Comics and the fine arts have overlapped “back as far as Hogarth,” muses Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art director Cydney Payton. “Maybe even further back,” chimes in Barbara Shark, chairman of the BMoCA board. Payton and Shark are talking about the show they co-organized, Art and Provocation (Images From Rebels),…
Plays about the theater have enjoyed a healthy success for at least 2,500 years, ever since Greek dramas were followed on the day’s bill of fare by comedies that made fun of the serious action preceding them. Somehow, audiences never tire of listening to the lamentations of people paid to…
A few years from now, an enterprising promoter is going to reap a considerable fortune repackaging the hits of, say, Madonna, Michael Jackson and Lyle Lovett. But the show won’t be sold to American audiences by sending it out on the usual concert circuit. Nor will it seize its target…
The 1950s-era Los Angeles of L.A. Confidential is Noir Central. Its denizens are tattooed in shadow; the play of light and dark in the streets, the police stations and the morgues, is fetishistic. The post-war L.A. touted in the travelogues and billboards is a boomtown, but what we actually see…
Every film adaptation of a pre-existing work has its own unique set of problems; in the case of Jocelyn Moorhouse’s A Thousand Acres, the problem is compounded. Not only was Jane Smiley’s 1991 novel a Pulitzer Prize-winning best-seller with a large number of (presumably) devoted fans, but the book was…
In Jonathan Nossiter’s brooding Sunday, the oft-maligned borough of Queens is seen as a snowy wasteland of crumbling warehouses and lonely subway stations through which the lame and the halt wander like zombies. Just the place, Nossiter reasons, to set a psychological mystery about loss of identity and the power…
Thursday September 11 The writing on the wall: From Toulouse-Lautrec’s Folies-Bergere can-can girls to the late Joe Camel, poster images have filled our modern cultural landscape with a graphic march of political and social messages along with purely commercial entreaties. The Colorado International Invitational Poster Exhibition, a biennial showcase sponsored…
“It was a hell of a decision to make,” says director Paul Hughes. “This is my life. The gallery is my identity.” But even so, Hughes is closing Inkfish Gallery, his life for over twenty years, at the end of the month. Back in 1975, Hughes was the regional manager…
Something has happened to the experimental theater. Time was when an alternative-theater piece was certain to be as iconoclastic as it was entertaining–when performance pieces opposed in form and content to mainstream theater practices and conventions would draw an audience for both their novelty and their political and social commentaries,…
This has been a rough year at the movies for British working stiffs, but a great year for feel-good stories of their redemption. In the art-house hit Brassed Off!, coal miners cut loose from their jobs by Thatcherite economics found solace and self-respect in the endurance of the company’s brass…
The Disappearance of Garcia Lorca aims to cover a great deal of ground. It renders, with picturesque splendor, Spain just before its civil war and the dramatic fate of impassioned, iconoclastic Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca during the rise of Spanish fascism. Still, no matter how earnestly it attempts to…
The Game is a puzzle picture, and beyond its premise, there isn’t much you can divulge without giving the show away. I’m not one of those critics who like to write Stop reading now if you plan to see this movie, so I’m tempted to wrap things up right now…
Thursday September 4 The Rio thing: Moonlight on water, feijoada and mangoes, miles of virgin sand, a gentle bossa nova, your lover’s eyes–they all fall gently into the romantic territory of Ivan Lins, a Brazilian pop composer/performer who pads like a boy from Ipanema in the footsteps of the late…
Painting is a very old-fashioned method of making art. After all, it’s been around for at least 15,000 years (as proven by cave paintings). Astoundingly, over those years painting has changed very little, except in terms of style. Otherwise, it’s done the way it’s always been done: An artist applies…
On the basis of having played a lovably meddlesome Beverly Hills teenager in Clueless and Batgirl in the latest McSequel of the dismal Batman series, young Alicia Silverstone hasn’t quite hit full stride. There may not be much time, but she’s trying. Excess Baggage looks very much like an attempt…
For a movie so enamored of its own peculiar charms (see also: Gump, Forrest), Alan Wade’s Julian Po can exert quite a tug on the audience. It’s self-consciously “literary” and shamelessly derivative, but the germ of mystery inside it pulls you along. It’s full of ersatz gravity and precious philosophizing,…
Thursday August 28 Queen of the roost: Once upon a time, all she wanted to do was have some fun, and she did–but former back-up singer Sheryl Crow has come full circle to settle comfortably on a music-business pedestal reserved for few artists, especially female ones. Now she’s running her…
New Mexico’s centuries-long traditions in the fine arts cast a deep shadow over Colorado art, both for better and for worse. It’s not that we don’t have our own strong traditions, particularly in painting and printmaking. It’s just that there’s so much going on in New Mexico that it often…
Director Bill Duke’s valentine to Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, the king of the Harlem numbers racket back in the 1930s, is called Hoodlum. But that hardly seems appropriate. If Duke and his backers at United Artists Pictures wanted to remain true to the spirit of the piece, they would have titled…
The low-budget phenom of the month is a 28-year-old Los Angeleno named Miguel Arteta, whose first feature, Star Maps, comes decorated with the usual indie-hero stories about borrowed cars, unauthorized location shots and crew lunches catered by Mom. It’s also encrusted with enough tortured metaphor to sink a sophomore lit…
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…
