This is a strange time for Hollywood to revive newspaper movies. Despite their obvious saintliness, reporters rank just north of lawyers and child molesters on the nation’s current list of heroes–and I’m not talking here only of the “Elvis Shot JFK” brand of journalism. These days, the public–and the White…
Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, the Italian brothers who co-directed flinty, passionate films like Padre Padrone and The Night of Shooting Stars in the late Seventies and early Eighties, probably haven’t gone soft in the head. But Fiorile, which traces the legend of a family curse through two centuries of domestic…
Wednesday March 30 Three for the stage: You can always count on the US West TheatreFest for an interesting time–the annual series that puts new works by unknown playwrights on stage at the Denver Center for Performing Arts is dedicated to variety and innovation in the theater arts. This year’s…
If one word can sum up something as complex as Asian art, that word is “tradition.” The strictly observed methods of mixing and applying ink, the narrow range of acceptable subjects (trees, pagodas, mountains, birds), the consistently diagonal composition–all are painstakingly repeated by generation after generation of artists. But even…
Turning Nathaniel Hawthorne’s brilliant novel The Scarlet Letter into a contemporary drama is a doomed proposition. Phyllis Nagy’s torturous attempt, now playing at the Denver Center Theatre Company, is so full of error, so misguided, so utterly banal a reading of a great work of art, one can only wonder…
The idea for Twenty Bucks probably came from Max Ophuls’s sparkling 1950 comedy La Ronde, but its prickly sensibility is pure 1990s. Rather than chase the flame of love, as Ophuls did, first-time director Keva Rosenfeld follows a pivotal twenty-dollar bill from person to person to person, with amusing results…
The youngish filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen might do well to come out into the light once in a while. As it is, their parochial, stubbornly adolescent view of life seems thrown together entirely from the bits and pieces of the old movies floating around in their heads, cemented by…
In Barry Levinson’s Jimmy Hollywood, an unemployed actor finally gets his shot at five minutes of TV fame by casting himself as a real-life anticrime vigilante. Sound familiar? Hero at Large, a lukewarm 1980 comedy with John Ritter, played the same hand. The feisty protagonist this time around is Joe…
Wednesday March 23 Stepping lightly: It’s a fine night for dance connoisseurs–with performances in the inner city by the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble and across town at the Arvada Center by the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre. Robinson presents her annual spring concert at 119 Park Ave. W., beginning tonight at…
Daniel Sprick, master oil painter and key contributor to the annual Artists of America exhibition, conquers–and transcends–the stereotypes of that bastion of mainstream representational art. His exquisite but unsettling paintings are on display at Carol Siple Gallery through April 9. Sprick’s soulfully exact portrayals of quiet rooms filled with ordinary…
We all suffer, some more than others, some horribly. But we all suffer. And though drama is almost always about suffering, it seldom reminds us to consider the man on the street, the woman next to us in the theater, much less what we may do to help each other…
Like most soap operas, Claude Miller’s The Accompanist covers familiar ground. It is the winter of 1942-1943. The Nazis occupy Paris. And the ethical tug-of-war between the French Resistance fighters and the Vichy collaborationists is taking on ever darker tones. Still, director Miller wants us to believe that the problems…
You’ll never take Lieutenant Frank Drebin, the bumbling flatfoot of the Naked Gun movies, for one of the major thinkers of the twentieth century. Combining the cold solemnity of Joe Friday with the ineptitude of Inspector Clouseau, he scatters dumb non sequiturs like confetti in the streets of Los Angeles,…
Wednesday March 16 A great Dane: He’s not only funny and a fine pianist–entertainer Victor Borge is also a tireless humanitarian. This sly gentleman of the arts, who defines the oboe as “a cockney tramp” and bagatelle as “the lady speaks” and then breaks out into a virtuoso keyboard display…
The healing power of color provides a soothing tonic for gray March days. An extra-satisfying injection of curative hues highlights a CORE New Art Space show opening Thursday and featuring CORE co-op members Bari De Jaynes, Dean Habegger and Sandra Toland. Not all works were available for previewing, but if…
The first time I saw The Lion in Winter, it was the film version and it starred two larger-than-life movie stars–Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn. At the time, the story seemed irritatingly antihistorical–ascribing, as it did, contemporary attitudes to heroes of an entirely different culture and time. I dismissed it…
For the oglers in the crowd, the attraction of John Duigan’s Sirens will be the movie debut of statuesque swimsuit model Elle MacPherson–sans swimsuit. For everyone else, there is no attraction, unless it comes as news to you that a straitlaced Anglican priest of the 1930s and his prim wife…
Well-heeled suburbia on Christmas Eve is not the most dangerous venue on the planet, but in The Ref it becomes “the fifth circle of hell” for a brainy burglar on the lam. Ted Demme’s bawdy domestic comedy fairly shouts “high concept,” and there’s no point in arguing with witty writers…
Shirley MacLaine may believe she was Dolly Madison or Mary Todd Lincoln in a previous life, but right now her only shot at First Ladyhood comes in a hot-and-cold comedy called Guarding Tess. The widow of a beloved president, Tess Carlisle is regarded by all America as a living monument…
Wednesday March 9 Instrumental to the case: A glance at the career of English guitarist Andy Summers will always include a big checkmark by the Police–the pop trio in which he made his name. But the talented Summers has long abandoned the simple formulas that worked so well for that…
Thirty years after her death, Marilyn Monroe’s legendary image retains its fascination and allure. Marilyn in her many guises embodies all aspects of The Goddess–virgin, whore, would-be mother, muse, crone. She symbolizes postwar America, fun and glamour, woman as sex object and vessel–and woman as exploited, abused victim. The arc…
We still pay for the Vietnam War. Tracers, now playing at the Theatre on Broadway, gives us another window onto that experience. A collaborative effort written by John DiFusco and seven other vets, the play is part group therapy, part high drama and part history lesson. The story takes seven…
