As you watch Whiteline Productions’ presentation of An Evening of Three One-Act Plays by Luigi Pirandello, it becomes increasingly clear just why the Pirandello Repertory Theater (and its cash-cow second-stage cabaret, the Laugh-a-Minute Luigi Comedy Club) has yet to take hold in Denver. Of course, lack of popular demand has…
As a requiem for the Sixties, The Big Chill didn’t quite hit the mark the first time around, in 1983. Its greatest-hits soundtrack was soul-stirring, all right; it’s hard to top the Stones, Marvin Gaye or Aretha Franklin in any decade. But the shameless way in which director Lawrence Kasdan…
American History X, a hard-edged look at American neo-Nazis, arrives in theaters with a lot of behind-the-scenes baggage. First-time director Tony Kaye has engaged in a protracted, high-profile battle with distributor-producer New Line Cinema over the film’s final form. While Kaye may have a justified grievance, this is not as…
When Montoya, one of the fearless vampire killers in John Carpenter’s Vampires, tells another character that nobody believes in the title creatures because nobody wants to, there’s no mistaking the ancestry of the line. It comes down, through two generations of horror films, from the moment in the original Dracula…
Even folks who know all about the prairie-dog controversy gnawing at the western plains will probably be enlightened by Varmints. Produced by High Plains Films, the ninety-minute documentary has its world premiere at the Boulder Theater on October 28, and from all appearances, the issue is far more complex than…
Some say the book is in trouble, destined to become obsolete in the computer age. But when the Denver Public Library Friends Foundation asked for literary testimonials from national celebrities and role models for an upcoming exhibit, the results expressed, in myriad ways, solid, enduring support for books. Called Library…
Thursday October 22 Hear that faint tinkling of bells off in the distance? Yep, it’s the holiday shopping season rearing its ugly head. But since it’s still early in the game, you have time to plot a clever course to avoid the ordinary choices, and Kaleidoscope, a bazaar gathering merchandise…
Only rarely can one individual literally change the cultural landscape of a major city. But that’s exactly what Nancy Tieken has done since she came to Denver for health reasons in 1991. Bored by a lengthy recuperation process, Tieken, a lifetime art historian with a BFAfrom Radcliffe, volunteered at the…
Teeming with macabre, whimsical episodes and peopled with bizarre, charming characters–all 23 of whom, save one, are played by a first-rate quartet of actors–Giles Havergal’s acclaimed adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel Travels With My Aunt is now being presented at the Space Theatre by the Denver Center Theatre Company. But…
Sixty years before American audiences were entranced by the 1992 Mexican film Like Water for Chocolate, a mystical fable about a young woman’s repressed dreams, Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca wrote a trilogy of tragedies about the hopes and fears of his country’s peasant classes. Shortly before he died, in…
For filmmaker Todd Solondz, it’s always midnight in suburbia. Life is lonely, and the natives can be hostile. In his daring second film, Happiness, the darkness engulfs victims of all ages: a boy in the throes of impending adolescence, three New Jersey sisters tormented by sex and love, an obscene…
A riveting but darkly disturbing thriller, Apt Pupil isn’t easy to sit through. The subject matter itself proves deeply unsettling, while two brief acts of sadism are so horrifying as to be unwatchable. And yet this brutal film borders on the brilliant. Beautifully structured and edited, with a chilling central…
The first time we see Ray Joshua, the young black hero of director Marc Levin’s impressive feature debut Slam, we get a vivid taste of the conflicting forces that rule him. His olive-drab pants, so hip-hop baggy that you could fit two rail-thin Rays inside, are stuffed with bags of…
At the beginning of Gary Ross’s Pleasantville, two unhappy suburban teenagers (is there any other kind?) fall down the rabbit hole of their TV set and find themselves trapped in a parallel universe–a 1950s sitcom more idealized than Ozzie and Harriet, sweeter than Father Knows Best. In this black-and-white realm,…
Teri O’Neill doesn’t take photographs of flowers; she takes pictures from the flowers’ point of view. Using a standard 35mm camera and photographic equipment intended for medical and industrial use, O’Neill is able to get her ethereal shots from inside the flowers. “I’m trying to show that there’s more to…
Thursday October 15 If those passive boob-tube debates don’t do it for you, get up-close and personal with Colorado’s political hopefuls at a 1998 Candidates Forum, sponsored by the Allied Jewish Federation and the National Council of Jewish Women. All of the high-profile candidates, including gubernatorial, U.S. Senate and congressional…
Greg Sarris is one of those California creations: Part Filipino, part German Jewish and part Coast Miwok Indian, he’s a bowl of soup in the melting pot of America. And if you think Sarris might, as a result, be a complex guy, you’re right. A Stanford-trained writer of fiction who…
Though it may seem as if the current exhibition season has just gotten under way–and it has–some of the fall openers have already closed. But there’s still time to see three marvelous shows that are just entering their final days at two of the city’s most notable galleries. These three…
If you grew up participating in duck-and-cover air-raid drills and memorizing the exact location of your neighborhood’s official fallout shelter, then you probably didn’t regard the end of the Cold War as just another over-hyped media event. As the first images of a collapsing Berlin Wall flickered on your television…
Hardened by years of debilitating despair, a young woman shuffles into a Midwestern living room, saunters over to the dining-room table and matter-of-factly declares, “I’m going to kill myself, Mama–in a couple of hours.” Ninety intermissionless minutes later, the character of Jessie Cates regrettably fulfills that awful promise. Apart from…
The Jonathan Demme-directed Beloved runs nearly three hours, and it’s a long slog. This adaptation of the 1987 Toni Morrison novel bursts with ambition: It tries to get inside the fevers of the African-American slave experience, but it also wants to be an epic family saga and a whopping ghost…
As witch movies go–even lighthearted, supposedly comic witch movies –Practical Magic is conspicuously lacking in supernatural phenomena. There are no ritual murders, resurrected warlocks or conventions of hags bent on turning the world’s children into mice. Director Griffin Dunne (1997’s Addicted to Love) can’t scare up a single bedeviled infant…
