Benjamin Ross’s black comedy The Young Poisoner’s Handbook is a relentlessly nasty piece of goods that never hesitates to make a kind of existential antihero out of its protagonist–a brilliant, psychopathic fourteen-year-old who poisons his stepmother with stuff from his chemistry set and the local drugstore, gets caught, cons the…
After a suspiciously long abstention, Hollywood has finally deemed the death penalty an Important Issue once again. But the two current movies on the subject reveal the huge gap between the best minds of the “entertainment industry” and its low-rent hucksters. The good news: While redneck double murderer Sean Penn…
Thursday May 2 Just folks: Early mountain musicians of the southeastern United States improved upon traditional Scottish and Irish melodies armed with an arsenal of mandolins, guitars, dulcimers and autoharps. In the process, they created a completely indigenous musical strain–the forerunner to what we now know as bluegrass, folk and…
Unlike in many American cities, just about every tree, shrub, plant and vine in Denver has been planted and cared for by someone. As early as the 1880s, people were bringing blue spruce trees down from the mountains and planting them among the scrub bushes and prairie grasses, which are…
“Two planks and a passion” is how Christopher Selbie describes the kind of theater he believes in–theater that emphasizes the art of acting, the imagination of the actor, and the imagination of the viewer. Four years ago Selbie formed the Compass Theatre Company with a few friends and a measly…
The supposed intrigue in Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon is that it gives Western audiences a rare, sympathetic glimpse of contemporary Iran–a country and a society demonized here since the late ayatollah took those hostages and the evening news started showing demonstrators stomping on the American flag in the public…
That old growing-up-and-moving-out thing is the coldest of dead horses, and anyone who can actually shoot a little life into the carcass deserves a round of applause from kids of all ages in the balcony. Enter Matt Reeves, born on Long Island, raised in Santa Monica and a moviemaker since…
Thursday April 25 Triumph of the Will: The Arvada Center’s Music With a View series offers short and sweet concerts commingled with current gallery shows, a gentle combination well-suited to lovers of the arts. The series gets a few birds with one big rock tonight during a celebration of William…
Spring is here, and that can mean only one thing in the art world–you can’t find a parking space on gallery row in LoDo. When the Rockies take over Wazee Street, plenty of fans park at the two-hour meters that line the street. They can count on getting a parking…
We’ve had a lot of little devils hoofing it on the Denver boards recently–Beethoven ‘N’ Pierrot, Lucifer Tonite and the Jerry Lewis rendition of Damn Yankees have come and gone from local theaters since December. Beethoven’s devil was a sophisticated shape-shifter who never succeeded in seducing Beethoven into mediocrity. The…
Movies about parenthood tend to exaggerate the icky-diaper issues. Over the last few years, a new emphasis on Dad’s role in a baby’s life have produced a slew of sentimental foolishness like Look Who’s Talking, Three Men and a Baby, Junior and the insufferable Nine Months. But it’s not as…
For those of us who didn’t grow up black in the segregated rural South, it’s hard to tell how much of Once Upon a Time…When We Were Colored is real-life inspiration and how much is nostalgia tinted by wishful thinking. In any event, this is the black feel-good movie of…
The unlikely heroes of our story are a human geek named Mike and two wisecracking robots, all condemned by a mad scientist, Dr. Clayton Forrester, to watching really awful Hollywood movies in outer space. Under the circumstances, you’d talk back to the screen, too–loudly and often. Still, that doesn’t quite…
Thursday April 18 Band of Lincoln: A revolving ensemble made up of some of the world’s finest musicians, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center simply oozes excellence, mixing unexpected instrumentation and eclectic material with stunning showmanship. One such grouping–flutist Ransom Wilson, violinist Ani Kavafian, viola player Kim Kashkashian, guitarist…
A terrific set and wonderful lighting design help set the mood in the Arvada Center’s Jungalbook, a worthy adaptation of the Rudyard Kipling children’s story. In a mysterious green jungle somewhere in India, a little man-cub is born and abandoned only to be retrieved by a stately panther and reared…
Men are incapable of fidelity, integrity or profound affection–and they’re shallow to boot. Frantic for validation, women backstab each other over worthless guys, dump and are dumped over the slightest cause and would be better off learning to make their careers more important than their relationships. Sound familiar? Romantic love…
The confirmed sentimentalist Franco Zeffirelli could probably tenderize a side of horse meat by pointing his camera at it–a gift the political advertisers might envy. But that makes him the wrong man for the job when it comes to a new version of Jane Eyre. Charlotte Bronte’s oft-filmed high school…
The assumption by conservatives that Hollywood is some kind of decadent liberal underworld has never been supported by the facts. On the contrary, this hidebound old institution has always been fueled by one thing only–sheer profit motive–and it has never hesitated to buckle under pressure from outside powers that be…
Thursday April 11 Freudian slip: Author Robert Boswell didn’t graduate with a double major in psychology and creative writing for nothing. His finely etched portraits of human relationships, the backbone of novels such as Crooked Hearts and the bestselling Mystery Ride, owe something to both disciplines. Boswell, who now teaches…
It’s an unexpected stroke of luck to find three of the most important cultural institutions in the mountain West conveniently lined up in a row along Denver’s Civic Center complex. And you could hardly miss the Colorado History Museum, the Denver Public Library and the Denver Art Museum, housed as…
If only Sam Shepard had never gone to Hollywood. He was such an amazing playwright before fame, fortune and Jessica Lange got ahold of him. Why area theater companies don’t produce his early plays more often is a mystery; they’re beautiful, weird and perceptive, and they offer actors plenty of…
Bertolt Brecht remains one of the few great geniuses of twentieth-century theater. Marxist didacticism notwithstanding, his best plays set up contradictions upon contradictions that shake us awake and require us to think poetically. Because finally, it is Brecht’s poetry more than his politics that penetrates through to truths about the…
