Bad-boy director Abel Ferrara loves to shock the squares. In his notorious slice of New York street life, Bad Lieutenant, he had corrupt cop Harvey Keitel snort cocaine off his little daughter’s First Communion photo and extort sex from a pair of scared teenage girls from Jersey. Ferrara jived up…
In the post-Babe era, can you make a live-action movie about animals and not have them talk to each other? For me, this is the deep philosophical question raised by Disney’s new 101 Dalmatians, a live-action remake of the studio’s 1961 animated feature–in which, by the way, the animals did…
Thursday November 21 Her A’s are numbered: The fans are getting anxious–alphabetical mystery novelist Sue Grafton is already up to the M’s. But you’ll have the chance to ask Grafton what happens after Z: The author, whose first book in the popular A-to-Z Kinsey Millhone detective series was inspired by…
Since the impressionists invented modernism nearly 150 years ago, relentless innovation has been the buzzword in contemporary painting. Newer has been better since at least the late nineteenth century, at which point new art trends started coming along one after another. Impressionism was eclipsed by post-impressionism, then by neo-impressionism, then…
Vulgar, irreverent and awash in cheap shots, Nunsense may be the silliest show in town. But despite its bad habits, this bit of fluff has one redeeming feature: The music is actually pretty darn good. Of course, it takes enormous energy to sell the songs here, which comment on everything…
Feminists are frequently accused of being humorless: “How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? One–and that isn’t funny.” But at least one troupe in town is proving there are laughs to be had among the little womyn. Unidentified Female Objects II: The Search Continues, at the…
Any filmmaker bold enough to set a romantic epic in the middle of the Sahara with war guns booming in the distance runs a pretty big risk–aside from getting all that sand in the Panaflex. For real movie lovers who’ve seen a few things, Casablanca and Lawrence of Arabia loom…
Assorted ecologists, armchair philosophers and meddlers have been wringing their hands in recent years over the nature of nature documentaries. Are the lives of various species disturbed by the filmmaking process? Do camera and microphone falsify? Does Homo sapiens have any business peering into the lion’s den or the spider’s…
In The Mirror Has Two Faces, Barbra Streisand plays Rose Morgan, a Columbia University Romantic Literature professor who endures a drab, romanceless life. She lives with her imperious, fault-finding mother, Hannah (Lauren Bacall)–a beautician, no less–and wards off the attentions of a nebbishy suitor (Austin Pendleton) while pining for the…
San Francisco isn’t just the setting of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: It’s the movie’s muse. Along with composer Bernard Herrmann, who transforms convoluted psychology into resounding lyricism, and co-star Kim Novak, whose pheromones and otherworldliness give body and soul to tortured romance, San Francisco enables Hitchcock to conjure a netherworld of…
Thursday November 14 Food for thought: A cornucopia of local writers–here, there and everywhere–is slated to take part in tonight’s Share Our Strength’s Writers Harvest: The National Reading, an annual large-scale literary benefit to fight hunger across America. In our area, related events are scheduled at the Tattered Cover LoDo…
Although Mary Mackey announced a couple of months ago that her namesake gallery on the city’s west side would close at the end of the year, it now appears the gallery will remain open at least into 1997. No such uncertainty, however, surrounds the life expectancy of two superb shows…
Think of Edvard Munch’s eerie painting “The Scream” and you get a pretty good idea of how Stephen Mallatratt’s play The Woman in Black affects an audience. Ad Hoc Theatre’s intense, ingenious production of Mallatratt’s ghost story is truly creepy. No monsters leap out at you, but the central figure…
From the beginning of Stephen Sondheim’s tragic musical romance Passion, we realize there’s something screwy about the notion of “love” promoted in this kinky tale. It’s a sort of Fatal Attraction meets Beauty and the Beast–but without the tidy ending of either of those popular works. Throughout the disappointing first…
The fussiest Shakespeare buff should find little to fault in Trevor Nunn’s gorgeous and playful adaptation of Twelfth Night. The most popular and oft-performed of the Bard’s comedies has sailed along for four centuries on the glories of mistaken identity, confused passion and matchless poetry, and Nunn does them all…
Ron Howard, the child actor turned movie director, has grossed a billion dollars exalting firemen and astronauts. There’s no surprise in that: A guy who spent most of his youth on the make-believe sets of The Andy Griffith Show and Happy Days has a better excuse than most people for…
Thursday November 7 Bearing gifts: Billy Bryan, the first tenant at the Denver Zoo, had a luxuriant, cinnamon fur coat and was named after William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic presidential candidate of a hundred years ago. Billy, it seems, was a bear–one in a long line of popular ursines that…
Ignorance is bliss, but in Denver’s art world, it’s much more than that. These days it’s seen as being the best indicator of personal integrity. A good example of this can be found in the city’s approach to public art. In that arena, art disciples are outnumbered more than ten…
The most important thing Bruce Friel does in his latest play, Molly Sweeney, is expose the double-edged nature of so-called medical miracles. If he’d have thought more deeply about the subject, he might have made a genuine work of art. As it is, he has written an absorbing piece of…
Election season is fraught with rhetoric, innuendo, accusation and hyperbole. Facts are twisted, motives interpreted and failings magnified–each candidate spins his own image and spins the other guy’s, too. And this is the way it has always been in politics. CityStage Ensemble’s Dan Hiester recognizes spin-doctoring when he sees it,…
There are some pretty good reasons why it took 44 years for Truman Capote’s coming-of-age novel The Grass Harp to make its way to the movies. There are even better reasons why the movie’s on-again, off-again release schedule has meandered across most of the last nine months. First off, Capote’s…
Moviemakers are on one of their periodic Shakespeare binges, which is always good for the English language, if not necessarily for the advancement of the cinematic arts. Last year we got a radical Richard III, with powerful Ian McKellen reinterpreting the treacherous brute as a 1930s fascist, along with a…
