For my money, the savage and savagely funny crime films of Quentin Tarantino are a welcome antidote not only to those witless action heroes who give off baby talk as they tear up the joint, but also to Hollywood’s current wave of sweetness, its creeping Gumpmania. Let the self-appointed morals…
Wednesday October 5 American flyers: Sometime between the early Seventies and today, Boston rockers Aerosmith rose from the status of fourteen-year-old boys’ cult favorites to their current berth as grand old band of the decade. Behind Steve Tyler’s fiery, acrobatic vocals and Joe Perry’s smart guitar work, the group’s arrangements…
The medium of printmaking still carries an Old World cachet–as well as equally exclusionary costs. The expenses involved in making a hand-pulled print on heavy paper puts the reproductive technique out of reach for many artists. To overcome this obstacle, some arts communities have worked to make printmaking facilities more…
Ever the sentimentalist, playwright Neil Simon nevertheless has a knack for recognizing the ordinary citizen as interesting. Despite his penchant for safe answers and shallow ideals, Simon still manages to build hilarious dialogue and create characters in whom we invest emotionally. He takes us all in, and most of us…
This autumn, baseball fans are getting too little World Series and too much Ken Burns. In all likelihood, the last thing the strike-stricken multitudes need right now is another gooey baseball movie that fields the usual lineup of sentimental caricatures. But that’s what The Scout is. Apparently, Hollywood hasn’t figured…
Until now, no one has mistaken the fine-featured, sublimely gifted actress Meryl Streep for a regular on American Gladiators. But in The River Wild, there’s not only muscle in Streep’s performance, there’s plenty of it on her frame, too. In this rip-roaring adventure, the beefed-up star can shoot a set…
Wednesday September 28 Back in action: In the real world, there are few things you can really count on to be pleasing all the time, but the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble has a way of dancing all over that theory. The group will put its trademark skill and elan…
After fifty years of disrupting the art world, the formerly disreputable style called abstract expressionism has achieved a kind of elder-statesman eminence. Paintings that once were the butt of endless I-don’t-know-much-about-art jokes now enrich museums and decorate corporate offices, hotels and movie sets. Unfortunately, all of this visibility hasn’t made…
When an ordinary bloke poses as a foreigner in a remote resort in Georgia, he becomes a magic mirror in which the good-hearted people around him see their better selves and watch their dreams of fulfillment unfold. The evil-hearted, on the other hand, are undone by what they see in…
It’s at the pinnacle of Western civilization, but King Lear is still, first and foremost, a ripping yarn. When a theater company pulls it off, the audience leaves thoroughly entertained and rich in wisdom. A new theater troupe has come to Denver, and the very first thing the Ad Hoc…
Boaz Yakin’s Fresh has its heart in the right place, but it takes a bewildering wrong turn. First, the acceptable news: Yakin again shows us the dangers and sorrows facing a good kid on the streets of the ghetto. Twelve-year-old Fresh (Sean Nelson) lives with his aunt and eleven cousins…
In the great scheme of evil–where the schemers always out-think the victims–the TV quiz-show scandals of the 1950s are minor infractions. In view of later events like Watergate, Iran-Contra or the O.J. Simpson case, we Americans can hardly be expected to get all worked up about a couple of TV…
Wednesday September 21 Meal ticket: Boulder’s favorite home and gourmet store (actually two stores) is throwing a four-day Peppercorn Anniversary Celebration, beginning today and continuing through Saturday. Each day will be loaded down with cooking demonstrations and myriad food tastings, with delicious wares from Colorado and around the world. Customers…
Given the current art-world trend to deconstruct every available style and medium, it was only a matter of time before the same turn-it-upside-down mania hit the furniture market. To fit postmodern strategy, the “new” furniture must look like it’s coming apart at the seams or defying gravity–as well as tradition–all…
We are all related to each other, separated by only six people–six degrees of separation. You may not think you have anything in common with a monk in Tibet, but if you could trace a path through the right six people, you’d find a direct connection. This intriguing, if dubious,…
It could have been, so easily, Cheez Whiz. But The Who’s Tommy, now playing at the Buell Theatre, has evolved into a brawny rock hymn to reconciliation. “See me, feel me, touch me, heal me” is not so much the solipsistic demand of invisible youth it originally was but rather…
Whenever moviegoers do time in prison–or the nuthouse–they almost always run across that one transcendent inmate who sets the others free with his soaring spirit. He may be called Cool Hand Luke or Randall Patrick McMurphy or Papillon, but he’s always the soul of liberty–and the bane of authority. He…
If you want to move up in the superhero pecking order, as Belgian hulk Jean-Claude Van Damme does, you’d better outslug Sly and outshoot Schwarzenegger. You must snap more necks than Steven Seagal, and just in case you hear Chuck Norris closing fast, it’s wise to keep your killer kicks…
Wednesday September 14 Tommy, can we see you? Yes, we can. Pete Townshend’s brilliant and durable rock opera, Tommy, transformed over the years from its beginnings as a concert vehicle for the Who (the piece has since been reincarnated as a smash recording, a classical recording, a ballet and a…
Spontaneity, politics and confrontation marked much of the street theater and performance art of the Sixties and Seventies. And like many artists who came of age in that free-swinging era, L.A.’s Glugio Gronk Nicadro was drawn to art that encouraged direct interaction with the viewer, literally off-the-wall art forms that…
David Mamet’s A Life in the Theatre, now playing at the Boulder Art Center, might be seen as an argument against a career in the theater–sort of a parent’s tool to persuade the aspiring actor in the family to go to law school or become a sanitation engineer. But since…
Beatle boys John and Paul each loved their mum–and they each lost her. That’s one of the key themes running through Lennon and McCartney: The Day They Met, a new work by Denver playwright Michael A. Miller now being performed at the Mercury Cafe. Miller implies that the common loss…
