The latest release from Paramount Pictures’ bouncing baby, MTV Films, is set in a high school and has been inoculated with the usual doses of teenage angst, teenage wit and teenage lust. Here’s the surprise: It declines to get down on its hands and knees to woo Generation Y to…
When we first see Isa, the 21-year-old heroine of Erick Zonca’s The Dreamlife of Angels, she’s trudging under the weight of a huge backpack through the chill dawn of an almost featureless European city. With her close-cropped dark hair and street urchin’s sniffle, she seems to be carrying the burden…
Among minor works of late-twentieth-century art, something called the CityGrilleburger occupies a special place in our heart–and not just because of its fat count. A luscious beef patty of heroic proportion, it arrives cloaked in melted Swiss cheese, crisp bacon and–the coup de grace–a dollop of garlicky Caesar dressing. It’s…
The television is on, transmitting images from the Columbine High School shooting into the front room of the Lucero studios, at West 33rd and Tejon. The walls are covered with the blood reds, dusty blues and luminous golds of Stevon Lucero’s and Arlette Lucero’s artwork. Even after Arlette turns off…
Chastity looked up from the lettuce bin and there he was, his eyes burning holes in the glistening head of romaine she held in her hand. While she pondered Clint’s intense gaze, a gentle mist began to spray, soaking her bare wrists and sending shivers through her body…Nah. Let’s try…
Thursday April 29 Get over it–they do play bagpipes in Galicia, a region in northwestern Spain where an onslaught of religious pilgrims delivered Celtic cadences and instrumentation centuries ago. The pilgrims moved on, but their music stayed behind, eventually forming the basis for Milladoiro, a contemporary Galician outfit that blends…
Cydney Payton, the director of the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, has little trouble filling the place with exciting exhibits. In fact, she’s crammed so much into BMoCA that one of the four current shows, Housed, begins not in the museum, but on the street out front. Housed is a…
A black-and-white-striped uniform draping his stooped frame, a bespectacled prisoner wavers between capitulation and defiance as he impersonates Shylock in a production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice that’s being presented before a group of concentration-camp guards. Trembling yet strangely calm, the frail Jewish man turns toward his Nazi captors…
If, like the ancient Greeks who started the world’s first dramatic festivals, you’re a firm believer in the healing power of art, then the musical Blood Brothers might serve as something of a cathartic experience in the aftermath of last week’s calamity at Columbine High School. Still, chances are that…
A hand-wringing reassessment of the libertine 1960s has hit full stride–stirred as much, you can’t help thinking, by the transfiguration of former acidheads and ex-leftist firebrands into establishment powermongers as by the half-baked grumblings of their children. The anti-war and civil-rights movements were shot through with self-service and intolerance, the…
Just as David Cronenberg’s 1986 The Fly came off as an organic reaction to a terrible new wasting disease, his new movie crystallizes the confusions of an epoch that can’t decide whether it’s the Entertainment Era, the Information Age or the Digital Millennium. Named for a fictional “game system” also…
In Pushing Tin, the edgy new comedy from British director Mike Newell, the dominant image is a black screen pulsing with obscure fluorescent markings, like the characters on some early prototype of Pac-Man. In this case, though, nobody’s playing any games. The markings represent very real jet airliners filled with…
Richard Lewis is dying, but he’s a happy man. For once, something makes sense. “Being in middle age now, the truth of the matter is, you can’t escape that feeling of seeing the end of the line,” Lewis says. “I really live each day now, enjoy my life more now,…
Thursday April 22 Especially on Earth Day, the Lookout Mountain Nature Center, 910 Colorow Row, Golden, is an exhibit in itself. The building, which opened late in 1997, is constructed entirely of earth-sustaining materials, from the recycled boxcar planks used for its shiny hardwood floors to the bathroom tiles made…
When 91-year-old string-band musician Howard Armstrong performs Friday at the Swallow Hill Music Association’s Roots of the Blues Festival, he’ll be something of an anomaly. He doesn’t call himself a bluesman, though he knows how to play the blues. Instead, he plays a little bit of everything: old-time, jazz, blues,…
Over the past twenty years, blockbuster shows have become a necessary evil at museums. When they succeed–and they usually do, at least financially–they increase attendance, and that’s the bottom line in the exhibition business. But while they may attract big numbers economically, such shows can be aesthetically bankrupt. At the…
Playwrights have been turning the tables on their critics ever since Athenian dramatists parodied one another’s efforts 2,500 years ago. Whether being skewered by eighteenth-century British wit Richard Brinsley Sheridan (The Critic), lampooned by contemporary dramatist–and former reviewer himself–Tom Stoppard (The Real Inspector Hound) or indirectly taken to task by…
When Bernard Slade’s Same Time, Next Year debuted on Broadway in 1975, the play about a man and a woman who rendezvous once a year at a California inn was praised for its “genuinely funny” look at how attitudes toward marriage had changed between the Donna Reed era and the…
Comedian David Spade’s chosen shtick–every line a zinger, every crack calculated to draw blood–works well in the short bursts characteristic of standup, sketches and TV sitcom. But the man can wear you out over the course of a two-hour movie. Like the too-clever motormouth at a cocktail party, he doesn’t…
Next time you’re getting your axles chromed out at A & M Custom Tire and Wheel, don’t miss one of the metro area’s best and most authentic Mexican lunches–right across the street at a plain-faced red-brick hideaway called Christy’s. Never heard of the place? Of course you haven’t. Unless you…
Imagine, if you will, one of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s classic road movies that never leaves the terminal and you have pretty much described Life, the strikingly uneventful new comedy starring Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence. It’s their own Road to Nowhere. Life, which was directed by Ted Demme…
The love affair at the heart of Benoit Jacquot’s The School of Flesh has to be the longest shot on the board. Pairing a woman of the world with a boy of the streets, it is fueled by sexual obsession and casual cruelty, by the same huge contrasts in temperament…
