Grownups, take heart. Even if you misspent your summer at the movies pigging out on reheated space adventure, slob humor and stubborn old ballplayers who won’t hang up their spikes, all is not lost. A powerful and intelligent film called American Beauty has volumes to say about the way people…
Dressed head to foot in orange and blue, the crazies stood and howled in the Denver night, their raucous cry of joy mingled with blood lust. Their team had just taken a late lead, and now no one could shut them up. They flapped orange pennants and waved blue caps…
For half a century, the immigrant working men of Louisville hacked out a living in the Acme Mine below the dirt streets of their town, swinging pickaxes, inhaling coal dust in the gloom and praying for Sunday. On Sunday the miners would go to church and, if times were good,…
The pictures, descriptions and accounts of Saturday evening’s debacle at Mile High Stadium are not pretty. But here goes. By the end of the fourth quarter, Colorado Buffaloes quarterback Mike Moschetti had thrown three interceptions, been sacked nine times and earned himself a bloody nose. Meanwhile, his team endured a…
When last we encountered Peter and Bobby Farrelly, they were pelting moviehouses with industrial-strength jokes about retarded kids, lost semen, found excrement and exploding house pets. Good plan. There’s Something About Mary turned into last summer’s surprise hit and catapulted the brothers to the top of Hollywood’s A List –…
Here’s to you, Mark McGwire. Thank you very much for thrilling us from the tips of our toes to the tops of our heads last summer with your home-run prowess. Thanks also for shining much-needed light on a game that’s threatened in recent seasons to wither in the darkness. That…
If Kevin Williamson has anything to say about it, the good works of noble movie schoolteachers like Mr. Chips and Miss Dove and Mr. Holland will be wiped out in one fell swoop. In their place, the creator of TV’s hormonal Dawson’s Creek series proposes an unmitigated horror: a high…
That’s right: You’re being watched. No sooner do you lift a hot wing or dripping chili-cheese fry to your hungry maw than you feel the hot gaze on your neck. The huge caribou head that dominates the dining room and bar at the Lakewood Grill has got its eye on…
In a rare moment of privacy last Wednesday afternoon, Gary Barnett stood before a picture window in the dining room of the Dal Ward Athletic Center, gazing out at his world. Two stories below, the sunlit expanse of the Folsom Field gridiron stretched before him: an acre and a half…
The smiling man in the photograph on the wall at the Brewery Bar II is one George Goldberg, and the reason he’s smiling is that on January 7, 1994, he ate thirteen bowls of the local green chile for lunch. That amounts to five quarts of this time-honored saloon’s fiery,…
Who’s the hip pick to win the American Football Conference title this year? Why, the Jacksonville Jaguars–who else? Led by quarterback Mark Brunell, the Jags are rich in veteran talent, and barring major injuries, their time is now. On the other hand, if you live in hype-saturated New York, the…
It’s always amusing when the movie industry discovers its spiritual side. Profoundly secular institution that it is, Hollywood promotes–at its peril–the notion that teenagers spewing pea soup in Georgetown can be purged of their demons by Catholic priests, that angels from heaven intercede in the lives of ballplayers from losing…
It has been almost forty years since Eric Rohmer, riding the crest of the French New Wave, embarked on the first of his Six Moral Tales. The series would eventually include at least two classics–My Night at Maud’s (1969) and Chloe in the Afternoon (1972). Linked by theme and style…
Pity poor Montreal. In that northern outpost, you can hear the vendors pouring Molsons up in the third deck while everyone waits for hockey season to begin. And Baltimore. On the shores of Chesapeake Bay, another expensive chemistry experiment has blown up in manager Ray Miller’s face. While Will Clark…
Feel like shooting lutefisk in a barrel? Pick on beleaguered Minnesota again as the epicenter of everything that’s square-headed and unhip in America. Eager to let the world know that two plus two equals four? Take aim one more time at the vain stupidity of beauty contests. Drop Dead Gorgeous,…
For the twentieth century, it’s suddenly the bottom of the ninth with two outs, and that fact has unleashed a wave of nostalgia in the nation’s baseball fans unmatched since, well, since Big Mac hit number 70. For instance. Prior to last week’s All-Star Game in Boston, current players from…
For Morgan J. Freeman (a young writer-director, not the heralded actor), comic timing couldn’t get any worse–or better. That’s because one of the unhappy teenagers in Freeman’s second feature, Desert Blue, is a melancholy girl dressed in moody black who likes to detonate homemade bombs. The Columbine High School massacre…
When your cardiologist isn’t looking, motor down to the Bamboo Hut on Larimer Street, slip onto a bar stool and order a big bowl of green chile. But before devouring this masterpiece, drop five or six crunchy nuggets from your side order of chicharrones into the steaming bowl. Stir well,…
In the summer of 1991, the best-kept state secret in China had to be the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team’s 2-1 World Cup win over Norway. The tournament’s high scorer, Michelle Akers, booted the winning goal with just two minutes left in the final game at Guanzhou, and when time ran…
Woe be to the scribbler who presumes to rewrite a master–unless he is so deft that his invasion of privacy produces something new and exciting. Enter British writer/director Oliver Parker, who has the nerve to meddle with Oscar Wilde’s sublime farce An Ideal Husband–and the skill to pull it off…
To hear Spike Lee tell it, Summer of Sam means to be a panoramic view of the summer of 1977 in New York City–when temperatures shot into the high ’90s and power blackouts set nerves on edge, when the party agenda included snorting coke at Studio 54 and copulating with…
When a major bargain becomes available, it doesn’t take long for the sharpies to gather like vultures around carrion. Case in point: Now that disgruntled stockholders of the Ascent Entertainment Group have rejected a piddling $400 million offer for the Colorado Avalanche, the Denver Nuggets and the Can, their brand-new…
