The Colorado Shakespeare Festival has been around a long time, but though a lot of people support the noble cause, many more do not. There are just too many agonies associated with attendance at CSF. Every year, those of us who do show up try to forget the grotesque discomfort…
For more than half a century, the Spanish filmmaker Luis Bunuel stood in splendid isolation from his peers. Social subversive, incessant joker and deep thinker, he took it upon himself to lambaste some of the world’s most cherished institutions–notably the Roman Catholic Church, middle-class morality and vintage political correctness–without regard…
James Gray, the 25-year-old writer/director of Little Odessa, seems to be aiming higher than most of his fellow film-school graduates. Gray’s dark and bloody family melodrama, which is set in the Rus-sian-American neighborhood of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, aspires to both Greek tragedy and Shakespearean weightiness, and while his efforts sometimes…
Wednesday July 12 Designing children: The Denver Department of Parks and Recreation wants the city’s junior swingers to come out and tell it how to build a new playground at Gates Crescent Park, adjacent to the Children’s Museum along the Platte River Greenway. Kids ages five to twelve and their…
Few artists in this country have achieved the kind of fame that Georgia O’Keeffe has. Her life and work are, without exaggeration, the stuff of legend. But there’s been a downside to O’Keeffe’s celebrity. Some of her most famous paintings have become trivialized through excessive reproduction, especially in the form…
Cult classic The Rocky Horror Show is just so Seventies. It must have seemed fiendishly outrageous when it came out in London in 1973 (the movie version, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, was released in 1975)–so new, so outlaw, so wild. Well, it’s still wild, but it now seems kind…
The movies did it better. “Women’s pictures” such as All About Eve, The Women and even The Bad Seed, for all their melodramatic silliness, at least presented complex and interesting female characters. But Ruthless! The Musical, which is supposed to be a sendup of those Hollywood classics, is about as…
Clearly, the Art Cinematic has made great strides since the days when extraterrestrial invaders were all huge, featureless carcasses encased in blocks of ice, or spiders blown up to beach-umbrella size by atomic radiation. In the name of progress, the killer alien in Species is a gorgeous blonde (former model…
The absorbing drama Red Firecracker, Green Firecracker is set on a family estate and in a bustling northern Chinese river town at the end of the Ching Dynasty. These are the years leading up to the 1911 revolution, and director He Ping squeezes every bit of dialectic he can find…
Wednesday July 5 Words is out: Who needs ’em when strong visuals spell out the story so well? Alfred Hitchcock’s silent film The Lodger is a case in point. The 1926 thriller, about a landlady convinced her tenant is Jack the Ripper, contains stunning special effects (at least for the…
The black-and-white photos of Don Donaghy are often out of focus, overexposed and underlighted, so it’s no surprise to learn that Donaghy has never used a light meter. But as Photographs From the Street, a retrospective of Donaghy’s 1960s work now at the Grant Gallery, makes clear, a disregard for…
Two million Jews and tens of thousands of other prisoners were tortured and killed at Auschwitz. Because the numbers are so staggering, it is excruciatingly difficult to absorb the fact that each of those millions died an individual death, that each was murdered and that for each murder, there was…
Robert Dubac is so lively, witty and inventive, it’s easy to forgive the mild chauvinism that runs through his riotous one-man show at the Vogue Theatre, The Male Intellect (An Oxymoron). With a title like this one, you might suppose the writer/actor would spend the evening male-bashing–and, indeed, there are…
Wayne Wang’s astonishing little film Smoke sneaks up on the viewer in wonderful ways. Superficially, it’s a “slice of life”–half a dozen related slices, actually–about the people who frequent a Brooklyn cigar store in 1990. But just underneath a deceptively simple surface, we come upon serious matters: the need to…
Devotees–and detractors–of the underground comics pioneer R. Crumb may be startled to learn that this trafficker in headless female sex objects, anxiety-ridden male outcasts and pornographic kitty cats was probably the happiest member of his family. That’s just one of the things we learn in the course of Terry Zwigoff’s…
Wednesday June 28 ‘Poke folks: “This ain’t exactly a New York poetry slam,” or so says Carson Reed, one of the hosts for A Night at the Kitchen Table, the first of a series of tale-telling events to be held twice each month at the Wynkoop Brewing Company. The focus…
Wednesday June 21 Horn of plenty: The Creative Music Works wraps up its swell jazz and improvisation series at Vartan Jazz in appropriate style. Trumpet player Leslie Drayton, who’s been heard out in the real world working with everyone from Marvin Gaye to Nancy Wilson to Earth, Wind and Fire,…
Kathy Andrews was named curator for the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities only about a year ago. But she’s already come through with a must-see show. A Gathering of Galleries/A Gathering of Artists is an exciting look at the art market in Denver. Andrews, who says she wanted…
Being a bear of very little brain, Winnie the Pooh could hardly be expected to figure out his problems for himself. And in Winnie the Pooh, playwright Kristin Sergel’s version of the children’s favorite, Pooh needs all his friends to help him. Sergel melds a number of A.A. Milne’s stories…
If it were television, it might be a soap opera; if it were an old movie, it might be what they used to call a “chick flick.” Joanna M. Glass’s Artichoke is all about a sensitive woman caught between a male world and an irrational morality that keeps her down…
What can you say? Apparently, that’s a hundred million dollars’ worth of darting laser ray, jet-powered car and black rubber suit up there, and if the whole shebang goes in one eye and out the other before you even get back to the parking lot, that’s too bad. They probably…
Steven Soderbergh’s directing career has hit a couple of snags since he enlivened the independent filmmaking scene five years ago with a cool-tempered study of yuppie obsession called sex, lies & videotape. Since then, Soderbergh’s gloomy Kafka has probably played best in Prague, and his beautifully wrought adaptation of A.E…
