We don’t really understand our world. Flailing about in unsuitable relationships, many people really want a perfect blend of community and independence and just can’t find it anywhere–except maybe at a place like Stanton’s Garage, where life unexpectedly solves its own riddles and strangers help each other through emotional distress…
The so-called phenomenon in Phenomenon first shows itself when a likable but dim-witted auto mechanic played by John Travolta suddenly starts beating brainy Robert Duvall at chess. A little while later, the ex-dumbbell learns Portuguese in twenty minutes, just in time to save a lost boy’s life. He cleverly engineers…
If the goofballs in Hollywood want to pay Demi Moore 12 million bucks to waggle her butt and flash her chest at a movie camera, so be it. That doesn’t mean we have to reimburse them. Striptease contains two or three minutes of softcore T and A, and that is…
Want to hear a recipe for competing in the summer movie marketplace? First, dig up $80 or $90 million. Add 3,000 (yes, 3,000) special-effects shots depicting stuff like the fiery destruction of the Empire State Building, the U.S. Capitol and the White House, a couple of major air battles between…
Thursday June 20 Main squeezebox: Her last novel, The Shipping News, ran away with all the most impressive distinctions, including a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, catapulting E. Annie Proulx into the literary limelight. Now her latest, Accordion Crimes, continues in form, following a green accordion built in…
When people think today of the Victorian era–if they think of it at all–they imagine a Dickensian world populated with polite yet insufferable prigs and upright if ignorant street urchins. But the latter half of the nineteenth century also marked the emergence of modern and social science–everything from physics to…
Extended families can be such a blessing–sometimes a mixed blessing, as two local theater productions remind us. American playwright Paul Osborn’s charming, poignant comedy Morning’s at Seven and Irish playwright Brian Friel’s dismal drama Wonderful Tennessee both step gingerly on the minefield of sibling tensions. But while the first is…
One of the great things about a show like Ain’t Misbehavin’ is its interactive dimension: The performers play directly to the audience members, who get to clap their hands and tap their feet in time with the boisterous, life-affirming music of Thomas “Fats” Waller. And the fabulous Pointer Sisters production…
The young filmmaker Todd Solondz insists that the unsettling picture of preteen trauma he gives us in his astonishing Welcome to the Dollhouse is not autobiographical–even though Heather Matarazzo, the eleven-year-old actress he cast in the part of a lonely, terrorized seventh-grader, bears a striking physical resemblance to him, and…
The Germans are not exactly the kings of comedy–not in this century–so it’s always a little startling to come across a German film speckled with yuks, even when those yuks are largely about dissolution and death. Case in point: Doris Dorrie’s Nobody Loves Me is a kind of bedroom farce…
Thursday June 13 Let’s go Dutch: Windmills, wooden shoes and tulips are just some of the attractions at the Bethesda Dutch Festival, an annual event starting today on the Bethesda Hospital grounds, 4400 E. Iliff Ave. Featuring a picturesque Dutch village with shops and costumed denizens, dancers, old world food…
In its relatively short history, the Center for the Visual Arts, Metropolitan State College’s gallery in LoDo, has celebrated the diversity of the art world. Sally Perisho, the center’s founding director, has paid special attention to art by women, gays and ethnic minorities. And she has mixed things up: One…
A troubled mind struggling for decency, the neighborly hand held out to a wretched man–these are the elements of Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana, for my money the most meaningful of all the great American playwright’s works. Other Williams plays may be more poetic or tragic or psychologically…
Gospel, the musical form that arose at the turn of the century with Pentecostal revivalism in African-American churches, has had a lasting and profound effect on American music during its century-long evolution. While rhythm and blues and soul took off from gospel roots, gospel itself has retained its identity and…
Europe’s favorite movie comedian, Roberto Benigni, carries the Buster Keaton chromosome and the Jim Carrey chromosome–joined together in bedroom farce. American audiences know him best as Tom Waits’s talkative cellmate in Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law, as Johnny Stecchino, or as Inspector Clouseau Jr. in the ill-considered Son of the…
If you decide to catch only one of this summer’s zillion-dollar action movies, make it The Rock. The high-profile Simpson/Bruckheimer production team, Bad Boys director Michael Bay and a battalion of stunt people blow up even more stuff–Humvees, yellow Ferraris, cable cars, a Navy weapons depot, some big chunks of…
Thursday June 6 Sip away: Swilling’s not your style? The Winer’s Club, a unique society at the Hotel Boulderado’s Teddy Roosevelt American Grille, caters to the sophisticated palate by offering points for every glass of vino you imbibe (accumulated points are good for restaurant gift certificates and the like). How…
In spite of a century of modern art jam-packed with things like abstraction, minimalism and conceptualism, the venerable tradition of depicting the human figure in art has held on admirably. As the modernist twentieth century comes to a close, artists working with the human body as their subject seem to…
Musicals seem to be the one theatrical form in which outright silliness is not only acceptable but desirable. A farce has to have some underlying intelligence, some razor-sharp insight into manners and mores, in order to satisfy. But a musical needs only vivid tunes, lively dancing, sympathetic characters and perhaps…
Much of what makes us laugh in comedy arises out of pain. And Dale Stewart’s subversive, poignant comedy Harvey’s Boy is sore all over. However, there’s nothing morbid or crass about this one-man show. Stewart’s reminiscences about his childhood and young adulthood add up in the end to a warm…
If you want to get all star-struck, it’s probably a good idea to aim a little higher than the assorted frauds, mannequins, paralyzed junkies and ten-cent philosophers who drifted into Andy Warhol’s orbit in downtown New York in the late Sixties. At Max’s Kansas City in those days, the signature…
For more than half a century, science-fiction movies have been asking if there’s intelligent life in outer space. The Arrival makes you wonder how much of it is left on Earth. Imagine Charlie Sheen as one Zane Zaminski, a goofy science nerd with a bad crewcut, fogged-up glasses and a…
