Trumpeter Brad Upton’s previous CD on the Black Orchid label, Dragon, was recorded in May 2001 and released earlier this year; it revealed a jazzman whose ideas and gifts were spreading far and wide. His “current” release, also called Black Orchid, is, in truth, a leftover from 1999 that’s just…
If we can believe Carmelo Anthony, a nineteen-year-old college dropout with some fancy ideas in his head, the Denver Nuggets are about to achieve greatness. This will happen soon after he, Carmelo Anthony, laces up his sneakers and becomes a Nugget. In fact, Carmelo believes he — not some overhyped…
Mel Brooks’s none-too-funny parody of Star Wars, 1987’s Spaceballs, was released at the low ebb of the great comedian’s career. Two of Brooks’s most inventive movie hits, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, were already ancient history, buried back in the 1970s chapter of his life, and Broadway wouldn’t reinvent the…
The most compelling characters in Jeff Blitz and Sean Welch’s vivid, eye-opening documentary Spellbound are not the film’s geeky, often bewildered twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, who find themselves shoved into the spotlight at the National Spelling Bee, but the overbearing, variously motivated parents who do the shoving. The film has generally…
Once the enfant terrible of post-war German cinema, the single-minded director Werner Herzog made half a dozen great films in the 1970s, including Fata Morgana, Every Man for Himself and God Against All and his chilling update on F.W. Murnau, Nosferatu, the Vampyre. But Herzog’s most memorable (and most characteristic)…
Whenever the stars of the adolescent street-racing fantasy 2 Fast 2 Furious were feeling balky or temperamental on the set, as movie stars are wont to do, the cure was probably easy: an oil change and a tuneup. John Singleton’s adrenaline-spiked sequel to the surprise summer hit of 2001, The…
Every broken-down horseplayer has a hero story to tell, and it never hurts to listen. You could be draining an ice-cold martini in the bar at Siro’s, up at Saratoga, when Frankie Bales sits down to describe the time he parlayed the rail speed at Monmouth into a $12,000 pick…
If grownups were meant to watch Walt Disney cartoons, God would have kept us all in the third grade for two or three decades. Still, somebody has to drive the SUV every time the Disney-folk decide to lure the little ones down to the multiplex, and as long as the…
Preston Sturges, probably the wittiest writer and most nimble director of Hollywood’s Golden Age of Comedy, gave us such Depression-era classics as Sullivan’s Travels, The Great McGinty and The Lady Eve. Less well-known but just as uproarious, in its way, 1947’s quirky The Sin of Harold Diddlebock stars an aging…
Time was that Dad stuffed the Mercury full of eager children (including, perhaps, one or two secreted in the trunk) and motored off to the drive-in for a double feature and a double order of corn dogs. Alas, the drive-in movie, with a few exceptions, is as dead as James…
A lot of moviegoers see hyperactive Jim Carrey as the second coming of Jerry Lewis, but no one’s ever mistaken him for God. Clearly, he’d like to change that — at least for now, at least at the box office. Hey, you’d feel the same way if your last movie…
It’s a very long road from the tricky little S-curve at Denver Indoor Kart Racing to the famous Tobacconist’s Corner at the Grand Prix of Monaco. But if passion were the only fuel you needed to make the trip, young Chris Clark would already be there — shrieking through the…
One of the enduring curiosities of twentieth-century pop culture — and now 21st-century pop culture — is the tenacious hold The Rocky Horror Picture Show has exerted on audiences everywhere in America — and in some foreign countries, too — since its none-too-encouraging initial release in 1975. An outrageous spoof…
A startling new film from Iran, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s Under the Skin of the City, gives American viewers a rare and vivid glimpse of day-to-day life in contemporary Tehran — altering some of the politically based preconceptions we may have about the place and opening our eyes to a society that…
Make the odds eight to five that the only decent team playing at the Pepsi Center next season will be armed with those funny sticks with the nets on the end. In its first season, the Colorado Mammoth proved to be a tough-as-nails contender in the indoor lacrosse wars, and…
Hooray for the altruists and art lovers at Madstone Theaters. Recognizing that distribution can be a nightmare for young and/or unknown indie filmmakers, the art-house chain is showing six promising new films, through May and June, that have played the festival circuit but haven’t yet attracted distributors. In Denver, Madstone’s…
What a strange enterprise, making a movie about reading a book. It’s the kind of paradox that philosophy students chew over at three in the morning — and a prospect any Hollywood producer would flee as fast as his Ferragamos could carry him. But for Mark Moskowitz, a lifelong bibliophile…
Among Hollywood’s emerging directorial talents, Paul Thomas Anderson merits special notice for the boldness of his subject matter and the energy of his style. He is, after all, the fellow who vividly proposed, in Boogie Nights, that a houseful of variously drugged and deranged L.A. pornographers could be more devoted…
The soundtrack of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s spare and beautiful new film, The Son (Le Fils) contains not a bar of music, not a tinkle of bell, not a whisper of breeze. Much of the film is set in the carpentry shop of a Belgium vocational school for troubled teenagers,…
If some of the cowboys wanted him bucked off, they kept it under their Resistols. If there was envy, you didn’t see it. Fact is, in the hours leading up to something called “The Bud Light Million-Dollar Bounty (presented by Ford Trucks)” — aka “The Richest Eight Seconds in Sporting…
I don’t know about you, but I love Billy Ray Valentine. Whenever Trading Places pops up on the boob tube, I tune in to watch the ebullient Eddie Murphy in one of his most uproarious performances and what could be his most deftly directed comedy. A penniless street hustler refurbished…
The Harry Potter phenomenon — on the page, in the movies, at the bank — has aroused in publishers and studio heads alike a sudden new appreciation for our children’s needs. These people understand that no consumer is more motivated than the parent of a kid in the heat of…
