No wonder Nolan Ryan is doing painkiller commercials on the boob tube. He’s hurting. After all, in his waning playing days back in the 1980s, the poor guy had to scrape by on a couple million bucks a year and live in a place with just nine bedrooms. Think of…
The year 2000 was by no means the best of times for moviegoers, but only a curmudgeon would fail to find, say, ten points of light in a darkened room. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Once, we marveled at the flying gymnastics of Bruce Lee. Now it’s Ang Lee who moves…
Playwright/filmmaker David Mamet has the sharpest gift imaginable for shooting down the sins of American greed, the con games people run to get ahead and the corruption that comes with success. Whether he’s haunting a secondhand junk shop, poker games or an outlying real-estate office, he always finds enough horror-tinged…
The subjects of Mark Singer’s extraordinary documentary Dark Days were once the stuff of urban myth — the homeless “mole people” said to inhabit dank railroad tunnels below the streets of Manhattan, eking out subsistence in the face of scurrying vermin, disease and drug addiction. As it turns out, they…
For more than three decades, Hank Mobley was regarded by the bulk of the jazz-listening public as a journeyman of the hard-bop idiom, one of a dozen or so competent tenor saxophonists who toured clubs, filled out various recording bands and cut the occasional side under their own names. But…
First, the good news. This was the year Tiger Woods won the U.S. Open, the British Open, the PGA and seven other tournaments with the ease of a golfing god, then graciously praised the efforts of his merely mortal opponents. It was the year that Rulon Gardner, an unknown Greco-Roman…
About halfway through the mega-budget mountain-climbing adventure Vertical Limit, even the most rugged, thrill-hungry disaster-movie fans may find themselves going numb. Not from the howling weather on the icy faces of K2 in the Himalayas, where the action supposedly takes place. Not from oxygen deprivation. Not even from stretches of…
Popular saxophonist Vic Cionetti, Sunday, December 10, at the Gothic Theatre, officially returns to the Denver jazz scene with his first public concert in more than ten years. Jazz Alley TV will tape the 8 p.m. show for future broadcast. It will be Cionetti’s first appearance on stage since he…
The grandpere of all jewel-heist movies, Jules Dassin’s Rififi hasn’t lost a thing since its initial release in 1955. Seeing it anew in revival, anyone who knows and loves this cinematic gem will be reminded that its descendants — which include everything from the old Mission Impossible TV series to…
Have you heard? Beauty’s only skin deep. Pay attention, now: When it comes to love, experience is the best teacher. And just in case you didn’t know, youth is wasted on the young. Such are the banalities that director Tonie Marshall dispenses in Venus Beauty Institute, a French romantic comedy…
You got your Good. You got your Evil. And you got your thirty-year-old multimillionaire moviemaker to explain the difference to you. Look out popcorn vendors. Here comes Unbreakable, the first film written and directed by young M. Night Shyamalan since he lit up the box office last year with a…
The Rockybilt hamburger, a humble object of desire that sent three generations of Denverites into swoons of praise, has long since gone the way of cocktails at the Shirley-Savoy, the Broncos’ vertically striped socks and convenient Stapleton Airport. The last Rockybilt System shack closed its doors circa 1980, having fallen…
Just a wild surmise, but doesn’t it seem to you that in recent weeks Denverites have been far more concerned with the name of their new football stadium than with the name of their new president? Terrorists could blow up Boettcher Concert Hall in mid-Mozart, and not a soul would…
The moods of Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me are so artfully mingled that it’s difficult to get a fix on this highly personal independent feature. Set in a quiet little town in upstate New York’s lovely Catskill Mountains, it is at once a drama about the unresolved traumas…
The subject — or rather, the object — of Christine Fugate’s unsettling and surprisingly poignant documentary The Girl Next Door is one Stacy Valentine, a pneumatic blonde from Oklahoma who recently concluded a brief but reasonably lucrative career as a porn star. The film spans two years, and for that…
Consider the beautifully inverted recording career of Patricia Barber. First she establishes herself as an innovative stylist and fearless fusioneer, flouting convention with cool-jazz treatments of pop/rock classics such as “Light My Fire” and “Black Magic Woman,” upsetting expectation with mordant anthems-for-the-times like “If This Isnt Jazz.” Only then does…
The soon-to-be-talked-about sen-sations in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream include three or four flashing, near-subliminal montages that combine an eye’s iris and dilating pupil, an extreme closeup of heroin cooking in a teaspoon and a sucking hypodermic needle; a surpassingly frightening sequence in which Ellen Burstyn, in the midst…
You don’t have to be a psychoanalyst or a Pentagon code-breaker to understand the threat that Pat Bowlen issued last week. It was the ultimatum of an angry man, pure and simple. If the professional football team Bowlen owns and loves and realizes a handsome profit from doesn’t win its…
The stark simplicity of A Time for Drunken Horses, one of the few films that has slipped out of post-revolutionary Iran to the West, does nothing to obscure its emotional power or the complexity of the geopolitical issues underlying it. Filmed on location in wintry Kurdistan, it is the heartbreaking…
Any moviemaker who ventures into the sewers of New York City corruption will find Sidney Lumet’s wet footprints. In classics like The Pawnbroker, Serpico and Q&A, this streetwise film master has explored, among other things, individual morality in the face of big-city vice and individual transcendence of ethnic conflict. Other…
The setting of Stephen Daldry’s uplifting comedy Billy Elliot, about a working-class boy who wants to be a ballet dancer, is a beleaguered coal-mining town in the north of England, circa 1984. A coat of grime covers the squat brick row-houses, drying laundry flaps sadly in the breeze, and the…
Americans don’t give a damn if Slobodan Milosevic goes nuts and murders half of Eastern Europe. They don’t care if bubonic plague decimates Philadelphia, Homer Simpson gets elected president as a write-in or Firestone starts putting its tires on baby strollers. No, what most of America really worries about is…
