Have you noticed? They don’t have a last name between them. George, Karl, Doug and Moe sound like four hackers who take turns hitting it in the drink at Park Hill. But down at the Pepsi Center — you know, that big red thing where, once upon a time, a…
The Denver Art Museum’s beautifully chosen series The Art of Silent Film continues this week with a screening of Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), G.W. Pabst’s socially prophetic melodrama about a German pharmacist’s daughter (American Louise Brooks) whose big-city innocence leads her to a reformatory, then a brothel. Strategically…
If nothing else, give Dana Brown credit for enthusiasm. A documentary filmmaker in name only, he is really the camera- and microphone-equipped president of several booster clubs — among them what might be called the International Society of Beach Bums and, thanks to his latest exercise in hero worship, the…
The Woody Allen who wrote and directed Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) back in 1972 was not yet the full-bloom, all-promises-delivered Woody who gave us Annie Hall and Manhattan — but at least he wasn’t the inert and seemingly dispirited moviemaker who…
Matthew Parkhill’s Dot the I is the kind of tricked-up mental exercise that may intrigue the most impressionable film-school students and a philosophy major here and there. But anyone who’s gotten through sophomore year is more likely to find it a pretentious load of crap. Set in contemporary London and…
HELP WANTED: Tradition-rich athletic team seeks nineteen- or twenty-year-old American who can run like crazed jaguar for two solid hours. Must leap like Michael Jordan, kick leather like David Beckham, possess hand-eye skills of Champ Bailey. Awesome physique not essential, but uncommon courage required — job involves frequent collisions with…
Filmmaker Rick Ray spent four months in India, where one-sixth of the earth’s people live, shooting his wide-ranging documentary, The Soul of India. Ray will introduce and discuss the new film in Boulder this week as part of the Macky Travel Film Series at the University of Colorado. Along with…
When the great playwright Arthur Miller died in February, many admirers took stock of his most enduring creation, Willy Loman. A delusional idealist who finds himself failed and felled by the American Dream, the tragic hero of Death of a Salesman has for half a century been the most discomfiting…
As we know, theres no crying in baseball. No crying when the first six batters all smash ropes off you and by the bottom of the second, your earned-run average looks like the dinner tab at Mortons. No crying when the left-field bleachers are so sparsely populated you can hear…
In the big box-office months of December and January, Mike Nichols’s Closer was overwhelmed by the likes of The Aviator and Million Dollar Baby. Now comes a second chance to catch this boiling pot of lust, mistrust and double-dealing, adapted from a play by talented Brit misanthrope Patrick Marber. It…
The heroine of Alain Corneau’s culture-clash comedy Fear and Trembling (2003) is a Japanese-born Belgian career girl, Amélie (the always-animated Sylvie Testud), who pursues her goal of becoming “a real Japanese” by submitting to a series of hideous chores — including endless photolcopying and bathroom work — even though she’s…
The late director Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) was long regarded as the “most Japanese” of all Japanese filmmakers, a fact that sometimes alienated younger audiences as dramatically as it enthralled traditionalists. A three-film series at Starz called Celebrating Ozu now gives lovers of world cinema a rare opportunity to revisit the…
The chilling oddity of Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall is not limited to the fact that it is the first mainstream German film to grapple with Adolf Hitler — six decades after his death. Set, for the most part, in the underground Berlin bunker where the Nazi dictator spent his last days,…
Another big-league baseball season is all but upon us, and the prelude is decorated with the usual fond hopes — even in Denver and Tampa. But the game seems more deeply troubled than ever. Players shooting steroids. Barry Bonds on the verge of murder at a press conference. The Damn…
While Jonathan Caouette’s extraordinary documentary Tarnation has given hope to aspiring directors (famously, it was initially shot and edited on a Macintosh for a couple hundred dollars), what has startled film-festival audiences across the country is not so much the method, but the madness: A mélange of old home movies…
Despite the sunshine of the Stalin years and the carefree frolic of the oligarchs, the words “Russia” and “romantic comedy” don’t exactly come tripping off the tongue in perfect harmony. But if we can believe co-directors Olga Stolpovskaya and Dmitry Troitsky, a welcome spirit of playfulness — or the brave…
Thanks to the talky self-absorption of everyone from sleek Julia Roberts to slovenly Michael Moore, the Academy Awards broadcast is always too long by half. For the short of it, why not open the package called Oscar Shorts 2005, on view this week at Starz? The three Oscar-nominated animated films…
Give Dan Harris, the writer-director of Imaginary Heroes, plenty of credit for boldness and ambition. Not many kids fresh out of Columbia University would have the wherewithal to tackle a complex family-crisis drama with four or five different kinds of trouble running through it and half a dozen crucial minor…
In the midst of the hip, the hop and the hype, the NBA All-Stars managed to shoot a little hoop over the weekend. As befits the Mile High City, some would say, most of it was above the rim. From the rookie-sophomore game on Friday night to the slam-dunk contest…
Movie cultists, rejoice. An eight-week-long Friday-night series called “Reel Late With Keith Garcia” opens Friday, February 18, with Adventures in Babysitting (1987). Chris Columbus’s debut comedy follows a teenage babysitter (Elisabeth Shue) who takes two kids with her to downtown Chicago to help get a friend out of a jam…
5:55 a.m.: 7600 Broadway They say the neon lights are bright on Broadway…but right before dawn, on the hillside where Broadway begins, the only lights are a hint of orange and pink on the horizon to the east, the beacons of a convenience store a few blocks down the two-lane…
The White House and the Pentagon don’t find the French very funny these days, but you might. The Denver Film Society’s five-week Comédies à la Française series begins Wednesday, February 9, with Cedric Klapisch’s rollicking sex farce L’Auberge Espagnole (2003), in which seven coeds living in a Barcelona apartment confound…
