If you’re nostalgic for the cockeyed let-it-all-out gabfests of the late John Cassavetes, She’s So Lovely will seem like dejà vu all over again. Cassavetes wrote the script more than a decade ago, and now his son Nick–whose first feature, Unhook the Stars, starred his mother, Gena Rowlands–has directed it…
Thursday August 21 Walk in beauty: There’s always someone marching to a different drummer, and in the local art community, it’s Cherry Creek North, where galleries go against the grain of the “First Friday” arts stroll and throw their own Third Thursday Art Walks. But that’s okay–it just gives us…
Time has a way of slipping by when you’re not looking, but don’t worry. While you’re distracted, studio executives are keeping their usual keen eyes on the calendar, tabulating the simple economic arithmetic of boomer nostalgia. Hmmm…1997 minus 1957 equals 40 years. Forty years of nostalgic forgetfulness multiplied by the…
When the beautiful entomologist rips open the chest cavity of a huge, bloodthirsty insect in the sci-fi nightmare Mimic, it turns into Thoracic Park. This movie, like Spielberg’s, features evolution gone haywire and dramaturgy gone to hell. In the prologue, the heroine–the reckless and courageous (or foolhardy and stupid) Dr…
It’s as old as sin, the story of the hopeless square liberated by the freethinker. It’s also as new as several current movies–including Shall We Dance?, wherein a weary suburbanite is revived by the fox-trot, and Dream With the Fishes, in which a suicidal businessman hits the glory road with…
Think Meryl Streep handled the raging white water and the redneck villains pretty well in The River Wild? Come now. That was child’s play. Still like the way La Femme Nikita blew those four-star Euro-creeps away in the middle of their pate de foie gras? Forget about it–namby-pamby, art-movie philosophizing…
Thursday August 14 Next of Keen: Cult favorites often get that way because of a quirk; for guitarist Robert Earl Keen, it’s an oddball brand of deadpan humor that’s just weird enough to elicit double takes wherever he plays. But on that second look, you’ll usually discover that Keen has…
The world of contemporary art has seen some bad days in the 1990s. It all started when an economic slump brought the art boom of the 1980s to a crashing halt in New York City, the epicenter of the global market. The severity of the resulting freefall is illustrated by…
The hottest thing in Lanford Wilson’s Burn This, now at the Acoma Center, are the performances. The crack cast assembled by Curious Productions is so at home on stage that it’s a privilege to watch it work. Under the savvy direction of Kathryn Maes, the four actors create a private,…
Think about it: Musicals are absurd. The minimal plots coast along on thin ice and then, suddenly, for no good reason, somebody erupts into song. The music is usually as thin as the plot line, and the characterizations are really about striking appropriate poses. Unless you’re talking about the achievements…
Out of the plain strivings of the British working and middle classes, Mike Leigh always manages to make art, even if his movies never announce themselves as such. His latest, Career Girls, is a more modest thing than last year’s superb Secrets & Lies, but he once more finds the…
The cops in Cop Land carry on like a bunch of goombahs. On the take from the Mob, they mimic the Mob. The fuzzy line dividing cops and crooks is the subject of many a strong police movie, but Cop Land goes a step further–it says there is no line…
As another indictment of the male animal and American business ethics, Neil Labute’s In the Company of Men pretty much has it all. The playwright/filmmaker claims–rather coyly, I think–that this pitch-black tragicomedy about a pair of self-absorbed yuppie buddies who hatch a plot to exploit a beautiful deaf woman for…
Thursday August 7 Tale-telling hearts: Call it escapism, but everyone loves a story. And that simple truth is what fuels the annual Rocky Mountain Storytelling Festival, a weekend retreat at Palmer Lake where you and your family can get deliciously lost as much as you like, at least for as…
When we tuned in last fall, there were two groups vying to open a new museum in Denver dedicated to contemporary art. One group included such well-known Denver artists as Dale Chisman, Mark Sink and Linde Schlumbohm. This group dubbed itself “CoMoCA,” which stands for the Colorado Museum of Contemporary…
Playwright Tom Donaghy’s Minutes From the Blue Route offers a surprisingly tender, conciliatory look at a mildly dysfunctional family. And with its production of the piece, the Boulder Repertory Company has once again distinguished itself as a troupe capable of doing emotionally sophisticated work with quietly challenging material. The tensions…
Playwright David Mamet’s remarkable Speed-the-Plow is as true to the contemporary American cityscape as an Edward Hopper painting. Mamet’s tough-mouthed dialogue–always a series of interruptions and eruptions–falls with an intoxicating rhythm on the ear. His is the prose-poetry of the street, with its low-life hustlers, as well as the equally…
Jerry Fletcher, the hero of Conspiracy Theory, is a comic, glamorous variation on Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Like Travis, he’s a New York cabbie obsessed with protecting a woman from the world’s hidden malignancies. Unlike Travis, Jerry snaps when he achieves sanity. Mel Gibson has been almost too willing…
Admirers of director Tony Gatlif’s enchanting look at Romany life and music, Latcho Drom, are now in for a treat of another sort. With Mondo, the world’s leading (perhaps only) Algerian-Gypsy-French filmmaker has crafted a poetic fable about friendship, human displacement and belonging that strikes all kinds of chords in…
If you like your summer movies indistinguishable from video games, your heroes straight out of Toon Town and, just to gild the lily, wise-cracking, clown-faced villains who chomp on pizza topped with wriggling green larvae, then Spawn might be the picture for you. Harder-edged than Spielberg’s latest dinosaur epic or…
Thursday July 31 Out of the woods: Smooth as silk. Liquid gold. These are just two of the ways one might describe the facile voice of Kevin Mahogany, the male jazz vocalist generally named these days by those in the know as the Joe Williams or Billy Eckstine of his…
For many years, the exhibition calendar in the art world featured a preordained hierarchy of shows. In the fall, galleries, museums and other venues presented their most important events. Then, special exhibits launched the winter holiday season. The spring and summer were traditionally the times when the art world would…
