Stock Show season traditionally gives Denver galleries a yearly opportunity, if not a mandate, to showcase art of the West. Most of it stereotypically portrays the romantic ideals of cowboy life, often expertly mimicking work from the era of the Golden West, say, 1860-1920. Among the herd, The West as…
Of all Tennessee Williams’s sometimes brilliant but always anguished works, Suddenly Last Summer is the most difficult to produce. The structure of the play is so awkward and the horrors so thick that melodrama sneaks in unbidden at every turn. The first of two one-act plays included in a program…
The late Sam Peckinpah’s lively chase movie The Getaway is unlikely to catch The Wild Bunch or Major Dundee on the all-time Peckinpah hit parade. For one thing, the acting skills of ex-model Ali McGraw, who co-starred with Steve McQueen 22 years ago, will never be the stuff of cult…
Johnny, the sardonic young drifter at the center of Mike Leigh’s startling new film Naked, is a kind of serial killer, but he carries no gun, rope or knife. A street-tough British bloke from Manchester, he can be physically brutal with women, but he specializes in maiming his victims emotionally–by…
Wednesday February 9 That ode black magic: Even bohemians need love–and this Valentine week, the beatest hipsters around can celebrate romance in their own style, thanks to the Daily Perc Coffeehouse, an Aurora java joint at 9875 E. Colfax. The Perc, which normally hosts an open poetry reading every Wednesday…
While making a good likeness is the consummate goal to most representational artists, some insist that resemblance to the subject and its mood aren’t enough. Painting and sculpture at two LoDo galleries find profound meaning in the realistic depiction of ordinary things. At 1/1 Gallery, Jim Alford uses airbrush and…
It’s natural enough–a full-blown, new-age interpretation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But while the Denver Center Theatre Company’s rendering explores the fantastic quality of dreams, building a fabulous world full of rich, bright magic, it sometimes palls–like having to listen to a fundamentalist sermon when you hold different ideas…
In Peter Medak’s Romeo Is Bleeding, Sergeant Jack Grimaldi is a crooked New York cop firmly in the pocket of a Mafia don. He’s also cheating on his wife with a cocktail waitress, and when he’s assigned to hole up with a beautiful killer who’s turned state’s evidence, she seduces…
Given the gruesome effects of German mysticism on the twentieth century, it’s wise to regard any new form of it with suspicion. That includes the films of Wim Wenders, a thoroughly postwar German who seems to embrace both pacifist Euro-modernism and traditional Catholic theology. To be a German filmmaker in…
Wednesday February 2 Mambazo kings: The name is the first mystery, but it’s really very simple. Ladysmith refers to a South African township, black symbolizes the black ox, thought to be the strongest kind, and mambazo is an ax. Put that all together and you’ve got Ladysmith Black Mambazo, a…
Two new shows stretch the definition of the photograph as art while offering original and exciting visual experiences. Experimental Vision: The Evolution of the Photogram Since 1919, at the Denver Art Museum, tracks the long, fascinating history of cameraless photos, dubbed “photograms.” And Beyond Photography, at Emmanuel Gallery, skips past…
Caustic and brilliant, August Wilson nails down the realities of racism in his plays. They are as revealing, humane and in-your-face as they are graceful, funny and entertaining. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, at the Denver Center Theatre Company, is a masterful piece of theater, competently mounted and performed with moments…
The limousine liberals John Guare satirized in his Broadway hit Six Degrees of Separation are the same kind of New Yorkers Woody Allen seems so genuinely fond of…and so profoundly incapable of understanding. Installed in lavish Park Avenue apartments, these posers have a passing acquaintance with both intellectual fashions and…
John Madden’s Golden Gate, a romantic soap opera badly disguised as a fable of McCarthyite bigotry and good-guy guilt, features Matt Dillon as an eager-beaver FBI agent assigned to root out supposed communists in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1952, and Joan Chen as the beautiful daughter of an innocent Chinese…
Wednesday January 26 Childish pursuits: Author Jonathan Kellerman can say without reservation that it pays to write what you know. He used to be a practicing child psychologist, but now writes full time about the mystery adventures of fictional child psychologist Alex Delaware. Kellerman will be on hand for a…
When the theater “holds a mirror up to nature,” it’s not always a pretty sight. The nature reflected there is frail, cruel, stupid and cold as often as it is brave, kind, bright and sympathetic. But the reflection can order and analyze human experience, making it easier for us to…
The messages you get from the presidential campaign documentary The War Room are multiplying at an alarming rate. Clearly, the husband and wife team of D.A. Pennebaker (Don’t Look Back, Monterey Pop) and Chris Hegedus meant it as a valentine to the efforts of candidate Bill Clinton’s smart-mouthed chief handler,…
Director Michael Apted has range. He’s made two dozen films for British television, the political documentary Incident at Oglala and five installments of his continuing 7 Up series, which has followed a group of disparate children, at seven-year intervals, to adulthood. Apted has also ventured into Hollywood features–notably the 1980…
Wednesday January 19 Artists about town: As if Joshua Hassel hasn’t already done his share for the fine arts in Denver–running top-notch shows at his Arte Vitale Gallery and all–now he’s taking it to the TV screen with Object of My Desire, a half-hour magazine-format program about local art and…
Most Denver art cooperatives celebrate the turn of the year with big group shows of members’ work. These exhibitions provide both an opportunity to party and a way to assess the year’s achievements on the “alternative” scene, offering an infrequent overview of a co-op’s talent and diversity. Last year the…
In the theater it is possible to weigh arguments–to present two sides of a debate and let the audience come to its own conclusions. In the movies, and almost always on TV, what you usually get is propaganda. Occasionally, a great film will come along that is open-ended enough to…
Civil liberties remain in short supply for the beleaguered Catholics of Northern Ireland, but filmmaker Jim Sheridan has taken the liberty of vividly dramatizing one of the most notorious instances of recent British tyranny. Let’s hope Prime Minister John Major and Parliament are watching–red-faced and thoughtful. With a passion reminiscent…
