The highfalutin’ soap opera in W. Somerset Maugham’s fiction earned him a huge reading public in his day and made him a favorite of movie producers on both sides of the Atlantic. Maugham’s stories and novels — every one stuffed full of romance, deceit and tragedy — have inspired nearly…
There is a killing late in Gladiator, Ridley Scott’s new heroic epic, and it is one of those wonderfully cathartic extinguishings that make wide-eyed audiences rise and cheer. We’ve been herded across much of western Europe by this point, through Germanic mud, Spanish fields and Italian dust, and we’ve seen…
Everybody’s a princess at one point or another. Rich girls work it from birth to final crackup. Bourgeois girls play the precious-‘n’-misunderstood game through adolescence, shifting it into ruthless ambition shortly thereafter. Poor girls can blow an entire lifetime just screwing up their hair and pretending they’re Tolkein’s Galadriel. As…
Poor Kim Basinger! In her first role since bagging the 1998 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for L.A. Confidential (the film that should have won Best Picture and Best Director as well), the actress positively trembles with what seems to be fear. Notoriously insecure about appearing on camera, Basinger…
In the new film Dancing in September, black TV executive George Washington tells the woman he loves, sitcom writer Tommy Crawford, “One day I just may be the first black president of a major network.” The start-up network he works at, WPX, is trying to gain a niche with minority…
Jack Manning’s photograph titled “Don’t Call It Burlesque” looks like it was snapped by a detective in the 1940s: A man stands in the middle of three gloomy shadows, his head slightly turned to the right, looking quite suspect. Almost like a determined pimp, he’s standing in front of an…
The process by which an architect will be chosen to design the Denver Art Museum’s new freestanding wing is coming along nicely. A couple of weeks ago, the City Selection Committee, a mixed bag of politicos and others appointed by Mayor Wellington Webb, narrowed the list of eighteen architectural firms…
It was only this past January that Angela Rios, a former account coordinator for MCI, opened the funky little Morph Gallery in the Golden Triangle. The intimate space, which is made up of three small rooms in a tidy red brick rowhouse, is currently featuring New Show, a group effort…
Just when it seems like her “choreopoem” might devolve into a smallish, rancorous debate, Ntozake Shange’s heroine/narrator steps to one side of her story and conjures — as only a born poetess can — feelings that are both lacerating and sublime. Brimming with dialogue that’s at once startling and seductive,…
In this age of simplistic moralizing, hypersensitivity and polarized opinion, it seems that only an obtuse fable with Hallmarky lyrics is considered worthy of the label “deep.” Gone, sadly, are the days when composers of crowd-pleasers like South Pacific (which enjoyed an initial Broadway run of 1,925 performances), Carousel (890…
The voice-mail message begins with the caller identifying himself in a clear, sharp tone: “Hey, this is Chris Thompson, executive producer of Action and Ladies Man, and I hear you’re trying to get a hold of me…” Long pause. “For some ungodly reason.” Then, in a split second, the voice…
Unless you’re iron-willed Margaret Thatcher or some other sort of imperialist nostalgiaphile, it’s hard to get choked up these days about the demise of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. For one thing, it’s now eighty years after the fact; for another, joint government in Ireland remains a dicey proposition, and The Troubles…
Go get a few grains of salt to accompany these observations of tenable consistency and enduring potential: The movie industry is run by big kids; nifty sci-fi trickery may distract an audience from emotional shoals; cops and criminals are divided by a fine line; nostalgia and evil are cheaper by…
You’re just going to have to accept that Natalie Portman and Ashley Judd are far too glamorous for the roles they inhabit in Where the Heart Is. It’s an issue that probably won’t hurt the film’s reception: Remember Julia Roberts in Steel Magnolias? Your average moviegoer loves movie stars, and…
Popular culture is the province of the young-and-getting-younger. Teenage singers routinely sell millions of albums; basketball players ascend to the royalties of the NBA straight out of high school. But in architecture, the old-timers rule. The two most talked-about new buildings in years — the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain,…
Spring is the traditional time for protest, and with opposition to the activities of multinational corporations mounting, the U.S. left is stirring again. So it’s only fitting that a new feature film detailing the life of Abbie Hoffman, an icon of the rebellious ’60s, will preview in Boulder next week…
Denver and its suburbs are in a building boom that has been dubbed “supergrowth,” and the negative effect in terms of lost historic buildings is reaching a critical mass. It’s undeniable: Denver’s established character is being erased. From an aesthetic standpoint, the problem is twofold. First, the vast majority of…
At the end of March, the National Council for Education in the Ceramic Arts held its annual meeting in Denver, attracting more than 3,000 of the most distinguished ceramic artists and teachers from around the country. In response, local galleries, museums and art centers staged a veritable ceramic arts festival…
If Richard Nixon had been able to hire Luigi Pirandello as his spin doctor, the American public might have regarded Watergate as little more than a mirage in the vast political desert. But the Italian dramatist (and occasional fascist) died some forty years before the disgraced president was forced from…
A mildly retarded man who works in a grocery store believes he is Batman, the Dark Knight on a mission to free Gotham City from the clutches of The Joker. An actress playing the role of Wonder Woman becomes a spokeswoman, then scapegoat, for the Commie witch-hunters working for the…
In the rich mythology of the New Yorker, a periodical renowned for the quality of its writing and the quirks of its writers, no legend carries more weight than that of Joseph Mitchell. On the occasion of the magazine’s 75th anniversary, it is currently great sport among the literati to…
You can bet your last kopeck that newly elected Russian president Vladimir Putin hasn’t so much as breathed Josef Stalin’s name while prosecuting an expensive war in Chechnya and setting his old secret-police comrades loose in pursuit of the new Russia’s capitalist bandits and money-launderers. In the former KGB agent’s…
