Daniel is lonely. He misses the barrio, and a distant ‘burb with a goofball name like “Enchanted Acres” is a bleak wasteland in comparison to the warm feel of the old ‘hood. But Daniel is more than lonely: He’s in the midst of a mid-life crisis with cultural overtones. Tired…
John Waters may have grown up, but he hasn’t gone straight. In his days as an enfant terrible, the most notorious moviemaker in Baltimore served up raw sensation, black comedy and low camp to fringe audiences who prided themselves on all manner of deviance. Those raucous midnight screenings of Pink…
If the Manson Family hadn’t stumbled across Sharon Tate, maybe Roman Polanski would be making movies for the Disney Channel. As it is, this once-fascinating artiste of the cinema has turned his personal life into a trashy novel and his mercifully infrequent movies into guided tours of his own sour…
Wednesday April 13 How big was it?: On the subject of fishing, you probably fall into one of two categories–those who do and those who can’t fathom it. Author John Gierach belongs to the former group and his book Dances With Trout, a collection of perceptive fish stories, does everything…
Longtime CU art instructor Luis Eades’s extraordinary paintings at first resemble illustrations in children’s science books. His clean, expert representational style is technically flawless and viewer-friendly. But the paintings on display at Foothills Art Center are far from simplified schematics of difficult subjects. Instead, Eades attempts to portray complicated interconnections…
Love may be hard to find, but trust is even harder. The regional premiere of Trust, a new play by expatriated Denverite Steven Dietz (he now lives in Seattle), dives into the shallows of contemporary lust and longing to prove just how tough trust is to come by. Funny, twisted…
The ironically titled Belle Epoque (“Beautiful Age”), winner of the most recent Oscar for Best Foreign Film, is a playful Spanish sex farce that unfolds during the brief honeymoon between the bloodless overthrow of the Spanish monarchy in 1931 and the rise of the Fascists five years later in the…
The first installment of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Three Colors Trilogy” is called Blue, and the Polish filmmaker says it represents the French ideal of liberty. But before we get to any kind of liberty, we get a powerful dose of imprisonment–the self-imposed, emotional imprisonment of a young woman who has seen…
Wednesday April 6 Gallic symbols: It’s time to bone up on your French, Francophiles. You’ll need your linguistic chops for An Evening of Tales From Provence, presented by Denver’s Alliance Francaise and interpreted in French (and English) by mesmerizing storyteller Jean Guillon. The stories are free, beginning at 6:30 p.m…
Dreams and mythology are among the most common themes in art, yet no two artists see these related subjects in the same way. Even when dream/myth-based art shares archetypes and heroes, each piece tends to be highly personal and unique, just as dreams are. But as different as an artist’s…
Flowers spring from the stage. A miraculous healing frees a gruff old priest from blindness. A little girl dies by inches, trapped in mud after a volcanic eruption. Other extraordinary–incredible, even, to a mind trained in Western rationalism–events appear as natural occurrences. The impossible is made plausible, and the result…
This is a strange time for Hollywood to revive newspaper movies. Despite their obvious saintliness, reporters rank just north of lawyers and child molesters on the nation’s current list of heroes–and I’m not talking here only of the “Elvis Shot JFK” brand of journalism. These days, the public–and the White…
Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, the Italian brothers who co-directed flinty, passionate films like Padre Padrone and The Night of Shooting Stars in the late Seventies and early Eighties, probably haven’t gone soft in the head. But Fiorile, which traces the legend of a family curse through two centuries of domestic…
Wednesday March 30 Three for the stage: You can always count on the US West TheatreFest for an interesting time–the annual series that puts new works by unknown playwrights on stage at the Denver Center for Performing Arts is dedicated to variety and innovation in the theater arts. This year’s…
If one word can sum up something as complex as Asian art, that word is “tradition.” The strictly observed methods of mixing and applying ink, the narrow range of acceptable subjects (trees, pagodas, mountains, birds), the consistently diagonal composition–all are painstakingly repeated by generation after generation of artists. But even…
Turning Nathaniel Hawthorne’s brilliant novel The Scarlet Letter into a contemporary drama is a doomed proposition. Phyllis Nagy’s torturous attempt, now playing at the Denver Center Theatre Company, is so full of error, so misguided, so utterly banal a reading of a great work of art, one can only wonder…
The idea for Twenty Bucks probably came from Max Ophuls’s sparkling 1950 comedy La Ronde, but its prickly sensibility is pure 1990s. Rather than chase the flame of love, as Ophuls did, first-time director Keva Rosenfeld follows a pivotal twenty-dollar bill from person to person to person, with amusing results…
The youngish filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen might do well to come out into the light once in a while. As it is, their parochial, stubbornly adolescent view of life seems thrown together entirely from the bits and pieces of the old movies floating around in their heads, cemented by…
In Barry Levinson’s Jimmy Hollywood, an unemployed actor finally gets his shot at five minutes of TV fame by casting himself as a real-life anticrime vigilante. Sound familiar? Hero at Large, a lukewarm 1980 comedy with John Ritter, played the same hand. The feisty protagonist this time around is Joe…
Wednesday March 23 Stepping lightly: It’s a fine night for dance connoisseurs–with performances in the inner city by the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble and across town at the Arvada Center by the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre. Robinson presents her annual spring concert at 119 Park Ave. W., beginning tonight at…
Daniel Sprick, master oil painter and key contributor to the annual Artists of America exhibition, conquers–and transcends–the stereotypes of that bastion of mainstream representational art. His exquisite but unsettling paintings are on display at Carol Siple Gallery through April 9. Sprick’s soulfully exact portrayals of quiet rooms filled with ordinary…
We all suffer, some more than others, some horribly. But we all suffer. And though drama is almost always about suffering, it seldom reminds us to consider the man on the street, the woman next to us in the theater, much less what we may do to help each other…
