Contemporary playwrights face the same nagging question each time they write a script: Should it be a comedy, a tragedy or a dogmatic disaster-documentary? The latter is mostly the accepted province of Hollywood, and the only form of tragedy that seems to bubble up to the surface these days is…
Last year 28 of America’s regional theaters presented A.R. Gurney’s comedy Sylvia, giving it the dubious distinction of being the most-produced play of the professional theater season apart from holiday regulars such as A Christmas Carol. There’s an obvious reason: Despite some of Gurney’s off-the-cuff remarks about politics, self-help gurus…
Kevin Costner’s last outing as director/star, Dances With Wolves, nabbed Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay, but his post-apocalyptic followup, The Postman, is too standard-issue to impress even the resolutely middlebrow minds of Academy voters. Nor is it likely to please audiences. Call it what you will–Waterworld…
When was the last time the audience applauded a trailer and the movie lived up to it? Independence Day enticed millions with its preview shot of the White House blown to smithereens, but that film was a dumb, elephantine sci-fi pastiche. The trailer for Wag the Dog, a far more…
When first we see Melvin Udall, middle-aged misanthrope, he’s stuffing his neighbor’s pesky little dog into the garbage chute of their Manhattan apartment building. That’s perfection. Melvin, we soon learn, is nasty by reflex–a selfish, acid-tongued homophobe who has no use for Jews, blacks, children, women or anybody else who…
Imagine Macaulay Culkin as a three-inch rodent with no personality, and you’ve pretty much nailed the thing. Mouse Hunt, the third movie to be released by DreamWorks Pictures, is Home Alone boiled down to grim, humorless destruction, with a nameless mouse as the tormentor. Seen another way, it’s Tom and…
1. L.A. Confidential. Directed Curtis Hanson revives Fifties noir in high style. Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe and Kim Bassinger wallow in the mire and betrayals. 2. Mrs. Brown. Was Queen Victoria hot for her manservant? Dame Judi Dench convinces in a model of film literacy. 3. Boogie Nights. Rootless Seventies…
Thursday December 25 Grate expectations: Face the facts–holidays are at least 80 percent about stuffing your face, and the more the merrier. Hanukkah frolickers can get their fill of potato pancakes at today’s Munchin’ Lots of Latkes Luncheon, a tribute to those crunchy, munchy, grated and fried traditional spud treats,…
If things had gone slightly differently on the night of December 22, 1989, the Denver Art Museum’s current show Old Masters Brought to Light: European Paintings From the National Museum of Art of Romania would never have happened. Because that night, as the iron grip of reviled Communist dictator Nicolae…
The violence that engulfed America shortly after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy is well-documented. What isn’t as well known is that many churches responded to the unrest by pulling together in a unique and effective way. In order to heal the wounds of their…
Suppose you have a few million dollars to invest in The King and I. Naturally, you want to create a touring production of the highest quality, but you’re also concerned about turning a profit. What you need is some sort of guarantee that will eliminate the possibility of financial failure…
The new Gus Van Sant film Good Will Hunting is like an adolescent’s fantasy of being tougher and smarter and more misunderstood than anybody else. It’s also touchy-feely with a vengeance. Is this the same director who made Mala Noche and Drugstore Cowboy? Those films had a fresh way of…
For a high-school dropout with a bad temper, Quentin Tarantino has done pretty well for himself. Let’s see. In five years he’s grown into an ultra-hip icon with the fanatical following of a rock star and an entire school of imitators. He’s simultaneously brought Hollywood moguls to their knees and…
Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter is about grief and the search for grace and the frail relationships between parents and children. It’s a profound and beautiful work, and if we had any doubts about the skill of this gifted filmmaker in the wake of Speaking Parts or Exotica, they vanish…
Thursday December 18 Material world: Well-worn baby blankets, christening gowns, Halloween costumes, patchwork quilts and wedding attire are the kinds of sentiment-charged mementos we stash in our attics for posterity. Cultural Threads: Ceremonial Textiles Around the World, a new exhibit opening today at the Mizel Museum of Judaica, 560 S…
The Colorado History Museum’s new exhibit on the 1960s and ’70s is filled with contradictions. It’s elegant in places, crude elsewhere; there are joyful moments and sad ones. And conveying these contradictions is exactly what the show’s principal organizer, Stan Oliner, had in mind. “As I looked at the period,…
No matter how hard playwright Eugene O’Neill tried to distance himself from his anguished past, the personal demons of his family life continued to hound the great writer until his death in 1953. He passed on his obsession to his widow, Carlotta, instructing her to refrain from producing his most…
The closing moments of CityStage Ensemble’s production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead are ripe for a rendition of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” After all, director Dan Hiester bills his production as ” Stoppard’s comedy with a holiday twist.” Given that no discernible holiday references appear elsewhere in the…
When the Titanic, the grandest ocean liner of her day, struck an iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912, and sank to the bottom of the dead-calm, starlit North Atlantic, she launched a rich tangle of legends and lessons that endure to this day. You’ll find very few of…
It’s a tough act to follow, sweeping the Oscars with a hallowed epic about a redeemed Nazi who saves doomed Jews from the ovens. But Steven Spielberg, all grown up now and moving steadily forward, doesn’t disappoint. With Amistad, Hollywood’s master of narrative boldly plumbs some other heavyweight issues–the enduring…
Now that the Japanese Tora-san series–with fifty-some entries in thirty years–has presumably drawn to a close following the death of star Kiyoshi Atsumi last year, the James Bond films constitute the longest-running continuous series around. They’ve had their ups and downs, but something about the Bond formula has proved enduring…
Thursday December 11 Top of the season: A Christmas Carol–the Dickens classic replete with spooky ghosts, flashbacks and flash-forwards, an indefatigably cheery invalid and the original Scrooge of all Scrooges–has to be counted among the most essential of Christmas musts. So that you may fulfill your family holiday duty, Scrooge…
