Thursday May 30 New dimensions: What constitutes a finished work of art? The Completed Image: An Exhibition of Drawings, opening today at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, makes a case for the drawing, a medium often relegated to the stature of a preliminary sketch or study. For…
He’s midway through his solo exhibit at the Close Range Gallery of the Denver Art Museum, but Phil Bender still acts embarrassed about all the attention. In fact, Bender’s taken an “Aw, shucks” approach–which works perfectly with his thick Texas drawl–to the accolades heaped on his signature grids of found…
The archetypal story of Beauty and the Beast has taken many, many forms in practically every culture of the world. The most common of these involves a beautiful woman falling in love with a prince who has been hexed into ugliness. In other forms of the story, the Beast figure…
Part myth-making, part absurdist exercise, part political allegory and part youthful hell-raising, The Eclipse of Lawry, by Gwylym Cano, is fun, stimulating theater. It’s hard to follow some of the dialogue, since the repartee rips rather fast and is complicated by a Texas drawl meant to underscore the cowboy theme…
The silly season is upon us, so the best you can hope for down at the local multiplex these days is silliness with a touch of style, a dash of sense and an absence of tornadoes. Enter Dragonheart, which combines the romance of huge, toothsome beasts with the classic movie…
Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell is being billed as Japan’s coming-out party in the world of big-time animation, as well as another visionary take on the future. But before cartoon freaks get too carried away, it might be useful to note that Oshii’s drawing style can be stiff, cold…
Thursday May 23 The write stuff: So much for the theory that all critics are frustrated artists–modern Latino literature connoisseurs and scholars Graciela Limon and Bruce-Novoa both switched gracefully from criticism to fiction and poetry and back again, each winning acclaim for their efforts from other critics. The pair will…
The construction of Denver International Airport has meant many things to many people. For most of us, DIA has meant an extra hour or two of travel just to get to and from the remote facility. To many who were more intimately involved, especially in the airport’s financing and its…
Anthony Zerbe is one terrific character actor. He has appeared in dozens of movies and TV shows, as villains or good guys, disappearing into his roles and yet always remaining distinctly himself. I remember seeing his remarkable Richard III at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, and it has…
A whole section of seats has been removed at the Theatre at Jack’s to make way for the Civil War as only American journalist and author Ambrose Bierce could envision it–and as only CityStage Ensemble would stage it. Bitten by a Snake is creator/director Laura Cuetara’s compilation of five Bierce…
Good morning, Mr. Phelps…Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to play second fiddle to Tom Cruise, because he’s the star and the producer. And to inflate a pretty entertaining old TV series into a movie monster that cost more to make than all the broadcast episodes put…
Seen any good Icelandic movies lately? How about surreal Icelandic road movies that begin at a fish market in Tokyo and wind up with the principals eating roasted rams’ testicles in a raucous country-and-Western bar plunked down about nine yards from the North Pole? Fridrik Thor Fridriksson’s Cold Fever is…
Thursday May 16 An isle seat: The Haitian experience is brought to life by the stunning poeticism and unshakably truthful voice of author Edwidge Danticat, whose vivid, considerable storytelling skills shape the nine short stories in Krik? Krak!, her recent short-fiction collection distinguished in the industry by a National Book…
It was in mid-March that Paul Hughes, director of the venerable, twenty-something Inkfish Gallery, announced that he would mount an in-depth exhibit of thirty mostly small works by New York-based kinetic sculptor George Rickey. That fine exhibit, George Rickey: Recent Kinetic Sculptures, is now open at Inkfish and runs through…
It’s the music that matters most in Appalachian Strings. But the vibrant production now at the Denver Center Theatre Company is also a history, both of “hillbilly” music and of the people of Appalachia. The writing in this engaging piece is sometimes a trifle overwrought, the people idealized beyond the…
There may be more people on stage than in the audience, but the crowded space in the small Dorie Theatre is alive with ferocious goofiness in The Madwoman of Chaillot. Dated and simplistic as Jean Giraudoux’s 1945 tale may be, it still carries the moral force of a great old…
If you’re in the market for your very own Doppler radar set or a pickup truck with real cojones, Twister is a pretty good place to go shopping. Ostensibly, Jan De Bont’s big, loud, expensive action movie is about the destructive power of tornadoes and the folks who chase stormy…
Jim Jarmusch’s Old West is no place for John Wayne. Inspired by Native American pantheism, the English mystic poet William Blake and the heretofore unnoticed connection between the two, America’s most unpredictable filmmaker has come up with a dark, dreamy Western called Dead Man in which the “frontier” is not…
Thursday May 9 Gorgeous George: Who can resist the jazz- and Tin Pan Alley-inspired orchestral strains of George Gershwin’s all-American compositions? Not you. The Colorado Symphony Orchestra, with guest vocalist Marilyn VerPlanck and conductor Newton Wayland, will celebrate Gershwin’s music in a pops presentation beginning at 7:30 tonight (and repeated…
Denver’s really starting to look and act like a big city. The traffic in town is getting worse by the day. There’s no place to park either downtown or in Cherry Creek. And we now have a Mark di Suvero sculpture, “Lao Tzu,” sited on Acoma Plaza at the Civic…
And now for some socially redeeming theater: Ojibwa Indian poet and playwright Tomson Highway’s poignant contemporary exploration of Native American life, The Rez Sisters, at the Ralph Waldo Emerson Center. Once in a while a play comes along that opens a window into another world–then moves through the window and…
Film critics used to grouse about how stage plays never really transfer well to the screen–at least until Kenneth Branagh started transforming Shakespeare into cinema. And yet a well-written play provides smart dialogue, even when the setting is too confined for the big screen. Far, far worse than turning a…
