Mad City, a descendant of Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, may irritate orthodox movie buffs. In the coruscating Wilder classic, Kirk Douglas’s supremely cynical newspaper reporter turns the rescue of a cave-in victim into “the big carnival” (the film’s alternate title). The protagonist of Mad City, a TV reporter…
Thursday October 30 Where you been? Songwriters don’t come any tougher–or any more tender–than Austin musician Lucinda Williams, whose songs have been snatched up and made into hits by the likes of Mary Chapin Carpenter and Emmylou Harris. After holing up for months, painstakingly recording a long-awaited followup to her…
It’s no exaggeration to say that American culture got its greatest boost ever from the rise of the Nazis in Europe in the 1930s and ’40s. Hitler’s hatred for modernism in the arts led many of the most important contemporary figures to flee the continent and seek safe haven in…
The always opinionated George Bernard Shaw once challenged the so-called Father of Modern Drama, Henrik Ibsen, to explain “if he can, why the building of houses and the raising of families is not the ultimate destiny of mankind.” All this despite the fact that Shaw never reared a child of…
How did you respond in school when you were told by the teacher that the day’s learning was going to be “fun”? Did you imagine that you’d be entertained by Spandex-clad song-and-dance specialists? Were sing-alongs what you envisioned when a math lesson was on tap? No, even though education and…
The ongoing anxieties and agonies of the American family don’t make for a pretty picture. Divorce and disorder have replaced macaroni and cheese as the domestic commonplace, but most people can give little credence to either the self-righteous prescriptions of the fundamentalist right or the ecstatic bleatings of the new-agers…
In Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca, the cleverest (if not quite the most convincing) science-fiction movie of the year, the near future is inhabited by designer humans whose DNA codes have been rigged down at the lab for conformist perfection and by “in-valids,” the inferior products of parents who’ve relied on mere…
Despite its muckraking pretensions, Red Corner is a rickety throwback to escapist adventures that featured beautiful foreign idealists spouting high-flown hooey to fighting Americans. The heroine, a scrappy Beijing defense lawyer, ends up whispering a whole succession of sweet somethings to the hero, a framed Yank. The banalities include (I…
Thursday October 23 Ready to roll: Glamour, glitz and miles and miles of old and new film from around the world are certain benchmarks of the Denver International Film Festival, returning to town for its twentieth go-around. As always, the fest features celebrity guests (actors Jack Palance and Bryan Brown…
The spectacular show The Collectors Vision marks the first exhibit presented under the auspices of Denver’s new Museum of Contemporary Art. And though it’s been a very long time coming, this show on the mezzanine of the 1999 Broadway Building has proven well worth the wait. The idea of a…
Veteran Madison Avenue ad exec Marshall Karp moved to Los Angeles in 1987 and garnered modest success writing for such TV shows as Amen, starring Sherman “George Jefferson” Hemsley, and Baby Talk, featuring Connie Sellecca and George Clooney. Four years before he devoted himself to such Hollywood shlock, though, he…
The one-act play is largely a twentieth-century phenomenon. Shakespeare evidently never wrote a one-act play to encapsulate his feelings and thoughts, even though his world may have seemed smaller to him than our modern, global network of communications does to us. Relying mostly on his knowledge of human nature, the…
Just when you thought you couldn’t stand to watch another movie about a household concealing a dark secret–or sit through another Thanksgiving reunion–along comes The House of Yes. Adapted from Wendy MacLeod’s award-winning play We Are Living in the House of Yes, it’s a black comedy of manners concerning a…
The twentieth edition of the Denver International Film Festival gets under way tonight, October 23, with a showing at the Continental Theatre of The Wings of a Dove, Iain Softley’s adaptation of the Henry James classic, and closes October 30 with The Ice Storm, novelist Rick Moody’s harrowing tale of…
Stylishness without substance can become wearying real fast. Twenty minutes into A Life Less Ordinary, the new movie from the producing-directing-writing team of Trainspotting and Shallow Grave, I was already into overload. It’s not that director Danny Boyle doesn’t have imagination. It’s just that sometimes imagination is all he has…
The true-life incident of the Cottingley fairies is so full of possibilities, so thought-provoking and hilarious at once, that it’s amazing it’s never been filmed before. Making up for lost time, the story has suddenly appeared (on its eightieth anniversary) simultaneously as the basis for two films. Photographing Fairies, with…
Here’s a wonder. The dirty little pleasures of Boogie Nights, which chronicles the follies and the fondest dreams of a group of L.A. porn stars in the late Seventies and early Eighties, have almost nothing to do with sex or debauchery. Instead, this sly and hugely entertaining flashback to the…
Thursday October 16 The Shaw must go on: Screwball comedy may have been hatched when George Bernard Shaw’s Misalliance first hit the stage earlier this century, with stuffy British underwear magnate John Tarleton for a protagonist and a Polish aviatrix as his unexpected foil. The same issues of the heart…
Those cold fronts that have recently swept down from Wyoming can mean only one thing–the start of the fall art season. And the forecast for this year’s exhibition climate? Batten down the hatches. Exciting shows are cropping up everywhere, even at the almost-always-overcast alternative spaces. And there are some big…
What did it all mean? That was the lingering question many audience members pondered one recent Saturday afternoon after Cirque du Soleil loosened its formidable grip on their collective imaginations. Holding the sell-out crowd spellbound with a captivating performance of its current touring show, Quidam, the Montreal-based troupe received two…
Classical theater, like classical music, is often regarded as something that must be tolerated, if rarely enjoyed. Many theater-goers routinely endure an entire evening of, say, Shakespearean drama or Wagnerian opera, dutifully applauding a performance more out of respect for its standing as a classic than for its ability to…
The Seventies were so awash in Fifties nostalgia that it’s surprising that Dan Wakefield’s 1970 bestseller Going All the Way is only now turning up in big-screen form. Of course, not all Fifties coming-of-age stories are the same: Unlike The Last Picture Show and American Graffiti–which pretty much dominated the…
