Thrills for the week

Thursday April 17 Purple prose: Controversial scholar, feminist and prize-winning author Alice Walker is best known for her bestseller The Color Purple and the ensuing inspirational Steven Spielberg flick. But her newest book, Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism, is a whole different kettle of fish, collecting…

Diversity Rules

It’s been anything goes in the art world since the 1980s, and the upside of that scattershot approach to culture is that there’s something for everyone in the local galleries. The current spring shows range from sophisticated contemporary expressions to solid traditional offerings–and nearly everything in between. At the cutting-edge…

Tapped Out

You can’t go wrong with the Gershwin boys. No matter how you stack their tunes, they still buzz after all these years. And they buzz best with a snazzy tap-dance routine to bolster them–like the bright numbers in My One and Only, a vulgarized revision of the 1927 film Funny…

Road Show

Denver native Steven Dietz has had eighteen plays produced–several of which even made it to Denver (notably, God’s Country, The Lonely Planet and Trust). That distinguished career got another boost last week in Louisville, Kentucky, where Dietz’s new play, Private Eyes, received its premiere at the Humana Festival of New…

Low Voltage in D.C.

JFK used the White House as his brothel. In the end, Nixon reduced it to a one-man loony bin. And the current occupant, by all accounts, has converted the place into the priciest bed-and-breakfast on the planet. How can Hollywood fantasists hope to compete with the extremities of actual presidential…

Choosing Sides

Nobody is going to seriously accuse writer-director Alexander Payne of being chicken. For his first feature, the hilarious Citizen Ruth, not only has he chosen the number-one issue a filmmaker is likely to get killed over–abortion and a woman’s right to make a personal decision on the subject–but he’s made…

Heat of the Moment

Return we must with brash Kevin Smith to the place that inspires him: suburban New Jersey. Chasing Amy is Smith’s third feature in as many years, and neither his use of color film stock nor–surprise!–his breakout from shooting in one room much distinguishes his latest outing from its predecessors, the…

Thrills for the week

Thursday April 10 The write stuff: Writer Mona Simpson has a real gift for weaving fiction out of the threads of autobiography. What’s really amazing is how she manages to do it without boring anyone to tears. Simpson’s notable 1986 debut novel, Anywhere But Here, and its followup, The Lost…

Life’s a Stitch

Among the many mindless prejudices that enjoy wide acceptance in the art world, several stand out. One is the notion that physical and emotional struggles are good for artistic development–the concept of the “starving artist.” This persistent romantic myth takes a real toll on artists even today, despite the fact…

TV Guile

Playwright David Rabe savages Hollywood–particularly the Hollywood of television production–in his caustic Hurly Burly. And he doesn’t bother with the most visible life forms–stars, directors and writers. Instead he goes for the bottom-feeders, the little guys in the casting office who live off of mother Tube and feed off of…

Hitting the Century Mark

Ever since the semi-mystical Swedish writer Selma Lagerlsf won the 1909 Nobel Prize for Literature, a rumor’s been going around that the fix was in. The Swedish Academy, detractors say, had favored a native daughter who made her only real contribution to world culture in 1924–when she inadvertently launched Greta…

Inventing the ’50s

Have you heard? In the 1950s, much of America–particularly the typical small town in the Midwest–was sexually repressed and stupidly class-conscious. Many marriages were long-suffering disasters, and goods were often more important than feelings. But the emergence of Elvis, college enrollment for women and the simmering rebellion of youth signaled…

It’s a Hit, Man

There are way too many movies about hit men, but that shouldn’t dissuade you from seeing Grosse Pointe Blank. It’s not quite like any other movie–let alone one about a hit man. That may be because it’s a hit-man movie crossed with a high-school-reunion comedy, and the two genres mesh…

Bull Fighter

Over the past five years, action star Jean-Claude Van Damme has become one of America’s leading importers of foreign talent. In 1993 he hired Hong Kong action ace John Woo to direct Hard Target. For last year’s Maximum Risk, he brought over Ringo Lam. And now he has used a…

Boot Camp

Could the release of a three-and-a-half-hour director’s cut of the 1982 nautical spectacular Das Boot reflect some mass Oedipal desire to get closer to Mother Earth’s core as the millennium approaches? Perhaps. But there’s nothing vaguely feminine about Das Boot, the kind of man’s-man World War II adventure in which…

Thrills for the week

Thursday April 3 Well-versed: It’s the little things in life that make it more palatable, and perhaps that’s why National Poetry Month deserves attention. Or at least more attention than what’s afforded by a few bad jokes. The art of verse, after all, serves no pragmatic purpose; it’s there simply…

One Foot in the Mouth

The Denver Center Theatre Company presents a wild and woolly world premiere of One Foot on the Floor, a farce based on French playwright Georges Feydeau’s Le Dindon, and the results are mixed: plenty of laughs, but a slightly nasty taste left in the mouth when it’s all over. But…

Gotta Dance

The longest-running Broadway musical in history, A Chorus Line still has a few kicks left in its routine. Dated though it is, a bit slow of wit and just a tad sentimental, the show nevertheless gets at some tough truths and ends with a bang, not a whimper. The Broadway…

Form Follows Dysfunction

On its surface, The Daytrippers probably seems like your generic ’90s American independent let’s-get-our-friends-together-and-make-a-movie movie. Shot in Long Island and Manhattan in sixteen days for about a half-million dollars, with a cast including the inevitable Parker Posey and the almost equally inevitable Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott–where was Eric Stoltz?–it…

Canonizing Kilmer

When Val Kilmer walked away from the Batman franchise, it was only a matter of time before he offered up his own competing brand. The Saint isn’t just his answer to Batman–it’s a full-length commercial for all the Saint movies to come. There’s a breezy effrontery in the ploy; Kilmer…

Thrills for the week

Thursday March 27 All aboard! Extreme sports and extreme music take a ride together on the slopes this weekend during UnVailed ’97: The Ultimate Band & Board Event, a spring snow extravaganza in Vail designed to appeal to the shaved, tattooed and pierced crowd. Or to the rest of you…

Chinese Food for Thought

The lot of the contemporary Chinese artist can’t be an easy one. To begin with, there are the inevitable comparisons of their work with all of the other Chinese art of the last few thousand years–a pesky history that constitutes the oldest, and therefore the longest, continuous thread in the…