For generations, the heftier works of Leo Tolstoy have challenged undergraduate lifting power and speed-reading skills as much as they have confounded the world’s moviemakers. That dark tribute to nineteenth-century adultery, Anna Karenina, was filmed in America three times, beginning with Garbo in 1935 and ending with Jacqueline Bisset in…
Since Baby LeRoy first put the screws to W.C. Fields back in the 1930s, the intractable child who torments the cranky old man has rampaged through movie history like a wild force of nature. The most celebrated recent example, of course, saw little Macaulay Culkin befouling the burglary schemes of…
In Absolute Power, Clint Eastwood plays Luther Whitney, a master thief who burgles on little cat feet. He’s as stealthy as the Pink Panther pilferer, though not nearly as amusing. Luther, you see, is presented to us as an artist. We first see him at the National Gallery dutifully copying…
Robert E. Howard, the subject of Dan Ireland’s wonderful debut film The Whole Wide World, created the sword-and-sorcery genre with his Conan stories. Howard had a grand yet coarse-grained consciousness. His Conan stories, set in a fictitious primordial age full of demons and killers, boasted swift, cartoon-flavored action (“He moved…
Thursday February 6 World party: Musicians from the four corners of Asia are holding a mini harmonic convergence in the area tonight, offering audiences sound bites crossing the gamut from exotic and otherworldly to heart-poundingly physical to aesthetically classic and staid. There’s nothing like freedom of choice. To begin with,…
It was in the fall of 1995 that Robert Motherwell, the great New York School artist who died in 1991, gained a special place in the hearts and minds of Denver art lovers. That’s when the Denver Art Museum worked out a special deal with the Dedalus Foundation, which controls…
Fast and funny, The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged) skewers the Bard and honors him, too. In fact, the more you love Shake-speare, the more amused you’re likely to be by this jolly nonsense, now in its regional premiere. The comedy, which replaces Shake-speare’s immortal verse with game-show pandering,…
True story: A young seminary instructor was discussing the nature of evil in his class when a woman raised her hand and told him she did not believe in evil. “Really?” he said. “What do you call Auschwitz?” The student replied, “Well, it’s evil for me.” The insulated arrogance of…
Andre Techine’s Les Voleurs (Thieves) is stuffed with sex, blood and grand-theft auto, and at its heart lurks a homicide detective who’s deeply compromised himself in the investigation of a big case. But before anyone gets the wrong idea, please note that neither Clint Eastwood nor Arnold Schwarzenegger got within…
The spookiness that has seeped into first-time director Vondie Curtis Hall’s surreal action comedy Gridlock’d is the kind of dramatic bonus no moviemaker hopes for. It derives from the gang murder last September of the film’s 25-year-old co-star, Tupac Shakur, and it colors the entire length of this dark farce…
“In the constant struggle of man against nature,” the press notes inform us, “it is the most devastating adversary of all–a force… which suddenly explodes to wreak havoc and destruction on an unsuspecting population.” The notes are, of course, referring to a volcano. But…wait! Didn’t I read the same thing…
Thursday January 30 Ai on life: The compelling and beautiful works of award-winning distinguished poet Ai–the author of four published collections and a guest professor and artist at CU-Boulder–cut straight to the point, telling forthright stories of the downtrodden in a parade of cracked, unremitting voices. And accordingly, whether you’re…
The Denver Art Museum has undertaken one extensive remodeling job after another in the last few years. And the efforts have gone a long way toward increasing available space within the masterful if quirky building, the work of Italian modern master Gio Ponti and his Denver collaborator, the able James…
The only way to describe playwright August Wilson’s Seven Guitars is with superlatives: Wilson’s writing is inspired, and Israel Hicks’s casting and direction is nothing short of brilliant. The night I saw the show, it received a standing ovation from an audience that seemed floored and fascinated–and distinctly grateful for…
It may seem intriguing at first, but self-indulgent craziness gets old fast. That’s the problem with Don Nigro’s Seascape With Sharks and Dancer–it starts out well, but because the main creature is so sunk in self-pity, she doesn’t evolve. Such a failure to change may be true to life, but…
If the brutal miscarriage of British justice that drove In the Name of the Father didn’t send you running to the nearest Sinn Fein recruiter and the fiery romanticism of Michael Collins didn’t have you putting together a tidy shipment of machine guns for the Provisionals in Belfast, maybe Some…
At a twenty-year remove, Star Wars comes off less as the work of a wizard than as the weird obsessive outgrowth of an eccentric American primitive. George Lucas is a tycoon version of those self-taught craftsmen who fill backyards, storage rooms and cramped city apartments with paintings, gewgaws or wire-hanger…
Eight years after A Fish Called Wanda rang up $200 million at the box office and won an Oscar for its manic villain, Kevin Kline, the cast has reunited in hopes of putting another dark charge into movie comedy. Fierce Creatures is not a sequel but a major departure, and…
Thursday January 23 Eastern parade: Old-style brushwork and ancient Chinese motifs collide–or maybe just blend peacefully–with modern and Western techniques and themes in this year’s Contemporary Asian Art Exhibition Series, an annual show assembled by the Asian Art Coordinating Council, opening today at the Arvada Center for the Arts and…
Denver exhibition-goers will have to go to great lengths–or should that be heights?–to see the city’s latest ad-hoc art gallery. It’s located in a couple of hallways on the twelfth floor of a downtown high-rise, just off the lobby of the OZ Architecture firm. Now showing in the penthouse suite:…
Eleanor of Aquitaine was arguably the greatest woman of the late medieval period. She was beautiful and brilliant, a patron of the arts and a cultivator of the chivalric code. She defied the church hierarchy, married a French king and dumped him for an English king, bore six daughters and…
When that broken-down, opera-sized chandelier lying on the stage flies out over the audience and up to the ceiling in The Phantom of the Opera, it’s enough to justify the price of admission. The special effects in the Broadway road show of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s extravaganza, now at the Buell…
