John Shaft went to Africa, so why shouldn’t Die Hard’s John McClane? In the new action romp Tears of the Sun, Bruce Willis undertakes a jungle-rescue operation on the Dark Continent, and it’s a McClane adventure in camouflage, minus all the sass and most of the spectacle. As Navy SEAL…
Emerging from Till Human Voices Wake Us, it was easy to overhear some male viewers striving adamantly to put the film’s metaphysical themes in their place — to explain them away, as it were. This is a shame. The source of the story’s mystique is fairly simple and may be…
Long before director Jonathan Demme sent the bean counters reeling with box-office hits like The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, he made one of the most energetic and engaging rock-concert films ever. Stop Making Sense, from 1984, stars David Byrne and the Talking Heads, and it’s a treat not…
If you look back at hot pants, pet rocks, M*A*S*H* and roller-skating as souvenirs of the good ol’ days, it’s time to dust off that white leisure suit and slap on those platform boots, because Polly Esther’s is calling all vintage hipsters — along with younger club-goers — to get…
Thursday, February 27 In this corner, wearing red-white-and-blue trunks, Mr. Thomas Jefferson! And over here, in black stripes, his opponent, Alexander Hamilton! Now gents, a clean fight! Expect words — but not fists — to fly when the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities American Spirit Series hosts a live Chautauqua…
Because contemporary mural painting has roots in Mexico, where Diego Rivera, José Orozco and David Siqueiros pioneered the medium early in the twentieth century, it’s been a natural carryover in heavily Hispanic Colorado. Big, in-your-face narrative public art has long been making statements in communities across our state. In celebration…
Are you just dying to know the ins and outs of Denver’s Solid Waste Management division’s hazardous-waste-collection methods? Waiting with baited breath to hear what Blueprint Denver means to your neighborhood? If so, this is your lucky weekend: Denver residents are invited to the free City Service Open House, Saturday,…
Instead of taking to the streets to protest a potential war with Iraq, peace activists in metro Denver — and in over 600 cities around the world — will instead take to the stage with the Lysistrata Project, believed to be the first-ever worldwide theatrical act of dissent in the…
Thanks to Henry Thoreau, the name “Walden” evokes the ultimate in natural tranquility. Of peace and quiet. Of simpler times. But the new, highly touted Walden Family Playhouse — a professional children’s theater the likes of which we haven’t seen in these parts — is anything but tranquil. The Walden’s…
Photography’s fortunes are soaring right now — not only in Colorado, where photography shows are cropping up left and right — but in the New York-based art magazines, too. The shutter craze has been coming on for a couple of decades, but in the current season, photography is taking an…
Chance Operations Gallery (232 East 20th Avenue, 303-894-0377) is a pretty funky place. In fact, I nominate it as the funkiest art venue around. There’s the requisite bohemian location, of course — a shabby storefront in a row of shabby storefronts at the very shabby northeast end of downtown (you…
The violence wrought by the Manson family continues to hold our imagination. There’s something about the confluence of evil, pop culture (the best known of the group’s victims was beautiful blond movie star Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant) and the politics of the late ’60s that feeds our…
George Orwell’s reputation has been a little clouded of late. For decades after his death, he was seen as a kind of secular saint, a truth teller, a font of wisdom and decency whose writing brought desperately needed clarity to a murky world. But there were always grumblers, and the…
This should really piss you off: What follows is a story about a very funny movie you will have absolutely no chance of seeing any time soon. The powers that be who distribute movies–who copy prints, print up posters, deliver them to theaters, collect receipts, split profits (well…)–do not want…
Filmmaker Terry Gilliam is no stranger to fiasco. After all, this is the human dynamo who saw 1989’s inventive (if sometimes incoherent) The Adventures of Baron Munchausen through a series of artistic and financial crises that would have landed most people in an asylum. But Gilliam’s encounter with the tale-spinning…
Apart from “I Am Fascinating” and/or “My Parents Are Horrid,” the reigning theme of film students’ movies is “Lovers Are Bonkers.” Thus, it comes as no surprise when a director’s first feature contains many elements that’ll be instantly familiar to anyone who’s ever hung around a film school. So it…
The Fly does not loom large in the great scheme of things. It may not even rank high on the list of movies in which airborne objects — doomed dirigibles, hijacked 747s, Alfred Hitchcock’s assorted jays and starlings — play a major part. But director Kurt Neumann’s low-budget shocker has…
The word “bingo” usually conjures up visions of nursing homes and church gymnasiums. But when “B” stands for “bastard” and “I” is for “Iron Maiden,” and there’s a DJ on the premises spinning Pat Benatar hits, it can only mean one thing: Rock ‘n Roll Bingo at the Lion’s Lair…
Thursday, February 20 How’s the weather? Admit it: Your life revolves around that question — and that’s one that reason Bryan Yeaton of the Mt. Washington Observatory in New Hampshire is such a popular guy. Yeaton, who travels the nation in his “WeatherMobile” (actually, a sturdy Subaru Outback packed with…
Elvis Cole used to be a wiseass, a Los Angeleno P.I. with a classic chip on his shoulder and an inspiration-giving statue of Jiminy Cricket overlooking his cheesy gumshoe office. What happened? The invention of popular mystery writer Robert Crais, Cole has gotten noticeably deeper as his series of adventures…
Not unlike many Holocaust survivors, onetime World War II Japanese internment-camp detainees just don’t want to talk about it, so they bury their anger and sadness. But in the current political climate — one in which North Carolina congressman Howard Coble can condone the camps by noting that they were…
If all this gray winter weather is getting you down, fly to Sparrow, a tiny new Capitol Hill store that is adding a breath of fresh air to 17th Avenue. Whether you’re looking for an exotic bromeliad plant or a cheery paper pinwheel, Sparrow is the just the place to…
