U.S. Postal Service workers who think they have it tough should probably get a look at Huo Jianqi’s Postmen in the Mountains. In this deceptively simple and surprisingly moving film set in the early 1980s, a weary Chinese mailman, his wide-eyed, 24-year-old son and their faithful, knowing dog take three…
Oh, that Johnny Depp. Played in some dime-a-dozen rock bands, did some average television, made a few cutesy little movies. Whatever. Yeah, he messes with his looks in a fun way sometimes, but otherwise he merely rides that nicotine-sunken-cheeks thing all the way to the bank. The guy’s popular, but…
The most shocking thing about Kinsey, the first film from writer-director Bill Condon since 1998’s Gods and Monsters, is how shocking it actually is. Within the confines of a standard biopic (A Beautiful Dirty Mind, you might call it), Condon refuses to play it straight — which is only appropriate,…
Jerry Bruckheimer has always insisted that he cares less about critical acclaim than commercial appeal. “We make movies for the common man,” he said almost three years ago, as Black Hawk Down was crash-landing in theaters. “The pictures that I’ve made over the last twenty years or so have been…
Penek Ratanaruang’s Last Life in the Universe, released last summer, takes the notion of the Odd Couple to dizzyingly philosophical heights, while the director, who earlier gave us the ingenious musical Mon-Rak Transistor (2001), speculates on time, space and narrative itself. The seemingly mismatched pair here are a meek Japanese…
Less than two weeks after getting shot, Matt Casias sits in the northwest Denver dining room of a friend looking chipper and happy. He moves a little stiffly and occasionally gets sharp pains from the bullet lodged below his right shoulder blade, but otherwise you’d never know he’d just spent…
Thursday, November 18 Beautiful homes are never prettier than when dressed up for the holidays, with sparkling lights outside and gorgeous trees and tabletops inside. The six gracious ’30s- and ’40s-era homes in Denver’s Crestmoor neighborhood included in this year’s L’Esprit de Noël Holiday Home Tour will be decked out…
With the holidays on the horizon, there’s no better time to sing the praises of food. Bill Towber understands that, and so he’s offering a third helping of his Blue Plate Special this Saturday on R&B Jukebox, his weekly show on KUVO. The two-hour musical smorgasbord promises to be a…
SAT, 11/20 Round up the literature posse! The Tattered Cover Book Store will add new turf to its bookish Bonanza when it burns the “TC” brand in Highlands Ranch. Plans are for the 21,764 square feet of suburban space to translate into bibliophile bliss, with the same look and feel…
THURS, 11/18 Things have been pretty tough for Melo. Depression. Inability to breathe. Anger. And that all came before anything that’s happened to him in the past few months. Yes, the Nuggets’ barely twenty-year-old sophomore star has endured plenty of hardships, which he recounts with writer Greg Brown in Carmelo…
THUR, 11/18 José Mercado knew his second big show at North High School was gonna have to be good. Last year, the actor and educator elevated North’s theater department with Zoot Suit Riots, a larger-than-life production that made stars of its student actors. After nearly selling out the Temple Buell…
SAT, 11/20 Harmony: A Colorado Chorale has something sing about. When the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriages this past spring, Harmony artistic director William Loper wanted to applaud the wedding bells he heard ringing on the horizon. The result is Hand in Hand, Heart to…
Cydney Payton plays many roles at Denver’s smallish, newish Museum of Contemporary Art, including that of director and chief curator. She doesn’t put together every show at MCA, but she does organize the vast majority of them. In fact, it was her reputation as a first-rate curator that got her…
The redevelopment of Stapleton International Airport by mega-developer Forest City has been surprisingly successful. The town center at 29th Avenue and Quebec Street is very nice, being the best-designed of the many ersatz downtowns that have sprung up all over the metro area. Like Lowry before it, Stapleton has made…
Charles Parson, Emilio Lobato, Jason Needham. The cavernous Lower Galleries at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities have been given over to the awe-inspiring Charles Parson: Landscape’s Sonnet, a huge solo that includes constructivist drawings, wall relief panels, sculptures and installations. As if that isn’t enough, Parson also…
For the entire first act, the Denver Center Theatre Company’s Boston Marriage is pure enjoyment. It’s light and fast, and the language is dizzying — clever and cleverly self-punctuating. The plot concerns two nineteenth- century women who live together in an arrangement termed a “Boston marriage.” Some such arrangements were…
Paula Vogel’s The Long Christmas Ride Home begins as a tart-tender look at an overworked topic — the way family dynamics become exacerbated, for good or ill, at Christmas time — and ends up floundering in sentimentality. The play’s defining feature, the thing that should have lifted it from the…
Angels in America: Part I: Millennium Approaches. Tony Kushner’s Angels in America is a complex, seven-hour masterwork about the lives of two couples and one quintessentially evil historical figure, and the inextricable way in which politics, history and private life intertwine. There’s also an angel, along with other supernatural and…
The witless inanity of After the Sunset is so numbing that the sole reason for any living creature to sit through it — man, woman or household pet — is to marvel at the speed and variety of actress Salma Hayek’s costume changes. After an opening sequence in Los Angeles,…
Most articles written about The Polar Express have focused on its groundbreaking technology, which takes the process used to create Gollum in The Lord of the Rings one step further. Much as Andy Serkis’s performance was digitally mapped and reproduced via CGI, so, too, is Tom Hanks computer generated here…
A week after having seen Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, no memory of it remains except for some scribblings in my notepad — such is the slight nature of this woeful, forgettable sequel. Squandering the goodwill that lingers from the original — now a beloved relic among the singletons…
The punk-hipster appeal of filmmaker Jim Van Bebber is based on half a dozen lurid, no-budget gorefests like My Sweet Satan, in which a suicidal teenager gets strung out on dope and starts worshipping the devil, and Roadkill: The Last Days of John Martin, whose maniacal protagonist insists on scraping…
