The screen is Jim Jarmusch’s playground. Or so it appears. The quirky director of Down by Law and Mystery Train has attracted a following as loyal as the Quentin Tarantino cult, because his stuff, too, is hip, ironic and resolutely contrary. Jarmusch seems to take a kid’s unqualified pleasure from…
The time is long past when John Wayne would swagger into the Ship Tavern and promptly tuck into a double scotch and a slab of prime rib as big as Kiowa County. Another old regular, Bob Hope, doesn’t get out much any more, and most of the flinty wildcatters who…
Late in the second round Friday night, native son Stevie Johnston’s left eyelid was gushing a torrent. He knew it was time. Circling left, he caught Julio Alvarez with a stiff right hook that startled the Mexican, then shot a straight left to the chin that sealed Julio’s fate. “I…
Among the qualities that make Fred A. Leuchter Jr. a buffoon who’s also an accomplice to evil, his desperate hunger for attention is the most obvious. He’s like the hick-town wallflower who’s always getting lured into the visiting hustler’s backseat for a quickie. When the state of Tennessee asked Leuchter…
Red & Jerry’s is a cozy little nook containing fourteen full-sized pool tables (two of them cloaked in black light and featuring iridescent billiard balls), several acres of flashing, bell-ringing video games (including a roller-coaster “simulator” as stomach-churning as the real thing), enough dining tables to seat the U.S. Marine…
Adherents of the long view can rattle on all they like about the grueling 162-game schedule and the notions that the real fight begins in late summer and authentic quality shows in October. Fact is, the Colorado Rockies’ reconstructed brain trust will learn a great deal about its reconstructed baseball…
In the early ’90s, British actor Tim Roth made his bones with American audiences as one of Quentin Tarantino’s anointed hipsters: After getting gruesomely shot to pieces in Reservoir Dogs and sticking up a pancake house with batty Amanda Plummer in Pulp Fiction, Roth’s credentials as a bad cat were…
Director John Frankenheimer has been putting bad guys on the street since Luca Brazzi slept with a teddy bear, and he shows no sign of letting up at age seventy. In Reindeer Games, a relentless, and relentlessly witty, crime thriller set in the frozen wastes of northern Michigan, a sleazy…
Twenty-seven-year-old Ben Younger delivers the message of his first feature, Boiler Room, with all the subtlety of a car bomb. To wit: Greed is alive and well in the new century, fueled by the material dreams of a generation bent on instant gratification and the distorted expectations of neophyte investors…
Don Quijote Restaurant. 35 Federal Boulevard, 303-934-9753. Hours: 10:30 a.m.- 9 p.m. Sunday, Tuesday-Thursday; 9 a.m.-9 p.m. Friday and Saturday
The heroine of Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke is a bold and impressionable Australian girl named Ruth Barron (Kate Winslet), who flees her middle-class suburb with friends for a spiritual adventure in exotic India. Inevitably, she is thunderstruck by a saucer-eyed guru named Baba, who quickly reveals the source of absolute…
Beware the shrieking teenagers who saw Titanic ten or twelve times and have been conducting their own shipboard romance fantasies with Leonardo DiCaprio ever since. They will be massed and marching in Bombay-at-rush-hour numbers this week, maybe in Chinese-army numbers, and anyone over the age of seventeen who doesn’t feel…
Film director Agnieszka Holland is the daughter of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, but she was raised in communist Poland in an atmosphere of state-imposed atheism. If those bona fides don’t qualify her to make a two-hour movie about the timeless tug of war between faith and reason,…
I once watched a tense Broncos playoff game at the jam-packed Edgewater Inn, and when the crucial moment arrived — your predominantly orange heroes down a field goal late in the fourth quarter, and Elway directing one of his trademark drives — a curious phenomenon took hold in the place…
At the age of 27, Stevie “Li’l But Bad” Johnston has the aspect of an old warrior. The angry clots of scar tissue decorating his eyebrows frame a gaze as piercing as a jaguar’s. He speaks so quietly that you can sometimes barely hear him. But bring up the subject…
The besmirched hero of Sweet and Lowdown, Woody Allen’s valentine to swing-era jazz and the furies of creative temperament, is a fictitious ’30s guitarist called Emmet Ray. Self-absorbed but brilliant, crass but lyrical, Emmet is the embodiment of the notion that a great artist needn’t be a good guy or…
The regulars at Rodney’s are a sufficiently worldly and world-weary lot that when John Elway used to fall by for a Scotch on the rocks and a game of backgammon, they paid him almost no mind. Too busy dismembering their slabs of prime rib and football-sized baked potatoes. Too busy…
Those who choose to dismiss Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson’s dark (and darkly humorous) meditation on loneliness and regret in the San Fernando Valley, will probably see it as self-important and philosophically inflated — the kind of three-hour ordeal that university professors can dissect at their leisure while ordinary folks shy…
Of the readers who bought four million copies, in no fewer than thirty languages, of David Guterson’s 1995 bestseller Snow Falling on Cedars, many have been looking forward to the movie version. Others have been dreading it. For better or worse, this multifarious story about nativist bigotry, forbidden love, sons…
Is heaven located on tatty West Colfax? Well, maybe. To find out for yourself, try this: Seated at your sun-drenched window table at the cozy, two-year-old Los Reyes, beneath a lovely watercolor depicting a hacienda kitchen, order a plate of sopitos. A specialty of west central Mexico’s state of Michoacán,…
In Albert Brooks’s summer comedy The Muse, a ravishing daughter of Zeus — in the person of Sharon Stone — gives a burned-out Hollywood screenwriter a fresh jolt of inspiration. For a price. Brooks’s desperate scribbler must first lavish Tiffany trinkets on his newfound benefactor, put her up at the…
All right, then. Just how long has it been since your Denver Broncos rose from the slough of despond to win a pair of Super Bowls? A thousand days? How long since the icon John Elway hung up his cleats and Terrell Davis went into traction and Shannon Sharpe decided…
