douglas and Tim Roth gave us Van Gogh as a pathetic head case. I.Q.’s Albert Einstein was a cupid-playing old duffer. Ken Russell’s freaky depictions of Liszt and Mahler speak for themselves. When…
Best Ten Movies of 1998: 1. Saving Private Ryan. Steven Spielberg’s magnificent, harrowing D day epic is one of the great war movies ever made–and the most disturbing. Can The Thin Red Line match up? 2. Happiness. Director Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse) returns to his native New Jersey,…
In 1933, producer Merian C. Cooper, director Ernest B. Schoedsack, and pioneering animator Willis O’Brien created one of this century’s most indelible and powerful archetypes: King Kong. Then they did a peculiar thing: As if appalled at what they had wrought–but also delighted at the money it made them–they spent…
Thursday December 24 Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow–or not. Snow or no snow, you can get in the holiday spirit without leaving the comfortable confines of your home (assuming you need no last-minute gag ties to wrap up for Uncle Ernie). KCFR-FM/90.1 will air Colorado Public…
There’s a new cowboy in LoDo, or at least part of one. In recent weeks, his image began to emerge on the side of a building at 1617 Wazee Street, bearing the inimitable mark of Western watercolorist William Matthews, whose high-priced and admired works reside in the gallery within. Already…
What are dreams made of? For Coloradans John Jancik and Ken Zerbst and fellow members of their Top of the World Expedition Team, they were made of little more than delicate tundra, sea water, ice and snow. The goal? First, the team hoped to plant an American flag on Oodaaq…
Theodor Seuss Geisel won a pair of Academy awards for writing Design for Death, a 1947 film documentary about Japanese warlords, and Gerald McBoing Boing, a 1950 animated cartoon. But he was better known as Dr. Seuss, the prolific author who launched a new trend in children’s literature with such…
Human beings have reveled in the mocking of solemnity as early as the twelfth century, when subversive subdeacons rang church bells improperly as part of the annual Feast of Fools and food-fighting choir boys mischievously sang out of tune during the Feast of the Boy Bishop. It comes as no…
DreamWorks’ grandiose attempt at an animated feature for adults is a flimsy musical about Moses–a Sunday-school filmstrip writ ultra-large and decked out with the spectacle of Hollywood Bible epics. Slender sermons nestle among flashy action sequences and diaphanous fashion statements from the more tasteful pages of the Nefertiti’s Secret catalogue…
At the heart of Pat O’Connor’s rich, bittersweet Dancing at Lughnasa lies the quaint notion that once upon a time, people–especially women–whose youthful dreams were dashed, even those who lived entire lives of quiet desperation, might attain a state of grace, a kind of ascetic nobility to which the rest…
