It’s hard to pinpoint just what makes a mystery mysterious. But if you hard-boil it down, it’s all about the atmosphere. For Raymond Chandler, it was a Los Angeles full of mooks and wise guys and gorgeous dames; for James Lee Burke, it’s something lurking under the surface of a…
Despite recent events in Jasper, Texas, it’s difficult to imagine a group of modern white men brazen enough to pose for a snapshot as they gather around a black man’s mangled and lynched body swaying from a tree amid the tranquility of a Southern forest. More difficult still is to…
A couple of years ago, playwright Arthur Miller sounded something of a death knell for commercial theater when he remarked, “The theater culture on Broadway is dead. You can’t expect people to pay forty, fifty, sixty, a hundred dollars to sit down for a straight play.” Ironically, the acerbic dramatist…
You have to love the way Terry McMillan does literary research. On a spur-of-the-moment vacation trip to Jamaica, the author of Disappearing Acts and Waiting to Exhale says, she indulged in a mad, revitalizing fling with a man twenty years younger. Despite the rum punches and the hot and heavy,…
As the lights came up after a screening of the new Neil LaBute movie Your Friends and Neighbors, a colleague next to me growled disapprovingly, “That was a nasty movie.” For LaBute –whose debut film, In the Company of Men, is probably the worst date movie ever made–this comment would…
Seen one way, Manuel Pradal’s Marie Baie des Anges is a self-consciously artsy examination of teen anxiety and teen violence done up with pretensions and gewgaws that the most self-absorbed auteur might disdain. Seen in another light, it’s a disturbing vision that manages to capture, through bizarre editing, fractured narrative…
Over 25 years old and, proudly, the third-oldest continuous Chicano theater troupe in the country, Denver’s El Centro Su Teatro defines what a grassroots cultural arts endeavor is all about. Born of radical movements in the ’60s and ’70s and deeply dedicated to providing the Latino community with an artistic…
Thursday August 13 Don’t be fooled by the blah connotations: Dog Days of Summer, on exhibit at the West Gallery, 303 W. 11th Ave., is anything but, especially if you’re a fido fancier. A benefit for the A.L.I.E. Foundation, the show features all manner of dog-inspired works by local artists,…
Rod Kennedy’s laid-back drawl comes on like a friendly bear hug. It has a lot in common with the way Kennedy, founder of the legendary Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas, goes about leading his life–like it’s his main squeeze, for better or worse. In his 68 years, he’s been a…
In visual art, representations of the outside world have a formidable history–some 14,000 years’ worth. Which, of course, creates a problem for contemporary artists: How can they record external reality and still do something new? To meet this challenge, painters in recent years have advanced a variety of artistic strategies,…
John Hamburg’s independent comedy Safe Men, which got a look and a distributor at Sundance, trades on one of the oldest comic devices in moviedom: Innocence collides with corruption and changes both of them for the better. From the great silent comedian Harry Langdon, who made a high art of…
If you need new evidence of Hollywood’s current impoverishment of thought and deed, look no further than the ongoing siege against European movies. Not content to crank out sequels and recycle old TV shows into the multiplexes, the safety-first moguls have “remade” (translation: filched and dumbed-down), among others, the Godard…
The “floating world” of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japan reflected a time of urbanization and swift transitions. In turn, the great woodblock printers of the period–skilled observers of everyday life and landscape–caught the spirit of the era in vivid prints now prized by collectors around the world. One of the best…
Dr. Beverly Chico has been flipping her lid over hats for more than forty years. When the local headwear historian calls hats “houses for heads,” you only just begin to grasp the depth of her fascination. “To me, headwear is the most important item of wearing apparel,” Chico says. “The…
Thursday August 6 Oral history, folklore, tall tales and flights of fancy will all take their place around the campfire at the Rocky Mountain Storytelling Festival, an annual event in Palmer Lake that immerses participants in the art of yarn-spinning for an entire weekend. Featuring an accomplished cross-section of regional…
People in the art world–artists, dealers and collectors alike–generally eschew dressing up. As renowned writer and art collector Gertrude Stein observed in the 1930s, if you don’t have much money, you either buy clothes, or you buy art. Stein kept her own counsel in this regard, collecting a world-class assortment…
Back in the late Eighties, when a team of New York producers announced that a stage version of the classic 1952 film Singin’ in the Rain was in the works, two questions crossed the minds of every prospective audience member: “How do you pull off the rain scene in a…
As strains of “Can’t Help Falling in Love” waft through the smoke-tinged air of the Mercury Cafe, a young woman haltingly enters the local establishment’s Jungle Room and takes up residence in one of its remote corners. Her oddly vacant eyes darting to and fro, Rootie (Elizabeth Rose) stuffs a…
Nicolas Cage has never seemed more dazzling than he does in the new Brian De Palma thriller Snake Eyes. Playing Rick Santoro, a corrupt Atlantic City cop who likes to think he’s “everybody’s friend,” Cage for almost two continuous hours boogies to his own inner beat. It’s like watching a…
Anna Stockard, the high school senior facing the abyss in Susan Skoog’s Whatever, comes straight out of the dazed-and-confused school of anxiety that now dominates movies about adolescence. Anna’s father has long since vanished. Her mother is a frowzy desperado who rolls home to their suburban split-level at 7 a.m…
As tyrants of the twentieth century go, it’s hard to top Josef Stalin in the mass-murder department. He was pretty nimble with the Big Lie, too. These facts have not been lost on post-Soviet Russian filmmakers, of course: In the dawn of the free marketplace, it’s open season on Communist…
Thursday July 30 Leave it to the Colorado Dance Festival to go out with a flourish. Wrapping up the fest’s month-long tenure in Boulder is a trio of performances by New York’s David Dorfman Dance, an urbane outfit working under contemporary choreographer Dorfman, who keeps audiences on their toes with…
