The notion that Wolf Creek is opening nationwide on Christmas Day brings to mind the scene from Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, in which a young boy opens up his holiday gift and finds a severed head. The movie is about as diametrically opposed to the concept of “goodwill…
It’s impossible to talk about The Ringer, a comedy about someone pretending to be retarded in order to rig the Special Olympics, without mentioning that episode of South Park in which Cartman does the same thing. The Ringer was already in production when that episode was made, and it has…
Unless your new plasma TV is the size of a conference table, it’s a good idea to skip the DVD option and make straight for a movie theater to take in Lawrence of Arabia. The deepest pleasure of David Lean’s 1962 classic — all 227 minutes of it in the…
If you take Hollywood’s word for it, the Wild West was populated by more donkeys than women; in the Spaghetti Western School of History, men and animals do the hard work on the range, and the only female faces belong to sympathetic saloon girls and babes from the bordello. But…
Sin City: Recut, Extended, Unrated (Buena Vista) Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s near frame-for-frame adaptation of Miller’s bone-crunching comics finally gets a rewarding DVD treatment, following a shamefully sparse edition earlier this year. The theatrical cut boasts two commentary tracks (with Quentin Tarantino and Bruce Willis, among others), but there…
No wonder Iraq is a mess. If the battlefield in America¹s Army: Rise of a Soldier is an accurate picture of what it’s like in the Middle East, we should cut and run ASAP. The United States Army’s officially licensed shooter puts you smack in the middle of the action…
Bad News Bears (2005) (Paramount) The Beautiful Country (Sony) Death Race 2000: Special Edition (Buena Vista) F.I.S.T. (Columbia/Tristar) Gallipoli: Special Edition (Paramount) Gilmore Girls: The Complete Fifth Season (Warner Bros.) The Island (Universal) Kiss: Rock the Nation Live! (Image) The Last Day (Strand) Marvin Gaye: Behind the Legend (Red Dist.)…
Many people — if not most — think of art and art writing as subjective enterprises. It’s all a matter of taste; one person’s trash is another’s treasure. This thinking is partially right — but mostly wrong. Like it or not, art is part of the objective reality that exists…
The William Havu Gallery (1040 Cherokee Street, 303-893-2360) is hosting a great pair of solos for the holidays: Mark Dickson and Michael Clapper. The shows have been installed on the first floor, with Dickson’s classic modernist paintings hung on the walls and Clapper’s equally classic modernist sculptures displayed on the…
Andy Warhol’s Dream America. Hot on the heels of its smash hit, Chihuly, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center is presenting yet another blockbuster devoted to the work of a household name in contemporary art: Andy Warhol’s Dream America. The exhibition was curated by Ben Mitchell of Wyoming’s Nicolaysen Museum…
Everyone knows the story of Scrooge’s conversion from hard-eyed businessman to philanthropist in A Christmas Carol. Tiny Tim’s incantation, “God bless us, every one,” has become a seasonal staple, right up there with twirling sugarplum fairies and twinkling-eyed Santas. But what if Dickens’s well-loved story ran off the rails? What…
The best scene in The Credeaux Canvas, the first offering of the new Identity Theatre Company, is an extended nude scene, in which a young woman poses for a painter. She is Amelia, a singer trying to make her way in New York; the painter is Winston, an art student,…
Bug. At the beginning, Bug seems hyper-realistic. We’re shown a drink- and drug-addled woman, Agnes, living in a motel room, which we learn is on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. We have been here before. It is — among other things — Sam Shepard country. A quiet young man, Peter,…
It’s not hard to predict how Ang Lee’s controversial Brokeback Mountain will play in John Wayne country. This romantic tragedy about a pair of lean, wind-burned cowpokes who secretly live to poke each other flies in the face of everything that most people in Casper or Riverton or Laramie think…
For whatever reason, the modernized, comic redo of King Kong released exactly 29 years ago has become less the “pop classic” that Pauline Kael insisted it was at the time than a dimly remembered punch line. It barely registers with modern-day movie-goers, who remember it as a campy, eco-aware update…
One cannot, in good conscience, describe the countless strands of plot and strains of characters skittering through The Family Stone without knowing that description merits at least a snickerŠokay, all right, bellowing guffaws. The movie’s too overstuffed by half with pointless people and plotlines that dangle like warning signs, begging…
Yes, the title’s a problem. Three of Hearts was a 1993 romantic comedy starring Kelly Lynch, Sherilyn Fenn and William Baldwin, a distasteful clunker that traded on male titillation with lesbians and bisexual women. Worse, the poster for the new Three of Hearts is achingly similar to that of its…
Before Willy Wonka started churning out chocolate bars and Victor Van Dort inadvertently married a dead girl, Johnny Depp brought another of director Tim Burton’s adolescent fantasy figures to weird life. In 1990, Depp became Edward Scissorhands, a dangerously equipped dreamer who used his artistic dexterity on hairdos and hedges…
New Year’s Eve. No other holiday comes with such great expectations — and no other holiday deflates those great expectations so thoroughly. A river of disillusionment — and body fluids — ran through the submissions for our second “My Worst New Year’s Eve” essay contest. Readers recounted tales of horrible…
Nearly a year later, I still look back on that evening with utter amazement. Everything went perfectly wrong. No embellishment needed. And to think, for me, December 31 previously evoked thoughts of joy and anticipation. This could be the start of the best year of my life. No longer. After…
During the holidays of 1998, I ran into a string of bad luck. I lost my girlfriend, my apartment and my job in the course of two days. Feeling bummed right after Christmas, I went to St. Mark’s, where I ran into a friend of mine who was home from…
This is actually about my second-worst New Year’s Eve. If I told you about the first, I might have to kill you. I was six weeks out of a relationship with the woman of my dreams. I thought she loved me. We had an argument on Halloween about our costumes…
