Between the onset of Greta Garbo’s tuberculosis and the victory over Russell Crowe’s schizophrenia, moviegoers have endured a relentless barrage of disease — and they have relished almost every tearjerking, Kleenex-wringing minute of it. Who but a soulless curmudgeon could resist the emotion (no matter how manufactured) of Ali McGraw’s…
Citizen-soldiers eager to renew hostilities in the American culture wars can shoot a couple of spitballs at each other this week over Little Secrets, a teen-anxiety movie that leaves no doubt where it stands on “family values” and moral absolutes. It approves. The shock troops of the Cinema Without Limits…
You fly halfway around the world clutching a snapshot in your hand, with little more to go on than a full money belt and an infinite collection of worries and hopes: It’s becoming a common experience for the growing wave of American families opting for foreign adoptions in China. And…
Saint-makers tend to be as humble as their subject matter. “It’s a calling,” says Catherine Robles-Shaw of Nederland, a santera who makes her own historically correct gessoes and varnishes to finish delicate retablos, bultos and altars carved from native woods. “It’s the stuff of my life.” Littleton native Jose Raul…
Here at the beginning of the 21st century, it seems strange that so many artists persist in their attempts to render external reality with paint and brushes. Didn’t abstraction (on the one hand) and photography (on the other) vanquish the old warhorse of representational painting over a hundred years ago?…
The Andenken Gallery (2110 Market Street, 303-292-3281) is currently hosting Force Future 2002, the second effort of the ISM art collective. ISM’s goal is to bring worthy emerging artists to the fore, and that’s surely what the first Force Future accomplished. The likes of Karen McClanahan, John Morrison, Jonathan Stiles…
I wasn’t in the best of moods when I took my seat in the Buell Theatre auditorium for The Music Man, but I was expecting to get jolted right out of my doldrums the minute the production started. I remembered Meredith Willson’s songs as catchy and appealing. (I’m sure I…
Sometimes when a director shoots at a barn, the satisfaction comes in simply watching him hit it dead center. So it is with The Good Girl, wherein Miguel Arteta (Star Maps) targets middle-American ennui with wit, compassion and no shortage of ornery malaise. Like Arteta’s second feature, Chuck&Buck, this one’s…
Robert Evans wrote his autobiography in 1994 out of desperation as much as hubris. It cried, “Damn it, look at me…please?” He’d produced one film during the previous ten years, The Cotton Club, which was such a colossal failure that it rendered Evans a moot point in Hollywood. It was…
“Don’t clone, darling, colonize!” That’s the motto of a secret society that will soon infiltrate a bar near you — but you don’t need a coded knock or password to join the club. Access to e-mail should do the trick. “The gay scene is kind of boring these days; it’s…
When the back-to-back UFO Canine Frisbee World Cup Tournament and Quadruped Canine Frisbee Disc Competition get under way on the Arapahoe Community College campus this weekend, free-flying Fidos from across the nation will be going for the gold, competing in a sport that’s uncommonly joyful and a blast to watch,…
A press pass, reporter-turned-novelist Gregory McDonald once said, is good for one thing: It allows the journalist to ask very smart people very stupid questions. Certainly, that’s how it feels after this 45-minute drive from downtown Dallas to the Allen home of Stan Liebowitz, professor of economics at the University…
The history of art in Colorado has yet to be written, so those of us with an interest in the topic have to get our information in dribs and drabs, chiefly through exhibitions. Of course, that’s only one of the reasons to see Colorado Collections II. Others include the incredible…
Veterans of Clay, in the North Gallery at the Lakewood Cultural Center (470 South Allison Parkway, Lakewood, 303-987-7800), is a small show, but it’s filled with work by artists with big reputations — and that was the idea. The exhibit takes an economical look at a small group of Colorado…
I walked into the Denver Center’s Stage Theatre harboring the darkest of suspicions. I’d read all about The Vagina Monologues — who hasn’t?–but somehow I’d managed to miss the show on its previous visits to Colorado. It sounded like a lot of other allegedly feminist phenomena that bother me. Take…
The Boulder Dinner Theatre’s version of Paint Your Wagon makes for an enjoyable evening, although I suspect it has very little to do with Lerner and Loewe’s original musical. This production is primarily a vehicle for A.K. Klimpke, a onetime favorite of melodrama audiences at the Heritage Square Music Hall…
Blood Work, Clint Eastwood’s 23rd film as a director, is another crime thriller in the mode of True Crime (1998) and Absolute Power (1996) — although it’s better. More than these, however, it resembles In the Line of Fire (1993), the Eastwood vehicle directed by Wolfgang Petersen, arguably the best…
The past is a foreign country — they do things differently there.” So goes the immortal line from The Go-Between. And in the brilliant new documentary The Cockettes, that “foreignness” comes through stronger than ever, even for those who lived though the fabled and reviled 1960s. The film, by David…
Every Tuesday night, a large group holds hands and sways in a circle, while the strains of French accordions float through the warm air of downtown Boulder. This isn’t a cult — at least not a dangerous one, unless a few stubbed toes count as sinister. Instead, it is the…
As a founding member of San Francisco’s Negativland, Mark Hosler knows the value of a good laugh — in or out of the courtroom. After the band was nearly sued out of existence by Island Records in 1991, for copyright infringements that involved unauthorized sampling of a U2 song, Hosler…
The spectacular blockbuster exhibit An American Century of Photography: From Dry Plate to Digital, which highlights the photo collection of Hallmark Cards, is a third of the way through its three-month run at the Denver Art Museum. Denver is the seventh and last stop for the traveling show. Hallmark, the…
Renowned sculptor George Rickey died last month at the age of 95. Born in America, Rickey became interested in art in England in the 1930s, when he attended Oxford University and the Ruskin School of Art. After graduating from Oxford, he went on to Paris, where he became friends with…
