For many years, getting real was the chief preoccupation of the world’s painters. The Stone Age artists who decorated all those caves in France and Spain wanted views for their viewless spaces, and they painted what they knew: mainly bison and horses. The idea that painting exists to provide a…
“What can you do with the love that you feel? Where can you take it?” asks an eighteen-year-old girl caught in an emotional tug-of-war in William Inge’s Picnic. When her mother replies, “I never found out,” the young woman makes a gut-wrenching decision that represented the breaking of new theatrical…
Denver legend has it that the great Billy Eckstine performed in several Five Points jazz clubs of yesteryear, bringing his silky-smooth baritone to such venues as the Rainbow Ballroom and the Rossonian. Piqued by the opportunity to make a local connection to Eckstine’s music, members of Denver’s Shadow Theatre Company…
With Zero Effect–an apt title if ever there was one–writer-director Jake Kasdan presumes to turn the hard-boiled detective movie on its head with Gen-X hipness. He winds up looking pretty empty-headed himself. Kasdan, the 22-year-old son of Big Chill/ Accidental Tourist director Lawrence Kasdan, would likely never have gotten his…
In these paradox-ridden times, producers on the hunt for cutting-edge fantasies look back: They visit their boyhood or girlhood rooms and ransack their old books and videos or peruse their studio’s property list for works that scored well in other media. In the mid-’90s, the English company Working Title made…
Despite the tides of government repression and suspected U.S. chicanery that have afflicted his country for the last 35 years, the Brazilian filmmaker Bruno Barreto claims he’s not much of a political animal. As if to underscore that, his only global success was 1978’s spirited erotic farce Dona Flor and…
Really just the pulverized, roasted and melted-down by-product of the humble cacao bean, it’s when blended with mounds of butter and sugar that chocolate takes on that glorious, sexy sheen. And that’s where the trouble begins–just ask the people who make it. “It is one of the four main food…
Thursday February 5, 1998 Telling tales: When elder Ediberto, called “Papi-tres” by his great-granddaughter Camila, uses cuentos, or traditional stories passed down among generations, to connect with the modern young girl, he doesn’t seem to get through at first. But eventually, with help from El Cucui, the Mexican béte noire,…
Already, the art season that began last fall and will end this spring has seen its share of newsworthy events. Some of these developments, especially those in the publicly funded realm, seem all to the good. In November there was the completion, after five years of effort, of the multi-million-dollar…
Great playwrights have always attempted to illuminate broad human truths by writing about their own individual demons. Tennessee Williams is the classic American example: His plays consistently give voice to the strange psychoses of the Southern women–his mother and sister–who were significant in his life. Likewise, Ireland’s greatest living dramatist,…
When last we heard from famed G-man Eliot Ness, film star Kevin Costner was portraying the crimefighter in Brian DePalma’s flamboyant film The Untouchables, itself a knockoff of the 1950s television series starring Robert Stack. But DePalma’s tale of Ness’s outwitting and outgunning mobster Al Capone and company in Prohibition-era…
Set in nineteenth-century Australia, this tale of two gamblers–Oscar, a failed minister, and Lucinda, a glass-works owner–is too wispy to be an art thing and too heavy to be a toy. Its key symbol is a tiny glass teardrop. The “Prince Rupert drop” cannot be smashed with a sledgehammer but…
For better or worse, Barbet Schroeder is another one of those French directors who spent his youth watching Hollywood genre movies, over and over, in the smoky confines of the Paris Cinematheque. By the time he was big enough to find Jerry Lewis a genius, he had also absorbed everything…
For little Ludovic Fabre, the dreamy second-grader at the center of Ma Vie en Rose (My Life in Pink), everything would be fine if his childhood fantasies followed society’s orders. But nature has thrown him a curve. Ludovic doesn’t want to grow up to be a fireman, or a rough-and-tumble…
John Woo has generated plenty of American disciples in the decade since his Hong Kong action films began playing film festivals in the West. Even before he began his Hollywood career with 1993’s Hard Target, bits of his action shtick started showing up in the work of savvy young filmmakers,…
Blond-haired and blue-eyed, Luis Alberto Urrea is Mexican. And he’s American. Either way, he’s a Renaissance man of letters, juggling disciplines with an compassionate and down-to-earth concern for piecing together the puzzle of human experience. He sometimes introduces himself at readings by saying, “I know I look like Bubba.” But…
Thursday January 29 Detroit wheels: Life on the streets of Detroit gave former street performer Robert Bradley ample opportunity to hone his talents as a musician. Like the late Ted Hawkins, the Venice Beach busker who gained fame and recorded some fine albums before his death, Bradley, who is blind,…
It was with the idea of “breaking the winter doldrums” that Emmanuel Gallery director Carol Keller organized the compelling installation exhibit Ed & Stan at Emmanuel. Consider those doldrums broken. The “Ed” of the show’s title is sculptor R. Edward Lowe, and the “Stan” is photographer Standish Lawder. Though they…
For the last thirty years, comedy writer Neil Simon has reigned as the king of America’s community-theater circuit, where his plays are a favorite choice of groups strapped for cash, talent and time. Amateur performers need only speak the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright’s lines clearly and distinctly in order to evoke…
Just when it appeared that the reputation of noted Christian apologist and children’s book author (The Chronicles of Narnia) C.S. Lewis might naturally diminish with the passing of time, British playwright William Nicholson rescued the prolific writer’s name from virtual oblivion with the play Shadowlands. The absorbing drama, which tells…
In the new Great Expectations, directed by Alfonso Cuaron and scripted by Mitch Glazer, the teeming world of Charles Dickens’s 1861 novel is very loosely updated and transposed to Florida’s Gulf Coast and Manhattan. It wouldn’t be accurate to call this film an adaptation–at its best, it’s more like a…
There’s something curiously inanimate about Alan Rudolph’s Afterglow, but it’s certainly not the luminous and thoroughly engaging Julie Christie. Here’s a film that means to meditate on the pitfalls of marriage in the Nineties using slyness and dark wit, but it comes off as bloodless as a blueprint. Only the…
