The Czech drama Zelary brings to mind Bertolt Brecht’s pointed observation, “War is like love; it always finds a way.” In this instance, war creates the atmosphere in which an unlikely love flourishes, then overwhelms that love. Only a fool would try to improve on Brecht, but after absorbing Ondrej…
Maybe it’s the mark of a great film that it can affect an audience member even when he sleeps through the entire thing. Such was the case with my father at a recent preview of David O. Russell’s I ♥ Huckabees, a philosophy lecture masquerading as a comedy, in which…
It would be so easy to titter and scoff at Shall We Dance?, a Miramaxed-out version of the 1996 Japanese film of the same name, which told of a bored businessman who is reinvigorated after a few dozen dance lessons. This version, with its cast of glow-in-the-dark movie stars and…
The appeal of a quirky little Norwegian film called Kitchen Stories, released earlier this year and largely ignored on this side of the Atlantic, arises from an unlikely source: a series of domestic studies conducted in the 1950s by a group of Swedish efficiency experts. Eighteen observers, perched up in…
Though the date is the subject of debate, most agree that it was October 7, 1955, when six relatively unknown poets headed to Six Gallery in San Francisco to participate in a showcase of promising up-and-comers. One of the bards, an upstart by the name of Jack Kerouac, opted not…
Thursday, October 14 The circus has already been in town for a week, swinging high at that Pepsi can, but the true circus experience — the nostalgic, intimate one pervaded by popcorn and manure — can only be had at the Denver Coliseum. The 134th Ringling Bros. and Barnum &…
The 27th Starz Denver International Film Festival will get a soulful kickoff at 7 p.m. Thursday, October 14, with an opening-night showing of Ray, Taylor Hackford’s startlingly candid biopic about music legend Ray Charles. Starring a perfectly cast Jamie Foxx as the blind, Georgia-born singer who became a star worldwide,…
FRI, 10/15 “I once danced on that table right over there,” said the executive vice president, pointing with a well-manicured finger at a metal table near the far wall of the Wazee Supper Club. “I once spent the night under that table,” her companion replied. No surprise. Over the years,…
THURS, 10/14 Photographer Subhanker Banerjee’s two-year, 4,000-mile odyssey across Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge began in 2001 and yielded 200 photographs. The Indian-born naturalist undertook the journey on foot as well as by kayak, raft and snowmobile in his quest to capture vivid scenes of creatures living in the refuge…
TUES, 10/19 Lollapalooza died a quick and quiet death this summer, a victim of sluggish ticket sales and growing apathy toward the whole idea of large-scale rockfests. But ironically, there’s still a thriving market for weird Lollapalooza mutations, like Pepsi-palooza and Hallelujah-palooza, not to mention a personal favorite, Pancake-palooza. Well,…
THURS, 10/14 When John Patrick Shanley’s play Dirty Story debuted in New York in 2003, the playwright chose to forgo the standard playbill biography. Rather than mention Shanley’s Oscar for the Moonstruck screenplay or numerous other accolades, the profile read, “John resides on Earth, in America, a country where the…
Among the first chapters in the history of Western art is the one devoted to Egypt, with much of the subsequent story tracing its origins to the objects and buildings produced in the Nile Valley more than 3,000 years ago. This was long before — millennia before, as it happens…
Photographs by David Alexander Björkman make up the interesting exhibit The Maya Ballgame, now on display at the Museo de las Américas (861 Santa Fe Drive, 303-571-4401) for the “Month of Photography.” The Björkman shots, printed in black and white, are divided into two groups: those in the north gallery…
Ansel Adams Edwin Land and Persistence of Myth and Tragedy. At the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, two legendary figures from the history of photography have been brought together in Ansel Adams Edwin Land: Art, Science, and Invention: Photographs From the Polaroid Collection. In the ’60s, Adams was invited by…
When Sue Leiser trudges across the stage and thumps onto a chair, she’s there. Really there. Solid. Present. Her face in a little moue of anger and disgust as she contemplates the malfunctioning of her bowels. The minute you see her enter in The Tale of the Allergist¹s Wife at…
Going to the Country Dinner Playhouse always feels like stepping back in time and into another America, the kind of place my in-laws would have recognized. They grew up on Colorado farmland, fell in love while they were in high school, even attended the kind of picnic dramatized in Oklahoma!,…
84, Charing Cross Road. A fascination with the life of old books provides a lot of the charm of this play, which is based on the correspondence between New York writer Helene Hanff and Frank Doel, a London bookseller. An anglophile and lover of literature, Hanff longed to see England…
Rare is the film that caters to fans of rabbits, motorcycles, Gordon Lightfoot and fellatio, but now, thanks entirely to Vincent Gallo, we’ve got that demographic nailed. With The Brown Bunny, the cinematic enfant terrible who gave us the awful pleasures of Buffalo ’66 returns, but don’t expect a retread…
There are at least three movies contained within the covers of H.G. Bissinger’s best-selling 1990 non-fiction book Friday Night Lights. One is concerned with the socioeconomic life of a small West Texas town built on the wobbly foundations of oil and racism and the out-of-whack worship of a high school…
Forget the presidential debates and the carnage in Fallujah. If you want to see real bloodletting, fall by the Esquire Saturday night to catch The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. This is the gruesome cult favorite in which five young innocents who have wandered into the wrong part of rural Texas…
The gloves are off, and the Capitol Steps are ready for an evening of equal-opportunity offending. The musical political-satire troupe will right-hook George W., left-jab John Kerry and sucker-punch everybody in between when it takes the stage at the University of Denver this Friday. But first, a note from our…
Thursday, October 7 Though she was French through and through, many agree that Nadia Boulanger almost single-handedly formed the cornerstone of contemporary American music. When she died 25 years ago, the composer, groundbreaking conductor and antiseptically precise teacher whom Virgil Thomson once called “a one-woman graduate school” left behind a…
