Wednesday October 26 Hollywood and race: Young African-American filmmakers may have recently carved a brilliant niche in the artistic life of the nation, but you might not know about their predecessors from the cinema’s earlier days. “Midnight Ramble,” tonight’s episode of PBS’s The American Experience, delves into the “race movies”…
She stares out of the canvas at the viewer–at nothing. She seems frozen in a moment of deep anxiety, preoccupied with her thoughts. Who is she? In a sense, she is the artist, for this is an intensely realistic self-portrait. But at the same time, this woman and the other…
The McCarthy era stunk. If you don’t believe that, be sure to catch Red Scare on Sunset at Industrial Arts Theatre. The satire by Charles Busch imitates the style of Red-scare films (I Married a Communist, et al.) that fed American paranoia during the Fifties. Ironically, these propaganda films were…
Mocking sacred cows is a venerable tradition in the arts, and as long as it’s done without any discernible taste (but with a good deal of wit), it satisfies our sense of the ridiculous without betraying original works. Remember Richard Armour’s Twisted Tales From Shakespeare? Like that perverse piece of…
Every time you start hoping Dr. Kevorkian will pay a house call on Woody Allen, the filmmaker miraculously returns to form and gets everybody laughing again. Witness Bullets Over Broadway, the third movie Allen has completed since The Troubles started. It’s a Runyonesque farce combining Roaring Twenties theater folk, potato-nosed…
Radioland Murders is the kind of dippy, overheated show-biz fantasy that besmirches the good name of slapstick. It doesn’t do much for the long-cherished romance of radio, either. The operative cliche here–and it operates overtime–is the oldest one of all: The show must go on. The time is 1939. The…
Wednesday October 19 Too many spooks: A fascinating footnote in U.S. history becomes a focal point in tonight’s segment of PBS’s The American Experience. Telegrams From the Dead explores an American movement obsessed with the notion of life after death. Known as Spiritualism, it has had a following that included…
Among the Denver area’s many opportunities for artists, the annual associateships at the Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute are unique, offering studio space, a stipend and a supportive atmosphere to a select group of visual and performing artists and writers. Originally designed to give women artists a place to work on…
Sometimes the dark is safer than the light. Sometimes a blind woman can “see” more clearly than those whose eyes have not dimmed. In Wait Until Dark, at the South Suburban Theatre Company, the heroine of the story is a young woman, recently blinded and still learning to maneuver around…
America loves its gangsters. Not the real ones, of course: We like our gangsters safely enshrined in the movies or on stage, and we like them to be Italian (one more outrageous prejudice). But while we admire the consummate movie godfather, Don Corleone, he’s still pretty scary; once in a…
The first (and maybe the last) thing anyone will want to know about The Specialist is that an hour and a half passes before Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone pretend to copulate in the shower. Until then, what they do is model expensive sunglasses down in Miami and talk on…
Bad scholarship, new-age fantasy and publishers’ avarice have collided to produce the current vogue for Nostradamus, the sixteenth-century French physician and astrologer who is said to have predicted everything from Nazi Germany to AIDS to the JFK assassination. What he didn’t predict is that a movie this awful would one…
Wednesday October 12 Favorite haunts: That black pall hanging over the city is a little bit eerie, but…not to worry. It happens every year as people begin to gear up for the ghoulish costume balls and general mayhem of Halloween. And in preparation, several haunted houses are opening their doors…
Rejecting journalistic photography while investigating the uncharted neighborhood of the unconscious, three artists turn reality-based images into weird worlds full of symbols and suggestion at Mackey Gallery this month. Although the exhibit’s photographs are in black-and-white, they all display dark-hued psychological effects. Phoenix artist Linda Ingraham starts with grainy photographs…
Perhaps it takes an Eastern European to bring the Theater of the Absurd into the present; after all, people in that part of the world have seen so much more pointless cruelty up close. Pavel M. Dobrusky appears to be qualified, and the Czech director’s new Star Fever at the…
Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is one of the great dream narratives of all time. There’s a lot of sense behind the nonsense verse and the bizarre behavior of all those whom Alice meets on her adventure. But then, the life of a dream has a logic of its own…
The career (if you can call it that) of Edward G. Wood Jr. has become the stuff of cult legend because the man is widely acknowledged as the worst movie director of all time. In his 1950s heyday, such as it was, even Hollywood’s lowest shlockmeisters wouldn’t hire him. If…
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…
