Somewhere in the 1970s, we learned that women could like each other, that female friendship was precious, and that society’s insistence that women’s concerns were inherently more trivial than the concerns of men was blind and stupid. Though she might pass much of her time shopping or in the kitchen,…
A Bright Room Called Day. Tony Kushner, author of the brilliant Angels in America, clearly wrote A Bright Room Called Day in a state of agitation. Kushner sensed the blot of fascism spreading across America, and he drew an analogy — by no means original — between 1930s Germany and…
The Aristocrats(Lions Gate) The single joke around which Paul Provenza’s documentary revolves has a standard beginning and ending, like pieces of bread that make a sandwich stuffed with excrement, incest, and whatever other foulness the teller can come up with. Provenza and Penn Jillette recorded more than 100 comedians riffing…
Pop-culture pundits generally fall into two camps: those who think entertainment encourages a nation of knuckle-draggers, and those who say it’s actually making us smarter. In the case of Atari’s The Matrix: Path of Neo, both sides have a point. Like the movie trilogy that inspired it, Path of Neo…
Address Unknown (Tartan) Anyone Can Dance: Nightclub Freestyle (Delta) National Lampoon’s Barely Legal (MGM) Dallas: The Complete Fourth Season (Warner Bros.) Educating Rita(Sony) Flightplan(Touchstone) The Fog (2005) (Sony) God Save the Queen: A Punk Rock Anthology (Music Video Dist.) Hooked (Eclectic) Ludacris: Southern Smoke (Music Video Dist.) My Big Fat…
Over the years, chanteuse Lannie Garrett has become a local landmark — and now she’s putting her act in another landmark, the Daniels & Fisher Tower, which is now known as Lannie’s Clocktower Cabaret. The 150-seat theater at 1601 Arapahoe Street will be a semi-permanent home for Garrett, who kicks…
The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art has a visionary new batch of friends in The Collection, a support organization dedicated to bringing up-and-coming artists to BMoCA audiences on a monthly basis. The group’s first event of the year kicks off tonight at 6 p.m. with the sounds of local electronica…
We popcorn-chomping hitchhikers never know who will pick us up on the roadside. In Flirting With Disaster, it was a neurotic Manhattan adoptee on a nationwide search for his biological parents. The desert-parched heroines of Thelma & Louise brought us along as they raised hell en route to their doom…
The critical consensus has Match Point as Woody Allen’s finest film since…oh, let’s see…Bullets Over Broadway, is it? Or perhaps Deconstructing Harry? Or maybe Sweet and Lowdown? One forgets where the good stuff left off, because there’s been so much bad stuff since. It’s not difficult to understand the accolades…
America — and by extension Hollywood — has an obsession with innocence and the loss thereof. Every generation has that Moment When Everything Changed, from Pearl Harbor to JFK’s assassination to 9/11. The impact takes a while to settle in, then people forget again and future generations are similarly traumatized…
Albert Brooks, the once-funny comic-turned-filmmaker, plays a once-funny comic-turned-filmmaker named Albert Brooks in Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, which he also wrote and directed. It’s the second time Brooks has played himself, more or less; the first was in 1979, when he made Real Life, in which he…
Jets or Sharks? Schwarzenegger or Stallone? Welles or Hitchcock? Such trifles pale next to the real heavyweight championship between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. In a stroke of sheer genius, organizers of the Denver Public Library Film Series will now renew the great debate with a series of six films…
During the ’20s and ’30s, artists in Colorado and New Mexico began doing abstractions based on landscape paintings. They took the formal components of a mountain, mesa or rock formation, then simplified the compositions into non-realistic versions of the scene. With the rise of pure abstraction in the post-war period,…
The Denver Office of Cultural Affairs is facing some changes. On January 3, Denise Montgomery spent her last day as the agency’s director; she’s leaving to head up the marketing department of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. When Montgomery was picked for the cabinet-level post in 2003, she…
Auditioning Gods, et al. Arvada Center curator Jerry Gilmore has organized a quartet of shows devoted to recent work by Colorado artists. In the lower galleries, Bryan Andrews presents Auditioning Gods, which continues the “fetem” sculpture series he’s been pursuing for years. These hand-carved wooden sculptures are an attempt to…
It’s hard to deal with murder — particularly the rape, murder and dismemberment of a child — without being exploitative. It’s also hard to explore the issue of forgiveness without resorting to sentimentality. Bryony Lavery’s play Frozen, currently at Curious Theatre Company, succeeds on both counts. The three-character play involves…
Some people believe that artists are uniquely sensitive to their times and that their work can serve as a kind of canary in the coal mine, warning of danger. Tony Kushner, author of the brilliant and much-acclaimed Angels in America, clearly wrote A Bright Room Called Day in a state…
Gemma Wilcox is a terrific performer, with a soft, graceful, gentle quality that’s very appealing. She wrote Menage à Dix, The Honeymoon Period Is Officially Over and Leela¹s Wheel, the three pieces she’s now starring in at Buntport Theater; she plays several characters — male and female, young and old…
The King and I. Some of the problems with this production are inherent in the show itself. With its emphasis on strong women and abhorrence of anything resembling slavery, The King and I was progressive for its time, but no artist can entirely escape the myths and preconceptions of his…
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Magnolia) The best two hours you’ll ever spend learning about accounting, Enron is one part civics lesson, one part Greek tragedy, and one part political cartoon. Director Alex Gibney makes no pretense of objectivity; he wants you to hiss and boo at Ken…
Movie-based videogames have a well-deserved reputation for sucking. Ever since Atari’s E.T. — a game so ill-conceived that thousands of unsold cartridges were dumped en masse in the desert, creating the crappiest buried treasure of all time — Hollywood tie-ins have bombed big-time. Peter Jackson¹s King Kong: The Official Game…
Adventures of Superman: The Complete Second Season (Warner Bros.) Asylum (Paramount) Casino (MCA) Celebrity Mix (TLA) Final Destination: Scared 2 Death Pack (New Line) Gendernauts (First Run) Ghost in the Machine (Anchor Bay) Industrial Strength Keaton (Mackinac Media) Jamie Foxx Presents Laffapalooza! 6 (Image) Junebug (Sony) Lois & Clark: The…
