A college professor turned full-time party host purses his lips to mitigate his simpering enthusiasm. He declares that in Denver, throwing the bash of the season requires more than just careful planning, flawless execution and a politically correct guest list. In order for his suburban soiree to be a resounding…
Brimming with the ingratiating sentiment of a John Ford movie and radiating with the honeyed elegance of an Albert Bierstadt painting, The Girl of the Golden West works its charms gradually, culminating in a touching finale that lends a heartwarming glow to Giacomo Puccini’s rough-and-tumble romance. Softly crooning “We’ll never…
It won’t take long for anyone familiar with the television original to notice that something is not right with the listless Barry Sonnenfeld-directed film version of Wild Wild West. Yes, the film features Will Smith in the role of James West, with Kevin Kline as his cerebral sidekick, Artemus Gordon…
To hear Spike Lee tell it, Summer of Sam means to be a panoramic view of the summer of 1977 in New York City–when temperatures shot into the high ’90s and power blackouts set nerves on edge, when the party agenda included snorting coke at Studio 54 and copulating with…
Woe be to the scribbler who presumes to rewrite a master–unless he is so deft that his invasion of privacy produces something new and exciting. Enter British writer/director Oliver Parker, who has the nerve to meddle with Oscar Wilde’s sublime farce An Ideal Husband–and the skill to pull it off…
When this year’s PrideFest march takes off down East Colfax Avenue on Sunday, it will be as much a salute to the gay-rights movement’s past as it is a celebration of gains to be proud of today. There’ll be the usual banners and costumes, but at the forefront will march…
Some people will do anything for attention. But anything sometimes leads to art–though it might be the kind of art that’s played out on street corners for a handful of change. This weekend, a horde of street performers will swarm into downtown Denver for the seventh annual US West Buskerfest…
Thursday June 24 It’s Greek to us–and you, and everybody else–when the Greek Festival ’99, one of Denver’s oldest ethnic celebrations, returns for its 34th year. Featuring a craft market, import bazaar, taverna and live entertainment, the festival has always been its own best advertisement. But maybe everyone’s favorite reason…
The Women of the West Museum is alive and well, but at the moment, you can wander its halls only in cyberspace. Museum spokeswoman Jeannie Patton thinks it’s just fine being a museum without walls for now; like pragmatic women throughout time, the people behind the scenes at WOW are…
Thursday June 17 Bug frenzy is about to break loose at the Denver Botanic Gardens, 1005 York St., where they’re trying something different this summer. Get a preview tonight from 5:30 to 8:30 at the Bugaloo!, an opening celebration for the whole family announcing the arrival of Dave Rogers’s Big…
She is the most unexpected of pleasures–slender, dark-haired, with a voice like Mexican honey…and all of nine years old. When Nayeli Meza-Gallegos began to sing at the Cinco de Mayo celebration last month at El Tejado restaurant, forks full of refried beans and bottles of Pacifico beer halted mid-air, and…
By a lucky accident of scheduling, the Denver Art Museum is presenting a pair of shows that provide visitors with a striking juxtaposition. On the seventh floor, in sumptuously appointed galleries, is Art in the Age of Queen Victoria: Treasures From the Royal Academy of Arts, a traveling exhibition showcasing…
Alcoholism, journalism, communism, racism, Christian fundamentalism, tell-all autobiographies and the uses and abuses of plant food all surface as topics of debate in Sarah Fisher Lowe’s When the Wood Is Green, a world-premiere play that comprises Program Two of the Colorado Women Playwrights’ Festival. As if all of those subjects…
A few years before the entertainment business became the state religion, off-Broadway playwright Sam Shepard wrote Angel City, a surreal satire about Hollywood’s gangrenous grip on the American national character. A wicked and prescient take on the same industry that would eventually make Shepard into a bit of a celluloid…
Simon West, the director of The General’s Daughter, the new thriller starring John Travolta and Madeleine Stowe, likes the kind of close-ups that bore into an actor’s face, exposing every clogged pore and mascara smudge. In the film, his camera also tracks in to capture the thick layer of sweat…
Disney departed from its usual practice of basing big, animated features on classic literature or myth when it made what has proved to be one of the studio’s most popular films ever, The Lion King. Yet just barely beneath its surface, that film had a streak of xenophobia carried almost…
Back in the early Seventies, Ed Neal was a professional actor and part-time drama student at the University of Texas when a shoestring film crew came to campus looking for actors. A Shakespeare student who had already worked with actress Sandy Duncan in a touring production, Neal looked at the…
Thursday June 10 Coloradans have an ongoing love affair with their Western heritage–even if they came here from New Joisey. Place of birth notwithstanding, there’s an unending demand in these parts for that Lonesome Dove kind of lore. If you fall into the category that craves such entertainment, a new…
If Grant Wood had moved his artist’s eye a few acres to the left of the couple he depicted in “American Gothic”–the classic 1930 image of a gaunt bespectacled farmer gripping a pitchfork and standing beside his solemn wife–the painter might have seen rolling acres of earth, broken only by…
As we near the end of the 1900s, it’s interesting to notice that the world of the visual arts is wide open, with a staggering profusion of artistic visions. Quite literally, anything goes. There are so many competing styles, ranging from straight traditionalism to the wildest fringes of conceptual art,…
There is, near the end of the spy-spoof sequel Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, a dick joke. It begins like many run-of-the-mill dick jokes, of which the rest of the film is almost entirely composed, but it blossoms into one stellar, protracted, deftly executed, masterful dick joke. It…
Pretentiousness masquerading as profundity; self-indulgence masquerading as art. The Loss of Sexual Innocence, the dreadful new film from writer/director Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas, One Night Stand), joins the ranks of the worst films ever made. On the surface, this statement may seem harsh and heartless–but it will strike anyone…
