The conducting style of Richard Strauss stood in marked contrast to the flamboyant antics of other twentieth-century maestros. In fact, violinist Yehudi Menuhin once noted, when Strauss took to the podium, there was very little evidence that the great German musician was actually conducting. Nevertheless, a close look at vintage…
Near the end of Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 play A Doll House, Nora is compelled to choose between living with her patronizing husband or leaving him (and her adoring children) in order to pursue an independent life of self-realization. After a gut-wrenching, twenty-minute battle of wills with her befuddled mate, Nora…
From its very first frame, Neil Jordan’s The Butcher Boy whooshes us inside the rollicking, deranged world of twelve-year-old Francie Brady (Eamonn Owens). Francie is a redheaded roustabout who lives with his alcoholic “Da” (Stephen Rea) and screw-loose mother (Aisling O’Sullivan) in a small town in northern Ireland in the…
The single joke that has to power The Big Hit from start to finish is that the nice, polite suburban boy who wants everybody to like him and who meekly takes guff from the nerdy clerk at the video store is also a cold-blooded hitman who has whacked a hundred…
It was just a matter of time until hoops junkie and courtside loudmouth Spike Lee got around to making a basketball picture. It’s called He Got Game, and it means to be, in part, Lee’s antidote to his bluntly stated claim that “most sports movies suck.” It takes a talent…
Angel Vigil is a walking, talking, Hispanic-culture-spoutin’ machine of a man. Best of all, he’s powered by his mom’s secret chile recipe–the only product of folk wisdom he’s not more than happy to divulge. That one might get him into trouble, but the rest is what he lives for. Vigil…
Thursday April 23 Some folks would just put their tails between their legs and hide in the nearest closet after being dissed for radical politics by the President of the United States, but onetime assistant attorney general nominee Lani Guinier has not backed up an inch. The Harvard law professor…
In 1991, New York City native Julie Dash made Daughters of the Dust, a gorgeous pastiche of a film dense with African symbolism and a distinctly feminine spirituality. Set in the 1890s on a remote South Carolina sea island, it documents life among members of the Peazant family, Gullah people…
Anyone even remotely interested in tracing the course of contemporary art in Colorado over the past few decades will want to take in a pair of marvelous shows that focus on major, established local artists. But move fast–they’re closing soon. The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art is feting venerable painter…
Before you declare once and for all your utter disinterest in the private lives (not to mention the private parts) of public figures, take a gander at British playwright Alan Bennett’s intellectual farce, Kafka’s Dick. Far more than an underhanded jab at a deified writer’s supposed anatomical shortcomings, Bennett’s play…
In the days when radio was king, Americans seemed as united in spirit as at any point in their history. True, much of what was broadcast was merely sweet-sounding, thinly veiled propaganda (FDR’s Fireside Chats, for instance, weren’t much more than feel-good campaign messages). But the big-band music that came…
Give all the folks who finally got The Object of My Affection to the multiplex credit for perseverance. In the course of its decade-long journey from page to screen, this much-troubled tale about the unrequited love affair of a heterosexual social worker and a gay first-grade teacher has gone through…
In writer-director James Toback’s quicksilver sex comedy Two Girls and a Guy, Robert Downey Jr. plays Blake Allen, a struggling New York actor who lives in a spacious loft in SoHo he probably can’t afford. He’s a pampered prince who has worked out for himself a cozy romantic subterfuge: He…
Peter Howitt’s Sliding Doors is a romantic fantasy blessed with such intelligence, charm and lethal wit that most viewers probably won’t notice that its hip and plucky heroine, an embattled London publicist named Helen, is played by an American actress affecting a clipped British accent. What they will notice is…
When Glen Hanket and his bride, Susan, went on their honeymoon, they didn’t go to Paris or a Caribbean island, or even to Niagara Falls. Instead, they took a year off from their workaday lives to walk from Maine to Oregon, picking up roadside litter along the way. Hanket, usually…
Thursday April 16 If you like your bluegrass slightly slick and not so whiny, the Nashville Bluegrass Band has your number. The Grammy-grabbin’ quintet, which includes one small pickin’ legend after another, blends the old-time traditions pioneered by the likes of Bill Monroe with more updated interpretations by artists such…
When you drive through the Curtis Park neighborhood, kids are the first sign of life you’ll see. They’re everywhere–all sizes, shapes and colors, running down the sidewalks, sharing bikes and bubble gum, hollering, laughing and watching over one another. It’s a good sign. It means that there are families in…
There haven’t been many negatives this past year for local lovers of photography. The hail of impressive shows began last spring with an exhibit at the Emmanuel Gallery that brought together some of Denver’s best talents. Then came a display of photography superstars from the collection of Hal Gould at…
By virtually every account, the Broadway musical is booming. At last tally, a score of productions were playing to near-record crowds on the Great White Way. Of course, this spate of musical entertainment contains its share of theme-park shtick meant to attract starry-eyed out-of-towners and a fringe group of slumming…
Moviegoers who’ve grown immune to Christopher Walken’s dark charms won’t be breaking the doors down to buy a ticket for Suicide Kings. Its centerpiece is an all-out, full-throttle dose of the Walken weirdness as he portrays a semi-retired New York mafioso who’s kidnapped by a quartet of privileged but street-stupid…
When it comes to gamesmanship and the testosterone wars, no writer in America is more obsessed than David Mamet. Whether his combatants are duking it out in a seedy Chicago real estate office (Glengarry Glen Ross) or fighting for survival in the Arctic wastes (The Edge), the story remains the…
If nothing else, the current edition of Michael Moore’s continuing self-love fest does have a great subject: the desperation hidden inside a “thriving” U.S. economy. While politicians and financial wizards point to unemployment on the wane and profits on the rise, Moore notes that the largest employer in the country…
