Good morning, Mr. Phelps…Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to play second fiddle to Tom Cruise, because he’s the star and the producer. And to inflate a pretty entertaining old TV series into a movie monster that cost more to make than all the broadcast episodes put…
Seen any good Icelandic movies lately? How about surreal Icelandic road movies that begin at a fish market in Tokyo and wind up with the principals eating roasted rams’ testicles in a raucous country-and-Western bar plunked down about nine yards from the North Pole? Fridrik Thor Fridriksson’s Cold Fever is…
Thursday May 16 An isle seat: The Haitian experience is brought to life by the stunning poeticism and unshakably truthful voice of author Edwidge Danticat, whose vivid, considerable storytelling skills shape the nine short stories in Krik? Krak!, her recent short-fiction collection distinguished in the industry by a National Book…
It was in mid-March that Paul Hughes, director of the venerable, twenty-something Inkfish Gallery, announced that he would mount an in-depth exhibit of thirty mostly small works by New York-based kinetic sculptor George Rickey. That fine exhibit, George Rickey: Recent Kinetic Sculptures, is now open at Inkfish and runs through…
It’s the music that matters most in Appalachian Strings. But the vibrant production now at the Denver Center Theatre Company is also a history, both of “hillbilly” music and of the people of Appalachia. The writing in this engaging piece is sometimes a trifle overwrought, the people idealized beyond the…
There may be more people on stage than in the audience, but the crowded space in the small Dorie Theatre is alive with ferocious goofiness in The Madwoman of Chaillot. Dated and simplistic as Jean Giraudoux’s 1945 tale may be, it still carries the moral force of a great old…
If you’re in the market for your very own Doppler radar set or a pickup truck with real cojones, Twister is a pretty good place to go shopping. Ostensibly, Jan De Bont’s big, loud, expensive action movie is about the destructive power of tornadoes and the folks who chase stormy…
Jim Jarmusch’s Old West is no place for John Wayne. Inspired by Native American pantheism, the English mystic poet William Blake and the heretofore unnoticed connection between the two, America’s most unpredictable filmmaker has come up with a dark, dreamy Western called Dead Man in which the “frontier” is not…
Thursday May 9 Gorgeous George: Who can resist the jazz- and Tin Pan Alley-inspired orchestral strains of George Gershwin’s all-American compositions? Not you. The Colorado Symphony Orchestra, with guest vocalist Marilyn VerPlanck and conductor Newton Wayland, will celebrate Gershwin’s music in a pops presentation beginning at 7:30 tonight (and repeated…
Denver’s really starting to look and act like a big city. The traffic in town is getting worse by the day. There’s no place to park either downtown or in Cherry Creek. And we now have a Mark di Suvero sculpture, “Lao Tzu,” sited on Acoma Plaza at the Civic…
And now for some socially redeeming theater: Ojibwa Indian poet and playwright Tomson Highway’s poignant contemporary exploration of Native American life, The Rez Sisters, at the Ralph Waldo Emerson Center. Once in a while a play comes along that opens a window into another world–then moves through the window and…
Film critics used to grouse about how stage plays never really transfer well to the screen–at least until Kenneth Branagh started transforming Shakespeare into cinema. And yet a well-written play provides smart dialogue, even when the setting is too confined for the big screen. Far, far worse than turning a…
Benjamin Ross’s black comedy The Young Poisoner’s Handbook is a relentlessly nasty piece of goods that never hesitates to make a kind of existential antihero out of its protagonist–a brilliant, psychopathic fourteen-year-old who poisons his stepmother with stuff from his chemistry set and the local drugstore, gets caught, cons the…
After a suspiciously long abstention, Hollywood has finally deemed the death penalty an Important Issue once again. But the two current movies on the subject reveal the huge gap between the best minds of the “entertainment industry” and its low-rent hucksters. The good news: While redneck double murderer Sean Penn…
Thursday May 2 Just folks: Early mountain musicians of the southeastern United States improved upon traditional Scottish and Irish melodies armed with an arsenal of mandolins, guitars, dulcimers and autoharps. In the process, they created a completely indigenous musical strain–the forerunner to what we now know as bluegrass, folk and…
Unlike in many American cities, just about every tree, shrub, plant and vine in Denver has been planted and cared for by someone. As early as the 1880s, people were bringing blue spruce trees down from the mountains and planting them among the scrub bushes and prairie grasses, which are…
“Two planks and a passion” is how Christopher Selbie describes the kind of theater he believes in–theater that emphasizes the art of acting, the imagination of the actor, and the imagination of the viewer. Four years ago Selbie formed the Compass Theatre Company with a few friends and a measly…
The supposed intrigue in Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon is that it gives Western audiences a rare, sympathetic glimpse of contemporary Iran–a country and a society demonized here since the late ayatollah took those hostages and the evening news started showing demonstrators stomping on the American flag in the public…
That old growing-up-and-moving-out thing is the coldest of dead horses, and anyone who can actually shoot a little life into the carcass deserves a round of applause from kids of all ages in the balcony. Enter Matt Reeves, born on Long Island, raised in Santa Monica and a moviemaker since…
Thursday April 25 Triumph of the Will: The Arvada Center’s Music With a View series offers short and sweet concerts commingled with current gallery shows, a gentle combination well-suited to lovers of the arts. The series gets a few birds with one big rock tonight during a celebration of William…
Spring is here, and that can mean only one thing in the art world–you can’t find a parking space on gallery row in LoDo. When the Rockies take over Wazee Street, plenty of fans park at the two-hour meters that line the street. They can count on getting a parking…
We’ve had a lot of little devils hoofing it on the Denver boards recently–Beethoven ‘N’ Pierrot, Lucifer Tonite and the Jerry Lewis rendition of Damn Yankees have come and gone from local theaters since December. Beethoven’s devil was a sophisticated shape-shifter who never succeeded in seducing Beethoven into mediocrity. The…
