The Dr. Is In, Out, In, Out…

Richard Gere, as Dallas gynecologist Sullivan Travis, has never been more likable onscreen, perhaps because he’s never been more human, more vulnerable, more there. After so many years of so many duds, after so many years of playing ladies’ man to little girls (and the recent Autumn in New York…

Art Director

Early in the stunning new film by Spanish director Carlos Saura, the great nineteenth-century painter Francisco de Goya wakes from a disturbing dream and rises to see an apparition of his lost love, the Duchess of Alba. Following her down a surrealistically white hallway, the 82-year-old protagonist suddenly finds himself…

Alley Cat

When Longmont painter Rick Stoner starts snapping photos in an alley, some people get suspicious. They wonder if he’s an FBI agent, or a surveyor for the city setting them up for a property-tax hike. They wonder if he’s a plain old snoop. But nothing could be further from the…

Beer Here

Beer geeks know him as the world’s leading author of beer-related prose, the Bard of Beer Journalism. Unfortunately for Michael Jackson, there are less-knowing types who still mistake him for the King of Crotch-Grabbing Pop, the gloved wonder of cosmetic surgery. Jackson, whose numerous tomes serve as bibles for beer-…

Holy Daze

Located within the Jewish Community Center, the Singer Gallery’s association with the Jewish community might create the assumption that it explores only Jewish themes in art. But for a long time, Singer has presented shows that, while typically of interest to the Jewish community, have not, strictly speaking, been Jewish…

Art Beat

The Rocky Mountain Womens Institute has gone down a rocky road in recent months, and its this years pair of RMWI Fine Art Associates, Lauri Lynnxe Murphy and Dania Pettus, whove blazed the trail. It began when the two artists notified the RMWI that the pieces they planned to create…

Poetry in Commotion

Poets are often harbingers of truth who rail about society’s ills from the relative safety of life’s cheap seats. They weather worldly rejection and familial contempt in the hope that something they say or do will better the human race. The knotted-up artistes at the epicenter of Craig Lucas’s Missing…

Against the Tide

Mabel Tidings Bigelow has lived most of her ninety years contemplating her choices in life. The feisty Massachusetts salt aspired at an early age to be the first woman to swim the English Channel in the direction opposite to the one taken by Channel pioneer Gertrude Ederle (who swam the…

Rock and a Hard Place

John Wesley Hall believes justice is a myth taught in classrooms, a fable found in law books, as imaginary as the unicorn and the mermaid. The Arkansas attorney mentions case after case in which he represented an innocent who wound up imprisoned or, worse, executed; in the course of a…

Sagging Bull

Meet the Parents has just enough class to make for Prestige Pop: Robert De Niro as star, Randy Newman as composer, Blythe Danner as wallpaper, Ben Stiller as schmuck. It has just enough “comedy” to qualify as crowd-pleaser: sight gags (Stiller chasing a cat across a roof before setting fire…

Animal Husbandry

Every now and then, a movie comes along that makes you feel as though you’ve fallen face-first into a stale cat box filled with grouchy baby asps. Come to think of it, this seems to happen, oh, one to three times a week, especially when the movie is about “real…

A Star Is Björk

With global overpopulation neatly intertwining with the advent of the home-video camera, we have been afforded several near-miracles. For instance, when supersonic jets explode, or when mobs impolitely loot and riot in urban centers, the common consumer can now document the event and sell it to the networks for our…

Sea of Grass

There are those who bemoan Colorado’s landlocked condition and regard the Rockies as some kind of consolation prize for our lack of a Hamptons or a Jersey shore. But there are also those much more enlightened folks who realize that east of Denver, the high plains roll out with endless…

Down Under

Art’s truest underground — skateboard art — is part of a thriving industry that nobody’s ever heard of. But now it’s the subject of an exhibition illuminating a genre that rarely even sees the light of day, let alone a mass following. Or so it would seem. The result of…

Short Stories

Jerry Kunkel’s name is well known in these parts: He’s been on the art faculty at the University of Colorado at Boulder for more than thirty years, and for a while in the 1970s, he fronted the punk band Joey Vane and the Scissors. But though many people have heard…

Art Beat

Emerging artist Colin Livingston has put together a moving show made up of paintings and mixed-media pieces that depict his mother. Mom, currently at the Apart Modern Gallery, takes up a difficult topic, however: Livingston’s mother committed suicide when he was in the fifth grade. The artist addresses this deeply…

Ire of the Beholder

Cracking wise about this or that presidential candidate doesn’t seem so insulting in a country united in the belief that all politicians are laughingstocks. Unkind remarks about an artist of the moment, however, can have dire consequences in a society divided over aesthetic matters. Serge, Marc and Yvan have what…

No Score

Based on the true story of how a football team brought together the segregated town of Alexandria, Virginia, in the early 1970s, Remember the Titans is the first film from producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s Technical Black production company, which is meant to offer more contemplative and slower-paced films than his hollow,…

Scenes of Queens

In The Opportunists, the debut feature by writer/director Myles Connell, the stakes are low, the relationships are subtle, and Christopher Walken hardly raises his voice, barking only a single syllable in a fleeting moment of anguish. Of course, one of the many pleasures of Walken is watching him lose his…

Homosex and the City

Much has changed for urban gays in the two decades since William Friedkin’s Cruising. That controversial serial-killer thriller — set in the leather bars and after-hours sex clubs of New York’s West Village — was derided by gay-rights activists as a piece of cheapjack sensationalism leading only to trouble, seemingly…

Love Among the Ruins

Aimée & Jaguar tells the true story of a love affair between two women: one a Jew passing as a Gentile while working for the underground, the other a German housewife honored by the Third Reich as an “exemplar of Nazi motherhood.” Felice Schragenheim was a German Jew who, unlike…

The Rite Stuff

Pagans just want to be understood. So Pagan Pride Day is no joke to them; rather, it’s an opportunity not only to support one another, but also to share the wealth. And if it seems weird for Colorado’s event, which occurs in conjunction with the international version, to take place…