Once upon a time, not long ago, the Denver Nuggets were the sorriest franchise in the National Basketball Association. The laughingstock of the league. A garbage can for discontented, used-up and incompetent players. They were objects of scorn in their own city — like Brian Griese and the Denver boot…
Long before he made masterpieces like Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath and The Searchers, Sean Aloysius O’Feeney — better known to us as John Ford — directed a silent movie called The Iron Horse (1924). It’s an archetypal early Western, in which a man seeking revenge for his father’s murder…
Those in the mood for a bit of authentic swordplay (sans Tom Cruise, that is) would do well to catch Zatoichi #4: The Fugitive this Saturday night. In this 1963 episode of the renowned Japanese film series, the legendary blind samurai Zatoichi arrives in the village of Shimonita (in America,…
Fair warning: If the behavior of camels in the Gobi Desert during the spring birthing season is not high on your things-to-learn-about list and you don’t hunger to know everything about southern Mongolian herdsmen, then The Story of the Weeping Camel probably isn’t your kind of movie. Saying they were…
Only a devoted masochist — a guy with a thing for hairshirts and moonlight strolls in Fallujah — would envy Bob Apodaca. As pitching coach for the Colorado Rockies, Apodaca is asked to piece together some kind of credibility in a ballpark where earned runs, home runs and pitcher anxiety…
When Howard Hawks directed His Girl Friday back in 1940, he had no idea that his sublime newspaper-world comedy would one day become a treasured relic, lovingly rescued and preserved by the National Film Registry and the Library of Congress. But it has, along with many other great movies from…
THURS, 7/1 Some things were made to complement each other: peanut butter and jelly, Hope and Bo on Days of Our Lives, St. Augustine and the Marx Brothers. “But what does St. Augustine have in common with the Marx Brothers?” That is exactly the kind of question that Adam Lerner,…
By 1974, the year funnyman Mel Brooks directed Blazing Saddles, the Hollywood Western was all but extinct, a casualty of America’s Vietnam War weariness, and our dawning awareness that maybe the cavalry weren’t such good guys after all and the Indians not quite the vicious savages we’d imagined. It was…
Rulon Gardner, the playful Wyoming giant who pulled off the biggest upset of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, will be leaving the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs for Athens next month, hoping to win a second gold medal in Greco-Roman wrestling. The Greeks might do better to station Rulon…
A jury award-winner at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s Crimson Gold offers a revealing look at contemporary Tehran through the day-to-day life of a suspiciously impassive pizza-delivery man named Hussein (Hussein Emadeddin), who rides through the streets of the city on his motor scooter as if…
Brassbound skeptics may see the complex, provocative docudrama What the #$*! Do We Know?!, which poses the Big Questions of Life, as just another product of new-age self-absorption, an act of pompous navel-gazing that might best be confined to screenings at the local ashram. Certainly, these 108 minutes are singularly…
Love him or hate him, filmmaker Michael Moore knows how to get under your skin. As a political muckraker, he favors schoolboy rage over measured argument; as a social satirist, he never fails to slug us with a hammer when a scalpel might serve him better. A self-appointed guardian of…
The notoriously plotless musical comedy Head became an object of cult worship almost from the moment of its release, in 1968; with each passing year, it amuses people even more as a telling artifact of ’60s pop culture. What less could we expect of a movie that stars the made-for-TV…
Getting stranded at snowbound O’Hare for the night is one thing. You call home, maybe knock back a couple of martinis, then grab a blanket. A century ago, being quarantined at Ellis Island for eight months because you were, say, a part-time anarchist from Campobasso with a big mustache and…
When Jerry Robertson was twelve, thirteen years old, he used to climb into his Uncle Bob’s stock car at the old Englewood Speedway, hoping to get his future in gear but quick. “Lemme hot-lap the car,” the towheaded kid would plead. Every time, Uncle Bob just grinned and shot a…
Devotees of the Boulder Outdoor Cinema all know the drill: You bring your own lawn chair. Or bean bag. Or yoga mat. If you’re strong and ambitious and think you might need a snooze, you bring your own couch. Whatever you choose to sit or lie upon, you get it…
Now in its seventh incarnation, the Aurora Asian Film Festival is a showcase for the burgeoning cinematic talents of China, Japan, Thailand, Cambodia, Taiwan and Bhutan. This year’s four-day festival will feature more than a dozen new films from Asia and the Pacific Rim, beginning Thursday, June 3, with a…
Movie-goers familiar with the tides of recent Brazilian history will probably get more from Hector Babenco’s new prison movie, Carandiru, than the rest of us, because the filmmaker tells us so little about the society beyond the walls that helped shape the violent yet carefully ordered world within them. On…
John Servis couldn’t believe it. At 5 a.m., he says, a couple hundred bleary-eyed fans were already lined up along the rail at Philadelphia Park, awaiting their hero. By mid-morning, the crowd had swelled to more than 8,500 — hard-core gamblers with unlit cigar stubs in their teeth, students wearing…
This year’s renewal of Boulder’s popular Chautauqua Silent Film Series starts off with a showing of The Patsy (1928), King Vidor’s enduring comedy starring Marie Dressler and Marion Davies as a constantly feuding mother and daughter. Not to be confused with the Jerry Lewis talkie of the same name, this…
Aspiring filmmakers everywhere — many of them with better access to cameras and computers than to, say, actual talent — still daydream about being Kevin Smith. That’s because Smith’s tale is the ultimate indie success story of the 1990s, a fantasy come true starring a young striver who created a…
George Washington played a couple of seasons with the Chicago White Sox. He hit a respectable .268, with nine homers, 24 doubles and 52 runs batted in. The braided waistcoat and buckle shoes must have slowed him down, though. In his 128-game big-league career, George stole just one base. None…
