It has been eighty years since the adventurous son of a Michigan iron miner trained a silent-movie camera on the everyday life of an “Eskimo” family in the Canadian Arctic and virtually invented documentary filmmaking. Through the decades, Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North has attracted its share of criticism…
Naked emotion is a tricky thing to sell in motion pictures, especially in semi-autobiographical ones about confused mama’s boys gradually learning that life exists beyond the control of their lens. Back in 1988, Giuseppe Tornatore challenged himself thus with Cinema Paradiso and upped the ante, adding his unabashed sentimentality to…
Think Italian cars — and the ensuing revelry should conjure up a Mediterranean mountainside under blue, sunny skies. A tanned and chiseled Romeo is at the wheel, a carefree dark-eyed Juliet in a sundress at his side; they’re both wearing sunglasses and the top is down. Que bella, no? Unlike…
You can leave your green parkas at home until St. Patrick’s Day. “Put on some shorts, a Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops,” says Pat McCullough, and you’ll fit right in at Conor O’Neill’s Summer Outdoor Music Fest in Boulder. McCullough’s Celtic Events group is helping Conor O’Neill’s, a Boulder pub, launch…
Shouldn’t have said yes, couldn’t say no. The deal was simple, and those who chose to accept it had made their own private pact with the showbiz-journalism devil. “You will spend an hour with Tom Cruise and an hour with Steven Spielberg,” said the publicist, a lovely woman from 20th…
Last year, the Denver Art Museum hired John Pultz to be consulting curator of photography, a part-time position in the modern and contemporary department. Pultz’s day job is professor of art history at the University of Kansas, where he’s also a curator at KU’s Spencer Museum. Several years ago, he…
What is there to say about the organization that reinvented the circus, losing the kitsch and keeping the razzle-dazzle, removing tormented performing animals and substituting the extraordinary potential of the human body, giving us clowns with intellect and soul instead of rubber-nosed horn honkers in tiny cars? If you’ve seen…
Steven Spielberg just might turn into a great director — if only he’d stop sabotaging his movies. For the second time in as many films, he demolishes his product with a third act that renders all that’s come before it void. It’s as though Minority Report, set in a near…
If it’s possible for a film to be simultaneously ambitious and banal, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys does it. There’s little here we haven’t seen repeatedly in some form or another — growing up Catholic is popular fodder for filmmakers, as is growing up in the American South, usually…
Last month, I met former Denver mayor Quigg Newton, who served from 1947 to 1955. His Honor was being interviewed about his association with Denver painter Vance Kirkland for a documentary about the Kirkland Museum called MuseumMuseum, which will air on KBDI Channel 12. I was there as a creative…
The Andenken Annex, a new art-exhibition venue, opened last weekend in the Steelbridge Loft Building in LoDo, at 1449 Wynkoop Street. Although it’s billed as a branch of the Andenken Gallery, the annex is an independent space, and it has its own director: Warren Kelly, an ambitious young artist who…
As you enter Germinal Stage Denver, you’re greeted in the lobby by Bill and Betty — you know they’re Bill and Betty because their name tags say so. Once you’re comfortably seated, they take the stage to welcome you. They explain with great excitement that Jason and Medea are about…
When Pigs Fly harks back to the days when gay theater was mostly an unabashed celebration of the gay lifestyle and the joys of being out. In the 1960s, Robert Patrick — who later wrote the acclaimed Kennedy’s Children — was putting on exuberant skits, shows and revues in tiny…
The “one thing” at the heart of Jill Sprecher’s 13 Conversations About One Thing may not have one name. But as you wend your way through this intricate meditation on urban solitude and the nature of fate, you’ll likely discover for yourself whether it’s called happiness, hope, domestic tranquility or…
At first, the swaggering neo-Nazi skinhead played to scary effect by Ryan Gosling in The Believer seems to hail from the same cesspool that spit up Russell Crowe’s Neanderthal in Romper Stomper and Edward Norton’s deep-thinking thug in American History X. Gosling’s Danny Balint is a belligerent New York street…
David Auburn’s play, Proof, garnered ecstatic reviews in New York and then went on to a triumphant run in London — though critics there seemed slightly more excited about the appearance of Gwyneth Paltrow in the lead than about the script itself (she “has the eyes of a lynx,” suggested…
At various points throughout The Cold Six Thousand, a vivid riff on the cruelest events of the 1960s that’s just been issued in paperback, author James Ellroy subjects parts of speech to the same viciousness that marks the book’s plot. Sometimes adjectives wind up in the crosshairs. On other occasions,…
When the used antiques from estate and garage sales started taking over their Washington Park home, Kristen Tait and Dylan Moore figured it was either time to open a store or pitch a tent in the back yard. “Every inch of our house was covered — the garage was stacked…
Don’t have any major plans for the summer other than maxing and relaxing in your backyard hammock? Then welcome to Westword’s annual Summer Guide! We’re designating ourselves your social coordinators for the next four months, breaking it down for you day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute. Okay,…
What could be sillier than adults riding Big Wheels down Vail’s main street? Maybe a bunch of otherwise-sane grownups sailing off a three-foot-high jump at the end of that street. During Vail’s annual Big Wheel ‘N’ Chili Festival, June 22 and 23, you can see both. With a fifty-yard racetrack…
With flamboyant costumes and rollicking floats, Denver PrideFest 2002 will march down Colfax Avenue on June 23, for Denver’s annual celebration of acceptance, camaraderie and gay pride. “I just like being able to be myself,” says Bradley James Hein, who has attended Denver’s PrideFest five times. “It’s the one day…
Harking back to an Elizabethan shire, it’s “all for fun, and fun for all” at the 26th annual Colorado Renaissance Festival, which has borrowed from the Three Musketeers’ call to arms for this year’s slogan. “Good morrow to thee, welcome to our shire,” shouts Michael Shaffer, who plays the Marquiche…
