The John Grisham industry has claimed another heavyweight. A few months back, Francis Ford Coppola delivered up John Grisham’s The Rainmaker, and now Robert Altman sails into view with The Gingerbread Man, based on an original Grisham screen story–although it’s basically a recycling of other Grisham recyclings. Who would have…
The American reissues of Jackie Chan films have met with declining box-office success since Chan burst onto the scene in 1996 with Rumble in the Bronx. With any luck, the latest Chan opus to be recut and redubbed for Americans, the year-old Mr. Nice Guy, should reverse the trend. No…
In the course of an extraordinary acting career, Gary Oldman has portrayed, among other outcasts, the drug-addled punk rocker Sid Vicious, the possible presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and the notorious bloodsucker Count Dracula. They’re all choirboys compared to the barbarous South London blokes Oldman gives us in Nil by…
Still have your doubts that Western civilization has been conquered by sixth-grade dropouts snorting meth? No longer. Hollywood has just now released the first film noir for teenagers–a boiling stew of greed, betrayal, murder and three-way sex in which the female characters have not yet graduated from high school and…
Thursday March 19 While playwright August Wilson reworks his script for Jitney, originally scheduled by the Denver Center Theatre Company during this time slot, director Israel Hicks will take a break from his ongoing Wilson marathon to stage something a little different. Pearl Cleage’s Blues for an Alabama Sky stays…
Long before Jerry Garcia picked up his first banjo or Spock was a glint in Gene Roddenberry’s eye, there were Sherlockians–or Holmesians, as they prefer to be called in England. A cultist’s cult dedicated to good, if somewhat macabre, clean fun, the fans of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective…
We all know Molly Brown didn’t go down with the Titanic. So why host a wake in her former home, a Denver museum commemorating her name? “Molly was unsinkable,” local-history scholar Tom Noel attests. “Her mother was not.” Noel, who teaches local lore at CU-Denver, will be the ringleader Sunday,…
The Round World gallery opened quietly last fall on the edge of downtown Denver, moving into a pair of rehabbed storefronts that share a red-brick Victorian building with the popular La Coupole French restaurant. It’s an obscure location for an art gallery; the neighborhood is neither LoDo, which remains downtown’s…
President Clinton’s 1993 appointment of actress Jane Alexander to head the National Endowment for the Arts was seen by many as a healthy sign for the embattled agency. After all, Alexander had enjoyed a distinguished career in the theater and was the first actual artist to hold the post. But…
Apart from angst-ridden playwrights, hostile audiences and long periods of unemployment, the greatest challenge faced by a professional actor is the tricky business of sharing the stage with children and small animals. W.C. Fields made hating kids downright stylish, despite the fact that he began his own career by running…
If ever there was an “op-ed” movie–a movie destined to be written about in an “elevated” realm beyond just the movie pages–it’s Primary Colors. Thanks to Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones, the Hollywood/Washington nexus has lifted this new Mike Nichols picture, based on the 1996 bestseller by Joe Klein, into…
Takeshi Kitano, the reigning Renaissance man of Japanese pop culture, is a scriptwriter, movie actor and director, as well as the star of seven TV shows. He produces six different columns for national magazines and, it says here, has written 55 books. In his spare time, he makes outrageous public…
We should be thankful, I suppose, for the headlong assault by assorted filmmakers upon the dark castle of Great Literature. For one thing, it reduces the need for college students to squander their hard-earned beer money on Cliffs Notes. It also reminds patrons in the sports bars that iambic pentameter…
Thursday March 12 The whole Megillah: The main protagonist in the Purim story–Queen Esther–was one tough cookie. It’s no wonder she’s such a great role model for Jewish women today. Her saga, recounted each spring by Jews everywhere, is the focus this morning at a special women’s Megillah Reading taking…
Last year, during a Scientific and Cultural Facilities District funding evaluation, Industrial Arts Theatre (IAT) director Phil Luna sat mute, listening to others debate the reasons why his nonprofit troupe should be awarded a grant. “There was a question in the grant application–does your company do works for underserved populations?”…
Vance Kirkland was the biggest name in Denver’s art world for much of the twentieth century. From the 1930s through the 1970s, he dominated the local art scene, not just as the city’s premier modern painter, but also as an influential art teacher and a powerful force at the Denver…
William Shakespeare was, above all else, a practical man. The sheer majesty of his verse notwithstanding, the Bard of Avon became the world’s greatest playwright because he told his versions of borrowed (some would say stolen) stories better than anyone else. Which is why those who would improve upon Shakespeare’s…
While Kate Winslet was having her diaper changed and Keanu Reeves was sneaking a joint into the prom, an extraordinary thing happened. A cast of actors who have nineteen Academy Award nominations (and five Oscars) to their credit and one of the most accomplished directors in America were making a…
How do you make a sequel to a film whose plot simply will not yield a logical successor? You can bet your bottom dollar that somewhere in Hollywood right now–hopefully not in the office of James Cameron–someone connected with Titanic is working on that question right now. Some things are…
Richard Kwietniowski’s first feature, Love and Death on Long Island, won’t be every surfer babe’s idea of a good time. But if you’ve got a taste for mordant wit, sharp observation and a whiff of personal liberation, step up and grab a ticket for this quirky, wonderfully surreal tale about…
Thursday March 5 Art for art’s sake: If only you knew Picasso like Lucien Clergue knew Picasso. The French photographer, known for his portraits of members of the modern Gallic intelligentsia such as Jean Cocteau and Roland Barthes, caught Pablo on film extensively over a period of twenty years, until…
People hang on to the junkiest stuff in their garages and basements–old tools, newspapers, broken bicycles. But members of the Colorado Independent Press Association stash a far more precious cargo in the musty depths of their houses: boxes of self-published books, the finished fruits of their many-sided labors. “I’m out…
