Monaghan’s Tavern prides itself on Big. It’s home to the Monster Beer (huge), the Monster Burger (not so huge) and–on Wednesday nights–the Monster T-Bone Steak (huger than some, smaller than others). This neighborhood bar is also Big on its own history. For instance, owner Niles Oppenheimer, who bought the place…
In John Sayles’s Limbo, which is set amid the rough-and-tumble of southeast Alaska, an ex-salmon fisherman with guilty memories (David Strathairn), an itinerant lounge singer with a lousy voice (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) and the singer’s melancholy teenage daughter (newcomer Vanessa Martinez) become stranded, Robinson Crusoe-style, on a remote island. This…
Growing older, you find yourself searching for the deeper meanings in things, for their essence, with an intensity that would have been unlikely, or impossible, earlier in life. Why, you may find yourself asking, did your strikingly beautiful, once-married aunt, a mysterious woman by any account, stay so long in…
The peerless Ethiopian distance runner Haile Gebrselassie is a tiny man–5’3″ and barely 115 pounds–but in his native country, his heroism looms large. Since 1994 he has set fifteen world records at five different distances, and at the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, he outdueled a trio of favored…
It has not been lost on the Quinn brothers–actor Aidan, cinematographer Declan and writer/director Paul–that in old Gaelic culture, the tribal bard, or storyteller, was held in the highest esteem. The Quinns want to be Irish storytellers, too, and to that end, they have loaded up This Is My Father,…
Jerry Feld’s Club 404 (Your Host: Jerry Feld) is the soul of old Denver. Zebulon Pike and William Bent may have missed this wonderful, windowless refuge under the red awning at Fourth Avenue and Broadway by a decade or two, but virtually everyone who’s lived in our fair city during…
Once upon a time there was a game called baseball. This game was played, at the highest professional level, by young men of normal height, weight and ambition, in large American cities situated next to significant bodies of water. The object of the game was to hit a white ball…
It’s been half a century since the maestro, Vittorio De Sica, created the undisputed masterpiece of Italian neo-realism in the chaotic streets of post-war Rome. The Bicycle Thief, which begins a fiftieth-anniversary revival this Friday at the Mayan, was made on a minuscule budget, using a pair of aging cameras,…
If your poodle is decked out in the complete Captain Kirk uniform, you’ve taken Klingon language classes, or you once mailed DeForest Kelly a joint taped to a piece of cardboard just “to return the favor,” the 86-minute documentary called Trekkies is a must-view–love it or loathe it. In the…
Australia, the land once stocked with convicts battling for a second chance, loves the scrappy underdog. Whether it’s a pig named Babe, who thinks he’s a dog, or an adventurer named Crocodile Dundee, exiled to callous New York City with a huge knife in his belt, the Aussie little guy…
Among minor works of late-twentieth-century art, something called the CityGrilleburger occupies a special place in our heart–and not just because of its fat count. A luscious beef patty of heroic proportion, it arrives cloaked in melted Swiss cheese, crisp bacon and–the coup de grace–a dollop of garlicky Caesar dressing. It’s…
When we first see Isa, the 21-year-old heroine of Erick Zonca’s The Dreamlife of Angels, she’s trudging under the weight of a huge backpack through the chill dawn of an almost featureless European city. With her close-cropped dark hair and street urchin’s sniffle, she seems to be carrying the burden…
The latest release from Paramount Pictures’ bouncing baby, MTV Films, is set in a high school and has been inoculated with the usual doses of teenage angst, teenage wit and teenage lust. Here’s the surprise: It declines to get down on its hands and knees to woo Generation Y to…
When it was over, the big, blue-eyed man wearing the beautifully tailored charcoal suit and the pale-gold necktie left a box of Kleenex untouched on the podium and followed his blocker, wife Janet, through one last Sunday-afternoon sea of photographers. They vanished through a side door of a hotel ballroom…
A hand-wringing reassessment of the libertine 1960s has hit full stride–stirred as much, you can’t help thinking, by the transfiguration of former acidheads and ex-leftist firebrands into establishment powermongers as by the half-baked grumblings of their children. The anti-war and civil-rights movements were shot through with self-service and intolerance, the…
The day may dawn clear, but Saturday’s 125th Kentucky Derby will be run under a cloud–or rather, three or four clouds–that help explain the unhappy state of American horse racing. First, as twenty unpredictable three-year-olds go to the post at Churchill Downs, the memory of Charlie Whittingham is sure to…
Comedian David Spade’s chosen shtick–every line a zinger, every crack calculated to draw blood–works well in the short bursts characteristic of standup, sketches and TV sitcom. But the man can wear you out over the course of a two-hour movie. Like the too-clever motormouth at a cocktail party, he doesn’t…
In the sun-splashed fanfare of opening day at Coors Field, the impeccably tailored promotions manager from Louisville Slugger committed an unthinkable gaffe. Amid much ceremony and clicking of camera shutters, Chuck Schupp handed a gleaming silver bat symbolizing the 1998 National League batting title to some guy named Larry Walker…
The love affair at the heart of Benoit Jacquot’s The School of Flesh has to be the longest shot on the board. Pairing a woman of the world with a boy of the streets, it is fueled by sexual obsession and casual cruelty, by the same huge contrasts in temperament…
Next time you’re getting your axles chromed out at A & M Custom Tire and Wheel, don’t miss one of the metro area’s best and most authentic Mexican lunches–right across the street at a plain-faced red-brick hideaway called Christy’s. Never heard of the place? Of course you haven’t. Unless you…
Local admirers of Franco Piavoli’s Blue Planet, a poetic evocation of earthly harmony, will be heartened to learn that the Italian painter/filmmaker’s latest visual ballad, Voices Through Time (Voci Nel Tempo), opens an indefinite run Friday at the UA Flatirons Theater in Boulder. It was previously shown in Colorado at…
The first time he disappeared, John Zangrando was ten, maybe eleven years old. “I realize now, looking back, that I had experienced not being totally in my mind,” he says. “I disappeared. I disappeared, and there was just the saxophone. I remember feeling there was nothing else on earth. There…
