Hollywood routinely creates movies whose sole reason for existing is to provide a beloved celebrity a showcase to deliver a scenery-chewing star turn; occasionally, these films even win their lead performer an Oscar (example: Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman). But The Evening Star may be the first movie…
Best Ten of 1996 1. Big Night. Art vs. commerce, sibling rivalry and great Italian food at the Jersey shore in the Fifties. 2. Fargo. Yah, hon. Murder meets mirth in the frozen nort’ country, courtesy of the Coen brothers. 3. Secrets & Lies. Britain’s Mike Leigh examines a shattered…
Thursday December 19 Fair to Midler: What’s glitz without a sense of humor? Double-barreled songstress Bette Midler exudes plenty of both, putting on campish, in-your-face concerts that run a torchy gamut from big, mushy production numbers to out-and-out rock and roll. Take a rest from the holiday rat race; Midler…
1993 was a terrible year for the local art world. First the galleries started closing–Joan Robey, Alpha, Hassel Haeseler and Payton-Rule. Then the artists started dying–Wes Kennedy, Edward Marecak and David Rigsby. In the years since, both Kennedy and Marecak have been the subject of several fine surveys and memorial…
“Marley was dead to begin with.” Charles Dickens opened A Christmas Carol, his greatest ghost story and arguably the best secular Christmas tale ever written, with these strange, portentous words. In 150 years, the incredible success of the novella about old Scrooge and his ghostly redeemers continues to haunt the…
The arts and the sciences came together in the Renaissance in a way they never had before. Aristotle’s limited universe, in which the sun and planets revolved around the Earth, was discarded in favor of Copernicus’s more accurate assessment. And it was clearly seen by educated men and women that…
Michael Hoffman’s One Fine Day is a fantasy about family values with an awful case of high blood pressure. Starring Michelle Pfeiffer as a man-weary single mom and E.R. idol George Clooney as a woman-weary single dad who have kids enrolled at the same school, it spends one frantic weekday…
In the 43 years since The Crucible first saw a footlight, Arthur Miller has steadfastly maintained that his dramatic condemnation of the Salem witch trials was really a veiled outcry against Senator Joseph McCarthy and the political terrorism of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Almost no one’s argued with him…
Some amusing stuff about sports agentry drowns in the emotional shallows of Jerry Maguire, which stars Tom Cruise as a hot-shot dealmaker whose first bout of conscience torpedoes his future at his firm, the monolithic Sports Management International. After visiting a hospitalized hockey player who skates hurt in order to…
Thursday December 12 Brave new girl: Songbirds no longer wear sequined dresses or stand in the shadows in a chorus line somewhere to the left of the strutting lead singer. Modern songstresses write their own smart material, accompany themselves and belt out the songs forthrightly, without apologies. Singer/songwriter/pianist Paula Cole…
Clay is a material that occupies a special–or should that be peculiar?–place in the world of the visual arts. It is most often employed in the making of utilitarian objects such as cups, mugs and vases and is therefore relegated to the underworld of the decorative arts–the much-maligned craft tradition…
‘Tis the season for gooey sentiments, so you’d better watch out if you’re headed for the New Denver Civic’s gangly rendition of Louisa May Alcott’s classic Little Women. But there’s no need to pout: The real thing is out there in theaterland this holiday season, if you know where to…
Forget Independence Day. If you really want to see Earth get it, you can’t do any better than Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! It’s a destructo orgy orchestrated without any phony-baloney sanctimony about the fellowship of man–or spaceman. Burton isn’t interested in intergalactic amity; he’s not even interested in preserving the…
If it does nothing else, the election-year comedy My Fellow Americans will probably remind us that most citizens now regard their political leaders with the contempt usually reserved for serial killers, child molesters and news reporters. Hollywood always trails the social mood of the country by a year or two…
Yo, Adrian. Think the Italian Stallion was in tough when he duked it out with Apollo Creed, Mr. T and that huge Russian? Figure Rambo had his hands full on those fiery missions impossible to Cambodia and Afghanistan? Hey, the dialogue alone would have killed anybody else. Ever worry that…
Thursday December 5 Shine on: Why do holidays seem to leave us all with that warm, fuzzy feeling? Maybe it’s just a combination of shopping burnout and too many seasonal toasts, although a prevailing sense of tradition is a better, or at least a more heartwarming, guess. Two local traditions–one…
In the last few years, two groups have emerged in Denver, each intent on establishing a museum of contemporary art as an alternative to the Denver Art Museum. For a long time the two groups were unknown to each other. (If only the Ocean Journey crowd had been so circumspect.)…
Mama Rose is the stage mother from hell. The central character of Gypsy–now in a hardy production at the Arvada Center–might have been written up by psychiatrist M. Scott Peck in his classic case studies of evil. Apparently nobody in the late 1950s (when the show premiered) understood child abuse,…
So many words, so few ideas. In his tedious satire Was He Anyone?, playwright N.F. Simpson tries so hard to bite into the red tape surrounding governmental “charity” that he chokes on it. Not even the Hunger Artists Ensemble’s talented cast can do more than give this sociopolitical spoof a…
Kurt Vonnegut’s strengths as a novelist are his rare, dark humor, which can be as bracing as cognac, and his gift for shifting gears from tragedy to absurdity, tenderness to stark horror. His main weakness is probably a taste for cartoon moralism–a kind of flimsy preachiness, drenched in postmodern ambiguity,…
Critics normally don’t spend a lot of time praising producers; in a medium that is both commerce and art, our job is to evaluate the art side of the equation. And the assumption is that while producers are raising, counting or raking in moolah, a movie’s aesthetics are in the…
Two centuries before zillionaire NBA players started talking trash, before Don Rickles ambushed his first tipsy Vegas ringsider, before Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley traded quips at the Algonquin, the decadent court of Louis XVI turned acid wit into coin of the realm. While the nobles blindly sniped at each…
