Paul Thomas Anderson’s Hard Eight aspires to be gritty and tough and tender all at once, but its tones keep getting in one another’s way. In his feature-film debut, Anderson has conjured up the tale of a courtly old gambler, Sydney (Philip Baker Hall), who inexplicably takes under his wing…
During the first few minutes of Howard Stern’s romp through his inexplicable life, he spells out his mission: Private Parts will both convert the nonbelievers and entertain the cult. Stern wants to give you plenty of hot lesbian action (and freed from FCC restrictions, he takes real pleasure in saying…
Thursday February 27 West side, east side: A rich vein of local lore gets the nod today with a Jewish History of Denver Tour offered by the Colorado Historical Society. The traveling lecture, led by Denver resident Marjorie Hornbein, begins with an introductory talk at the Colorado History Museum, 1300…
Dale Chisman has long been known as an artist’s artist. For proof, look to the fact that several well-known local artists are among the collectors who’ve snapped up Chisman originals from his new show at 1/1 Gallery. Chisman is principally known for his paintings, but for more than three decades,…
Sure, it’s based on a loopy premise, but Lerner and Loewe’s Brigadoon still attracts audiences in droves. It’s most likely to appeal to family audiences: Kids under twelve go for the magic, while their grandparents appreciate the show’s optimistic image of an earthly paradise. Country Dinner Playhouse would seem to…
Legendary skirt-chaser Don Juan gets his in the end–at least in most of the versions of the famous story. And after seducing all those women, he would seem to deserve to burn in hell. But what if hell is a very pleasant sort of place–a kind of continuing cocktail party…
The vision of race war that Boyz N the Hood director John Singleton conjures up in Rosewood comes at a precarious moment in our national history. Polarized reactions to the O.J. Simpson verdicts have demonstrated how deep the rift between black and white remains–forty years after the civil-rights movement hit…
It has taken 22 years to release When We Were Kings, Leon Gast’s documentary about the tumultuous October 1974 Muhammad Ali-George Foreman fight in Kinshasa, Zaire, because the filmmaker’s original backers kept running into bad luck. One of them died in a plane crash; another was shot by a Liberian…
The ingredients are familiar: Donnie Brasco stars Al Pacino as a Mafia soldier and Johnny Depp as an FBI undercover agent who infiltrates the mob. But there’s a twist. Based on a true story, the film is a grunt’s-eye view of the Mafia, and it’s not remotely “operatic” or Scorsese-ish…
Thursday February 20 Zoot up: The plain truth is that grownups never outgrow the juvenile yearning to dig around in Mommy and Daddy’s closet and play dress-up. So give in. Step into those old-fashioned puttin’-on-the-Ritz duds, hit the dance floor and give your girl (or guy) a whirl across it…
There’s an old joke about the University of Colorado in Boulder: A visitor to the beautiful Italian-style campus asks a student how to find the art building, and the student replies, “It’s the ugly one.” Ah, the contradictions of the art world. Another unfortunate confluence of art and architecture can…
Humor doesn’t get any darker than Chazz Palminteri’s Faithful–at least not without getting sickening. But unlike many purveyors of black comedies, the tough-guy actor-turned-playwright manages to raise the audience’s spirits by play’s end, much as Woody Allen does in his best comedies. Palminteri skewers vanity, self-deception and especially hypocrisy, and…
Industrial Arts Theatre continues to expand Denver’s theatrical horizons with the first of what it hopes will be a long series of Colorado Women Playwrights Festivals. Running in repertory are two “programs”; the first features a full-length play, along with an amusing short, and it gets the festival off to…
January and February are good times for taking a vacation–very good times. Not because the airfares are low or because the weather sucks, but because what a movie critic must endure at the beginning of the year is so grim. It is almost impossible to maintain any semblance of optimism…
The second most important room in their houses is the boudoir, so the sophisticated French are good at sex farce. If anything, the warm-blooded Italians are even better. The occasional American moviemaker–Billy Wilder, Mike Nichols, Woody Allen–can turn the trick, too, wedding absurdity to desire and coming up with dark…
Billy Bob Thornton isn’t going to snatch the matinee-idol title away from Tom Cruise, Kevin Costner or Denzel Washington anytime soon. At the age of 41, the former Hearts Afire regular is also a grizzled acting veteran of low-rent slasher flicks like Chopper Chicks in Zombietown and modest critical successes…
Irvin Kershner’s The Empire Strikes Back, the continuation of George Lucas’s Star Wars, is a classic fantasy in its own right. I vastly prefer it to the first film. Its textures are richer, its emotions deeper, and it’s an honest-to-Jedi movie–not a dozen jammed-together entries of a serial. On its…
Elmore Leonard’s Touch is identified on the paperback as a mystery and carried in stores next to Leonard’s celebrated crime novels (like Get Shorty). But this wan little book is actually the problem child of Leonard’s oeuvre–the only crime it involves is lack of truth in advertising, and that’s on…
Thursday February 13 Jane’s addiction: Husband-wife acting duo Linda Manning and Michael Pinney left for the East Coast several years ago after attending CU-Denver’s theater program and performing at Denver’s long-lived Changing Scene. Their literal scene change resulted in a well-received New York City production of Manning’s play Do Something…
Is it the bright clear light, the product of endless chains of cloudless days? Or is it perhaps the rugged scenery? Maybe it’s the history, mystery and charm of the ancient indigenous peoples. Whatever the reason, New Mexico has attracted accomplished painters for more than a century. And for most…
Surf’s up, Shakespeare. Tweaking the Bard is the latest rage on the stage–witness Theatre on Broadway’s current compressed version of his “compleat works”–and the Denver Center Theatre Company is hanging ten with its new production of The Comedy of Errors. It’s set on the beaches of sunny Southern California, where…
Dealing with the death of a mother is a wrenching experience for children–to say nothing of Mum herself. And that’s where playwright Edward Albee hooks you in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Three Tall Women: It’s hard not to reflect on your own family as you spiral through the dark corridors of…
