Playwright Tony Kushner took on an astounding feat when he wrote Angels in America. The six-and-a-half-hour play consists of two parts–“The Millennium Approaches,” in which everything begins to come undone, and “Perestroika,” in which all of the play’s conflicts are more or less resolved. It is so Big that it…
Colm Meaney, the earthy Irish actor, has the puffy face of an ex-welterweight, the bulky grace of a steamroller and, beneath all his bluster, the blithe spirit of an imp. In the Nineties he’s been the heart and soul of two related art-house hits called The Commitments and The Snapper,…
The special effects in the sci-fi comedy Men in Black are an orgy of animatronics, mechanical effects, practical effects, miniatures, computer enhancements, makeup–the whole shebang. The film’s mishmash of tones, from goofball to horrific, is equally all over the map. The trailer for the movie promised a great big Ghostbusters-style…
So far, the only ingenious action movie of this mayhem-stuffed, crash-filled summer is Face/Off, directed by the peerless John Woo. It dispenses enough all-out ass-kicking to satisfy the most hormonal adolescent but manages to balance things up with–are you ready for this?–a bracing little essay on human identity. The high-priced,…
Slapstick decadence is the dominant style at the Disney studios this summer, reaching all the way from Touchstone Pictures’ action hit Con Air to the 35th Walt Disney animated feature, Hercules. It’s a moviemaking mode that weds anything-for-a-laugh to anything-for-a-jolt, leaving imagination and authenticity in the lurch. Instead of creating…
Thursday June 26 24 carrot gold: Any Jew worth his or her chopped liver knows there’s nothing more priceless than bubbe’s home cookin’. So for ethnic gastronomes, the name of Jewish-music group Tzimmes makes perfect sense. The band’s Yiddish title refers to a chutney-like stew of carrots, raisins, prunes and…
Thursday June 19 Just put your lips together and blow: Folk art is just to look at and enjoy, right? Wrong. The wacky, whimsical works of Iowa carver Connie Roberts have hidden talents, as well: They’re whistles. The outside might look like a tic-tac-toe board festooned with comic cats and…
This weekend Denver will be paralyzed by the Summit of the Eight, this year’s version of the Group of Seven conferences that have been held for years. These meetings bring together the leaders of the richest countries on earth–the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Japan–and serve mostly…
If Speed 2: Cruise Control were a frantic, zillion-dollar disaster movie in which the world’s most luxurious ocean liner hits an iceberg on its maiden voyage and sinks to the bottom of the North Atlantic, people might find it a little hard to believe. If it were a frantic, zillion-dollar…
It’s been a long road between landmarks for Peter Fonda. When last we saw him, it seems, he was a lean young rebel perched atop a Harley chopper, the winds of freedom whipping his hair, with a little-known running mate named Jack Nicholson in tow. For a member of one…
Bring earplugs to Batman & Robin. A pair of noseplugs wouldn’t hurt, either. The fourth installment in the Batman franchise is one long head-splitting exercise in clueless cacophony that makes you feel as though you’re being held hostage in some haywire Planet Hollywood while sonic booms pummel your auditory canal…
Thursday June 12 Oh, you kid: Erstwhile kid-in-the-hall Scott Thompson is a dedicated Streisand-watcher. Not a fan, mind you, just a watcher. It has to do with the striking resemblance: In an interview in US magazine, Thompson said, “A little more nose bump and I’m there.” The fey Canadian, who…
The current revival of 1920s and ’30s academic surrealism has grown into an international school of contemporary painting, and it has local legs that stretch back to the 1970s. Its adherents employ traditional painting genres such as landscapes, portraits and still lifes. But rather than work with a straight face,…
Chip Walton is one of the brightest young talents to crash the Denver theater scene in years. He’s an accomplished actor who made an elegant, riveting Salieri two years ago in the Aurora Fox’s Amadeus. But Walton’s special gift is for directing. He has a filmmaker’s split-second timing, a poet’s…
The germ of Clare Peploe’s complex fantasy of the heart, Rough Magic, is a sweet, obscure piece of pulp fiction called Miss Shumway Waves a Wand, written in 1944 by an all-but-forgotten novelist named James Hadley Chase. To say that Peploe, once an assistant to Bertolucci and Antonioni, has transformed…
The heroine of Susan Streitfeld’s solemn, psychiatry-stuffed first feature, Female Perversions, is a tense, humorless Los Angeles lawyer called Eve Stephens. She favors expensive tailored suits, two-inch spike heels and, if she can fit it into her busy schedule, mid-day office sex with her insufferable male lover or, failing that,…
Thursday June 5 Girl talk: The quartet of professional Latinas in Luminarias is looking for role models more inspiring than what it calls the stereotypical “gang mothers, undocumented workers, hookers and suffering women kneeling before the Virgin.” Along the way, the four find time to discuss politics, racial issues, relationships…
The fine arts almost never get sucked into mass culture’s real Internet–television. And when art does land in the TV spotlight, it usually suffers. Typically, there are three circumstances in which an event in the world of the visual arts will arouse the attention of the networks and CNN: the…
The best comedies are serious business. The whole spectrum of human frailty is meat and drink for the great comic writers, and it takes a profound intelligence to make us laugh at human beastliness. Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol, a nineteenth-century Russian with a gift for satirical realism, was one such brain…
Theatre on Broadway’s Whoop Dee Doo! is a lot like a good fat-free dessert: Flavorful while you’re tasting it, but so light it doesn’t stay with you. This cheeky musical revue from the late Broadway costume designer Howard Crabtree is well-done–the performers sing and dance their hearts out–but in the…
John “The Scribbler” Grisham and those lawyer shows on TV should probably get three to five in the Big House for the attendant crime wave they’ve started–that is, for fomenting an epidemic of allegedly hilarious legal comedies that don’t withstand much audience grilling. Jonathan Lynn’s Trial and Error is clearly…
It wouldn’t be completely fair to say that the string of hits produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer from 1983 through 1996 are stylistically interchangeable. But it wouldn’t be so awfully unfair, either: A homogeneous, auteurial touch runs from Flashdance (1983) through Top Gun (1986), Beverly Hills Cop II…
