Millennial hysteria takes many forms. Some people fall prey to a travel agent and book a cruise to the Aegean, bent on passing New Century’s Eve with Aristotle’s ghost and a nice plate of moussaka. Others of appropriate age and inclination vow to get drunk and copulate at the stroke…
At first glance, Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother seems uncharacteristically grim for a filmmaker with such a demonic sense of humor. Within ten minutes, the heroine’s seventeen-year-old son is hit and killed by a car, which propels her and the events of the film into motion. In the next…
The Buenos Aires-born pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim has assembled a formidable array of talent for this elaborate bow to the art of Duke Ellington. Arranger Cliff Colnot has deftly adapted classic Ellington/Strayhorn big-band arrangements for a “chamber jazz” group half the size of Ellington’s peerless aggregation, employing sumptuous new…
Once upon a time, the dimly lit Punchbowl, at 20th and Stout streets, was a perfectly good place to get an honest glass of whiskey, tell lies to your companions in highly atmospheric surroundings and, if the urge should strike, order a hefty bacon cheeseburger with plenty of good old-fashioned…
The heroines of Gavin O’Connor’s offbeat road movie Tumbleweeds are a struggling single mother named Mary Jo Walker (Janet McTeer) and her feisty twelve-year-old daughter, Ava (Kimberly J. Brown), who set out together from a back hollow in West Virginia to make a new life — or something like one…
If evidence of eighteenth-century jazz is unearthed in, say, the 21st century, Wynton Marsalis is likely the man who will play it and talk it up. The 38-year-old New Orleanian has heaped his credentials as an archivist and popular lecturer so high upon his status as a historian and neo-classical…
Half a block away, you catch the scent of garlic on the wind, powerful and ancient. Good news. There will be no duck on the pizza tonight, and no sleek escapee from culinary school will drop by in the candlelight trying to sell you a tablespoon of designer grappa for…
Kurt Warner may not know it, but Some Things Never Change. With six weeks left in the National Football League season, the perennially miserable Cincinnati Bengals are 1-10 and eager to clean out their lockers. The flightless Philadelphia Eagles are once more lolling in the NFC East basement with a…
The world’s demand for minimally talented thirty-year-old high-school dropouts who believe they’re great poets or great musicians or great movie directors isn’t going to catch up with the supply anytime soon. That won’t keep the strivers from striving, of course; nor will it snuff out their dreams. Case in point:…
The jazz musician who doesn’t improvise is the chef who doesn’t cook, the writer who lays down his pen, the ballplayer on the bench. Nonetheless, the famously quirky (and infamously temperamental) jazz pianist Keith Jarrett has decided to go straight in his new solo CD, The Melody at Night, With…
As midnight draws near for the decade, the century and the millennium, humankind’s most powerful, most undeniable impulse is to make lists. By now, of course, most of the good lists are already taken. Chiseled in stone. Scotch-taped to David Letterman’s ego. Posted on the Internet. Magnetized to the refrigerator…
The mutant children of Dr. Hannibal Lecter and his star pupil, agent Clarice Starling, remain doggedly at large in moviedom. There’s no serial killer (and no gruesome method of dispatch) that Hollywood now refuses to indulge, and no detective, no matter how hackneyed, who cannot be assigned to the case…
The sleek young cigar smoker wearing the Brooks Brothers suit and $300 cap-toe loafers wants to shuffle-bowl. He hasn’t done this since he was ten — hasn’t seen a resolutely low-tech shuffle-bowling game anywhere since he was ten — and this is a primo opportunity to reclaim a shred of…
Actor Frank Whaley has appeared in more than thirty movies, including Swimming With Sharks and Pulp Fiction. But none of them cuts as close to the bone, I suspect, as Whaley’s debut in the writer-director ranks, Joe the King. Set in the Seventies and carefully described by its maker as…
Buddy Bell had been in town all of five minutes when he started talking in riddles. “The situation here can be as perfect as a situation can be,” Bell explained at the October 20 press conference where he was installed as the Colorado Rockies’ new manager. “I understand that no…
All hail. America is the seat of democracy and the world’s most mobile society — the place where a printer’s apprentice named Samuel Clemens can take a new name and remake himself as the country’s greatest satirist, where a geeky college dropout can become a software billionaire and shoeless boys…
Jesus, Mary and Joseph! The repressed Irish-Catholic schoolgirl Molly Shannon plays on Saturday Night Live is certainly not everyone’s cup of glee. But there’s no denying the tug she exerts on anyone whose past is littered with the dry husks of Latin verbs and memories of nuns swinging big rulers…
The twenty-second Denver International Film Festival opens this week with a showing of Sydney Pollack’s Random Hearts at the Buell Theatre. Director Pollack (Tootsie, Out of Africa, The Firm) will introduce the romantic drama, which stars Harrison Ford and English Patient leading lady Kristin Scott Thomas. This year’s festivities also…
For the last month or so, I’ve been shucking littlenecks from the supermarket, splashing them with a little Tabasco and eating dinner in front of the television set. One night before tuning in, I constructed a pastrami on rye the size of a housing project. Trapped in a couch dent,…
The premise is preposterous, the final score inevitable and the record reading on the feelgood-o-meter totally predictable. But Mystery, Alaska comes furnished with some winning quirks and charms — including a very funny bit concerning premature ejaculation at twenty degrees below zero. So even if you don’t really believe that…
Have you heard? The only tools a nice fellow needs to repair the damaged psyches of an entire town are a guilty conscience and a dash of insight. That, at least, is the premise of Lawrence Kasdan’s silly new social parable, Mumford, in which the eponymous hero poses as a…
Trust Allison Anders and her old running mate Kurt Voss to come up with a piquant, carefully observed movie about tarnished hope, overfed vanity and half-baked scheming on the treacherous L.A. music scene. They know the territory. In 1988, the ex-UCLA Film School classmates wrote and directed Border Radio, one…
