Once again we are being bombarded by movies in which a new generation vents its anger at the sins, real and imagined, of the older one. The most eloquent of these outcries, I think, are David O. Russell’s vivid 1996 black comedy Flirting With Disaster, in which a baffled yuppie…
Jennifer Jason Leigh, who’s played everything from an acid-tongued Jazz Age sophisticate in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle to a drug-addled Nineties narc in Rush, has a lot to live up to as the heroine in the new adaptation of Henry James’s classic Washington Square. First there’s the literary…
Thursday October 9 Clay of the land: Not long after people discovered fire and started drawing with coals on cave walls, it’s likely that they learned how to squish mud into utilitarian vessels. Pottery, like fine art, has grown up considerably in the interim, but its functionality persists–and that’s the…
Clark Richert comes by his scientific bent honestly. His two older brothers grew up to be physicists, and his younger sister is a physician. Richert followed a different trajectory, studying painting at the University of Kansas, from which he received his BFA in 1963. But the bug was in his…
In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, an old woman has left the impersonal confines of a city hospital for the warmth of her remote cabin so that she might die quietly. Grace Stiles (Judy Phelan-Hill), a lifelong mountain dweller, has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and the ninety-year-old recluse…
The first act of Sam Shepard’s play Buried Child might have you wondering if the playwright wrote his drama shortly after watching the cult classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. At many points in Shepard’s story, it seems as though an ectomorphic, sledgehammer-wielding psychopath might leap out of the shadows, screaming,…
Seven Years in Tibet feels more like Seven Days in the Movie Theater. It refuses to come to life–not even when Brad Pitt, as hirsute as a yak, wanders the frozen Himalayas with an Austrian accent that probably gave his dialogue coach the hives. It’s an epic about how an…
Now that Oliver Stone has explained to us (at some length) that the CIA killed JFK, that Nixon was a paranoid loser, but not quite the paranoid loser his enemies have always imagined, and that violence in America is really a conspiracy between the celebrity-hungry public and the cynical mass…
Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s La Promesse is that rare thing, a coming-of-age drama that carries real moral weight without seeming ponderous and transforms a hot political topic into flesh-and-bone drama. The story introduces us to Igor (Jeremie Renier), a fifteen-year-old Belgian boy who’s forced to live a double life in…
Thursday October 2 Lions and tigers and hippos: While the highfalutin’ crowd packs Cirque du Soleil’s LoDo big top this month for swanky circus fare, the rest of us can simply experience the Greatest Show on Earth. The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus–featuring old-fashioned carnival attractions such as…
R. Craig Miller, curator of the Architecture, Design and Graphics department at the Denver Art Museum, is out of step with the current trend in curating–and thank goodness for that. Too many curators today dispense with such inconvenient details as history and style, relying instead on their own instincts and…
If you’re like most people, chances are there’s a situation from your past, oft-told at small gatherings, that has always seemed worthy to you of dramatization. “After all,” you say to yourself after having regaled a cozy audience of acquaintances with your oddly funny, slightly embellished tale, “people keep telling…
“I want to yell things in newspapers,” one character says in Leslie Ayvazian’s play Nine Armenians. The granddaughter of a prominent minister who fled his native Armenia for freedom in America, she intends to tell anyone who will listen that her people’s suffering–which remains palpable today–has been ignored by humankind…
The fact that director Gary Fleder imposed the dismal Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead on Denver and the world is no good reason to kick his next movie in the butt. There are plenty of other reasons. For one, Kiss the Girls is a movie about a…
The adventurous moviegoer who doesn’t mind wrestling with a little bafflement will probably find many things to admire in Wim Wenders’s The End of Violence–not least its coolly ironic title, the Germanic vigor with which it seeks to whip the causes, effects and flagrant merchandising of violence into a heady…
Kevin Corrigan doesn’t act so much as he seems to stumble from scene to scene, like a guy who doesn’t follow a script as much as his own internal stage directions. He’s got skin so pale it’s almost translucent, and he wears the face of someone who’s always this far…
Thursday September 25 Novel ideas: The last time author Lisa See came through these parts, it was to promote On Gold Mountain, a fascinating history/memoir of her multiracial Chinese-American family. With that story out of the way, See has switched over to fiction, and she should do just fine, considering…
It’s no surprise that the name Arthur Szyk is unfamiliar. And not just because of all those consonants. First, Szyk’s chosen forms of expression–miniature painting, illustration and illumination–are hardly the kinds of things that lead to fame and fortune. Then there’s the fact that, instead of working in some modern…
By the time the curtain falls on David Mamet’s Oleanna, you’re likely to have changed your mind several times about whose side is more “right” in the two-character drama. You’re also bound to gain new insight into a misunderstood, sometimes-maligned playwright. To begin with, the play examines political correctness, sexual…
Shouldering the tools of his trade, a gaunt figure walks on to the stage, opens his artist’s easel and begins to paint. He dons a hat emblazoned with burning candles that set his canvas aglow, while a backdrop reflects dual self-portraits of the man’s face. In this first moment of…
Small world, Hollywood. So damnably small (if not downright small-minded) that producers half-crazed by designer-brand seltzer and rampant profit motive are now starting to lift concepts for entire movies from the acceptance speeches of Academy Award winners. Case in point: The moment Scott Rudin, who’s downloaded truckloads of cash from…
Okay. Drop a billionaire know-it-all, a cocky fashion photographer and a slavering Kodiak bear into the Alaskan wilderness and tell ’em to fight it out. The smart money would be on the bear (he knows the territory), but because the perpetrators of The Edge profess to be more interested in…
