You don’t always get what you pay for. As everyone knows by now, Waterworld is the most expensive movie ever made. Fierce Pacific thunderstorms, logistical nightmares, a nasty feud between director and star, the star’s insistence that scenes be reshot because he didn’t like the way his hair looked–such were…
Wednesday July 26 Moonlight serenade: Get out your shoulder pads, girls–Larimer Square will be transformed this evening into a wartime dancehall, with help from the still-rollicking Glenn Miller Big Band Orchestra. Although bandleader Miller perished more than fifty years ago, his spirit continues to jitterbug into the Nineties as the…
Abstract expressionism is the bane of the uninitiated. Paintings of this type have no discernable subject and typically look sloppy, covered with scribbles, drips and scratches. They’re the kind of thing people are talking about when they say “My kid could do that.” But to artists, the problem of creating…
A major event in the local art world of the 1980s was the “21 Year Show,” presented eleven years ago at the now-defunct Progresso Gallery. It displayed the works of a group of local artists 21 years after they came together at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Now comes…
Musicals tend to be shallow, sentimental fun–a day in the park. But once in a while, one rolls along that actually has a little something to say. Three musicals now on the boards in Denver offer something beyond a quick escape, rousing tunes and slick performances: a trace of social…
It has taken a week or two to catch up with an exceptional children’s movie called The Indian in the Cupboard, and the wait was worthwhile. The director is Muppet-meister Frank Oz, the screenplay is by Melissa Mathison, who wrote the family blockbusters E.T. the Extraterrestrial and The Black Stallion,…
For Westerners, at least, the events leading up to the Tiananmen Square massacre are symbolized by the image of a lone, nameless Chinese student standing in the path of a huge army tank on a street in Beijing. Played and replayed on the evening news, these few seconds of blurry…
Wednesday July 19 Take a bike: In just a few short years, Denver Bike Week has been expanded to Denver Bike Month, offering fun incentives to cyclists throughout July. But the event’s centerpiece is still today’s Bike to Work Day, when all you suits can pedal downtown, grab a free…
In recent years, Loveland has acquired a national reputation as the place where romantics and cornballs send their Valentine’s Day cards to be canceled with a “Love-Land” postmark at the local post office (which, by the way, features some charming WPA murals by Russell Sherman). Perhaps it’s this saccharine sentimentality…
The Colorado Shakespeare Festival has been around a long time, but though a lot of people support the noble cause, many more do not. There are just too many agonies associated with attendance at CSF. Every year, those of us who do show up try to forget the grotesque discomfort…
For more than half a century, the Spanish filmmaker Luis Bunuel stood in splendid isolation from his peers. Social subversive, incessant joker and deep thinker, he took it upon himself to lambaste some of the world’s most cherished institutions–notably the Roman Catholic Church, middle-class morality and vintage political correctness–without regard…
James Gray, the 25-year-old writer/director of Little Odessa, seems to be aiming higher than most of his fellow film-school graduates. Gray’s dark and bloody family melodrama, which is set in the Rus-sian-American neighborhood of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, aspires to both Greek tragedy and Shakespearean weightiness, and while his efforts sometimes…
Wednesday July 12 Designing children: The Denver Department of Parks and Recreation wants the city’s junior swingers to come out and tell it how to build a new playground at Gates Crescent Park, adjacent to the Children’s Museum along the Platte River Greenway. Kids ages five to twelve and their…
Few artists in this country have achieved the kind of fame that Georgia O’Keeffe has. Her life and work are, without exaggeration, the stuff of legend. But there’s been a downside to O’Keeffe’s celebrity. Some of her most famous paintings have become trivialized through excessive reproduction, especially in the form…
Cult classic The Rocky Horror Show is just so Seventies. It must have seemed fiendishly outrageous when it came out in London in 1973 (the movie version, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, was released in 1975)–so new, so outlaw, so wild. Well, it’s still wild, but it now seems kind…
The movies did it better. “Women’s pictures” such as All About Eve, The Women and even The Bad Seed, for all their melodramatic silliness, at least presented complex and interesting female characters. But Ruthless! The Musical, which is supposed to be a sendup of those Hollywood classics, is about as…
Clearly, the Art Cinematic has made great strides since the days when extraterrestrial invaders were all huge, featureless carcasses encased in blocks of ice, or spiders blown up to beach-umbrella size by atomic radiation. In the name of progress, the killer alien in Species is a gorgeous blonde (former model…
The absorbing drama Red Firecracker, Green Firecracker is set on a family estate and in a bustling northern Chinese river town at the end of the Ching Dynasty. These are the years leading up to the 1911 revolution, and director He Ping squeezes every bit of dialectic he can find…
Wednesday July 5 Words is out: Who needs ’em when strong visuals spell out the story so well? Alfred Hitchcock’s silent film The Lodger is a case in point. The 1926 thriller, about a landlady convinced her tenant is Jack the Ripper, contains stunning special effects (at least for the…
The black-and-white photos of Don Donaghy are often out of focus, overexposed and underlighted, so it’s no surprise to learn that Donaghy has never used a light meter. But as Photographs From the Street, a retrospective of Donaghy’s 1960s work now at the Grant Gallery, makes clear, a disregard for…
Two million Jews and tens of thousands of other prisoners were tortured and killed at Auschwitz. Because the numbers are so staggering, it is excruciatingly difficult to absorb the fact that each of those millions died an individual death, that each was murdered and that for each murder, there was…
Robert Dubac is so lively, witty and inventive, it’s easy to forgive the mild chauvinism that runs through his riotous one-man show at the Vogue Theatre, The Male Intellect (An Oxymoron). With a title like this one, you might suppose the writer/actor would spend the evening male-bashing–and, indeed, there are…
