Insofar as filmmaker Tony Gatlif’s justly admired “gypsy trilogy” is an exploration of his roots and a search for his nature–he was born in Algeria to gypsy parents of Spanish origin but was later polished at Paris’s L’Ecole des Beaux Arts–it comprises one of the most passionate and telling self-examinations…
The hero of John Waters’s gently subversive new romp, Pecker, is a happy Baltimore teenager of the same name whose primary pleasure is shooting neighborhood snapshots with an old thrift-shop camera. Girls on the bus preen for him. He captures dancers in the local strip club through a back-alley window…
Jackie Chan’s American fans–and I’m one of them–have suffered through a nervous 1998 so far. The momentum the star earned with the 1996 release of Rumble in the Bronx has seemed to dissipate steadily: An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, the first American production to employ Chan since the…
Leelee Sobieski is a mouthful of a name (forty years ago, studio moguls would have made her change it to something short and unassuming)–but get used to it, because the young actress behind it is going to be getting a lot of attention. She almost single-handedly carries A Soldier’s Daughter…
As a director of action thrillers, John Frankenheimer has been a peerless stylist for nearly four decades–without leaning on a pile of glitzy special effects. What’s more, his most memorable movies, from The Manchurian Candidate (1962) to The Birdman of Alcatraz (also 1962) to 1986’s wickedly entertaining, unappreciated 52 Pick-Up…
Thursday September 24 Developers who’ve made financial investments and volunteers who’ve put lots of sweat and emotional equity into the Uptown neighborhood are again showing off the fruits of their labor at the Eleventh Annual Uptown Sampler, from 5 to 9 this evening. A $16 button buys food and drink…
Steve Friesen has on his white gloves, and he’s struggling to find the words to describe the treasure in his hands. “It’s a chocolate brown,” he says, then, “Naah–maybe…buffalo brown. Would that be a buffalo brown?” That’s a bit closer. But how can you describe a particular color when so…
The Bible says Eve succumbed to the apple, but most women secretly know it was probably something more like a shoe. Fashion may be femininity’s most basic foible, something women embrace and spurn with equal zeal, but either way, gals just can’t seem to escape the effects of its powerful…
It’s hardly unexpected to find art shows at museums–unless the museum is that funky Platte Valley landmark the Forney Transportation Museum. It is this unlikely venue that well-known contemporary artist Stephen Batura chose for his most recent, untitled show. In a sense, the Forney was a natural for this Denver…
By the time the two main characters in Horton Foote’s The Young Man From Atlanta sit down to confront their nameless fears during the drama’s riveting final scene, most theatergoers are likely to have either forsaken the playwright’s meandering spiritual odyssey or determined that the less-than-fruitful trip wasn’t worth taking…
When Murray Schisgal’s play Luv premiered on the Great White Way 34 years ago, the two-act comedy was an overnight hit with New Yorkers who had little trouble identifying with the Brooklyn-born playwright’s incisive observations about metropolitan living. Oddly enough, the play’s underlying theme that one man’s perceived paradise can…
Artistic collaborators can walk a tricky tightrope. There’s a whole gamut of personality quirks, ego bruises, ability gaps and creative differences to balance in the process, and for many, it doesn’t always work out. But against all odds, choreographers Chris Harris and R. Bryan Meeks seem to have been born…
For Brad Evans, dumpster-diving is more than a hobby. It’s an art–literally–full of everyday life’s deepest and most secret surprises, caught on the rebound. “If you see it and don’t get it, it’s gone…,” Evans says of his roadside finds–greasy oven doors, grimy hardware, old flags, dictionaries, Ed Grimley dolls,…
Thursday September 17 Colorado Poet Laureate Mary Crow is here on a mission–she’ll preside over Words on the Wing: Making Poetry Visible in Denver, a two-day program featuring readings, workshops and a public forum with the state’s high poetess. It all kicks off this afternoon at 3 with a special…
Denver’s Mizel Museum of Judaica occupies only a small gallery and a couple of offices in the recesses of the large BMH-BJ synagogue. Despite these modest facilities, however, the institution often presents highly provocative art shows that easily rise above the Mizel’s sectarian character. Ben-Zion: In Search of Oneself, which…
For better or worse, the confessional memoir has become the most popular literary form of our time, prompting ballplayers, Irish bartenders, prosecuting attorneys and mothers of quadruplets everywhere to lay bare their deepest thoughts and secrets, all based on the presumption that their miserable lives are more interesting than anyone…
One True Thing, directed by Carl Franklin, is trying to be the Terms of Endearment of the Nineties. Scripted by Karen Croner from the 1995 Anna Quindlen novel of the same name, One True Thing pushes the same high-gloss homilies about making peace with your family, and it caps everything…
Who would have guessed that a movie called Firelight could give off so little warmth? William Nicholson, the screenwriter of Shadowlands (1993) who’s making his directorial debut here, isn’t attempting to be ironic. He wants to create a love story in which the ardor pours through the confines of upper-class…
You can’t keep a good ship down. No sooner have a billion or so Titanic videos hit the shelves than a little-known Spanish moviemaker complicates the issue with a French-language film called, in English, The Chambermaid on the Titanic. Cheap profiteering? An attempt to cash in? Absolutely not. In fact,…
Thursday September 10 A variety of global art adventures will help greet the new season beginning tonight, with several museum and gallery openings that hop cultures, travel around the planet and journey back in time. At the Norwest Bank Atrium, 1740 Broadway, the Asian Pacific Development Center hosts its first…
The Forney Transportation Museum has always been its own metaphor: The building itself, with its veneer of dilapidation, is the perfect dwelling for the museum’s ancient collection. A jaw-dropping melange of things on wheels–including 170 automobiles of various vintages, 36 bicycles, four steam locomotives, four aircraft and innumerable other oddities–is…
Before the Beach Boys first intoned praises to a “Little Deuce Coupe” and that little old lady from Pasadena revved up the Jan and Dean hit, there was the ‘Vette, a new breed of sports car that embodied the carefree spirit of the road with more zest than any of…
