Billed as the first commercial film written, directed and co-produced by American Indians, Smoke Signals could be a sign of the truth-telling breakthrough they have deserved ever since John Wayne’s cavalry undertook to slaughter the “savages,” Jay Silverheels played sidekick, and Jeff Chandler was cast as Cochise. With the possible…
The last place you want to visit in mid-winter is gray, freezing Buffalo, New York. The last people you want to see in the last place you want to visit are Jimmy and Janet Brown, a pair of comic demons so indifferent, so surreally out of touch, that they scarcely…
In The Mask of Zorro, Anthony Hopkins plays the eponymous masked hero as if he were doing Shakespeare. He’s trying to turn a kitsch hero into a real one, and his efforts are so weirdly off-key that you don’t know whether to applaud or titter. This dolorous Don Diego de…
Thursday July 9 Ben Sidran–the same Ben Sidran who played alongside Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs in an early rendition of the Steve Miller Band, the same Ben Sidran who holds a doctorate in American studies, and the same Ben Sidran who’s written definitive books about jazz musicians and documentary…
Not everyone gets famous playing with model dinosaurs in their garage. Special-effects godfather Ray Harryhausen may be the exception: Not only did he begin his career that way while still a teen in his hometown of Hollywood, but in the process he managed to change the face of the FX…
Artist, radio personality and professional speed-talker Bill Amundson has built a career out of just being Bill, which in his case means being a self-deprecating, compulsive, middle-aged Midwesterner of Norwegian descent with a distinct inability to either shut up or stop drawing. What comes out–and out and out and out–is…
A cultural notion emanating from New York–as do so many–is that the art world closes down for the summer. While this may be true in that city, which wealthy collectors, gallery owners and artists alike abandon for the seashore during the dog days, out here in the hinterlands summer is…
In keeping with the melodrama that permeates Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca, Central City Opera’s opening-night performance featured as artist Cavaradossi understudy Chad Shelton, who in the last week of rehearsals replaced a star tenor sidelined by a ruptured blood vessel in one of his vocal cords. (Tenor Adam Klein, who was…
Even though Love’s Labour’s Lost isn’t one of William Shakespeare’s best-known or best-loved plays, the lyrical, ornate story is yet another example of the sentient dramatist’s incomparable ability to capture in verse the timeless truths about life’s great sea changes. And while the Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s visually stunning production of…
Michael Bay is the director of Bad Boys and The Rock and the new asteroid-attack movie Armageddon–which should be called The Very Big Rock. Bay has, I’m afraid, perfected a new form: His movies are trailers for themselves. Every scene is all climax and no foreplay. When it’s all over,…
Imps, waifs, big-eyed orphans and lovable mischief-makers have been the movies’ stock-in-trade since the first one-reeler cranked, and apparently they still enthrall the popcorn-munching public as completely as they torment the grownups forced to share credits with them. The presence of a braying Shirley Temple or an intractable Macaulay Culkin…
If you loved Don Rickles as the acid-tongued voice of Mr. Potato Head in Toy Story, wait till you get a load of Tommy Lee Jones’s gung-ho warmonger, Major Chip Hazard, in Small Soldiers. In Joe Dante’s uncommonly clever fantasy, Jones’s “character” is a military action figure just twelve inches…
Thursday July 2 Fans of Boogie Nights already know that the porn business is both an ugly business and a funny business. In that spirit, Ronnie Larsen’s off-Broadway success story, Making Porn, takes on the phenomenon as it occurs in the gay world, with strong shots of street wit, raunch…
The Cherry Creek Arts Festival tops almost everyone’s list of things to do in Denver over the Fourth of July weekend. The award-winning fest, taking place this weekend on the streets of Cherry Creek North, has been hailed nationwide by artists and buyers alike, and it adds a luster to…
When artistic director and choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar of Urban Bush Women launched the troupe in 1984, her vision was for an all-woman dance company that not only performed for but also educated its audience. The members would work together to affect social change while reflecting the culture of…
Sally Perisho, the highly regarded director of Metropolitan State College’s Center for the Visual Arts, has been at the eye of a whirlwind the past few weeks. Last month her gallery moved from the corner of Wazee and 17th Streets in LoDo to a pair of storefronts next to the…
Time was when an academic wit such as University of Colorado professor Sean Ryan Kelley wouldn’t have thought twice about how to direct the opening production of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. Like any other sensible college teacher, Kelley would have begun his creative odyssey by making a dutiful pilgrimage to…
The great English actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell was nearly fifty years old when she created the role of Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw’s most famous play, Pygmalion. And even though Campbell’s acclaimed swan song marked the beginning of her somewhat ignoble decline (upon visiting the grand dame in New…
The 1967 musical Dr. Dolittle, which starred Rex Harrison, was a commercial disaster for its studio, Twentieth Century Fox. The new, non-musical Fox version of this material, starring Eddie Murphy, isn’t in the same overblown category as the Harrison film–its disasters are more mundane. With all the creative range of…
Dedee Truitt, the smirky sixteen-year-old temptress who narrates and dominates Don Roos’s The Opposite of Sex, is a conniving but somehow sympathetic little shrew who’s bailed out on her feelings early in life. A kind of Lolita-without-portfolio, she gets herself pregnant by a Bible-thumping redneck from Louisiana, then sets out…
Here’s welcome news from the Emerald Isle. The obsessions of Ireland’s fledgling movie industry–religion, tragic politics and misty folklore–are nowhere to be found in Paddy Breathnach’s I Went Down. There are no glorious views of the verdant Irish countryside, no half-soused balladeering about the good old days, no impassioned cries…
Too many post-Woody Allen movies have been made about “sex in the head.” The smart, engaging Out of Sight is an action comedy about love in the head. The real thing ignites between bank robber Jack Foley (George Clooney) and U.S. Marshal Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez) when she stumbles into…
