Last week, America received two embarrassing reminders of its doting but asexual love for the Nonthreatening Black Man (NTBM). First, professional cowboy-hat-wearer Brad Paisley and Kangol connoisseur LL Cool J unintentionally trolled the entire Internet with “Accidental Racist,” a country song that argues that access to necklaces today totally makes…
Rampaging through the otherwise arid desertscape of contemporary Italian cinema, Matteo Garrone doesn’t want for ambition; he may be the premier chronicler of Berlusconi-era Italian culture, and its most muscular satirist. (That is, when Italian society isn’t busy outpacing satire altogether.) Reality, his followup to 2008’s Gomorrah, begins with a…
At any prior point in TV history, Rectify, a six-part drama on the Sundance channel, would be a shake-up-the-medium astonishment: A sober, even stately investigation into a curious kind of afterlife, that of a death-row inmate given freedom twenty years after his conviction. For all the finely crafted mysteries of…
Denver’s animation scene gets a turn in the limelight when the Denver Animated Pixelshow comes to the Bug Theatre Thursday night. More than two hours of locally made animated shorts will be screened, with most of the filmmakers on hand to talk about their work and answer questions. And you’re…
The highly anticipated Mile High Social, Denver’s new reality show, is set to debut at 8 p.m. Friday with a watch party at Ghost Plate & Tap. The socially aware show’s first 7.5-minute episode (aptly titled “The Casting Call”) will feature a performance from The Epilogues and focus on the…
When filmmaker Alex Cox finished shooting Repo Man in 1983, the first thing he did with the left-over money was option the film rights to the science fiction novel Bill, the Galactic Hero. Now both projects are back in the spotlight. The Criterion Collection recently released a Blu-Ray edition of…
A common sentiment recurs throughout the abundance of eulogies and obituaries penned by film critics in the wake of his death late last week: Roger Ebert was an inspiration. It’s easy enough to be encouraged by another’s success—to regard an esteemed older colleague with a combination of admiration and envy—but…
Georgia O’Keeffe. Georgia O’Keeffe has been done to death — on greeting cards, calendars and posters. That’s why it’s easy to forget that in the first half of the twentieth century, she was one of America’s most significant early modernists. And with her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, she crusaded for the…
To the Wonder, Terrence Malick’s second movie in two years, is ridiculous, pretentious as hell, and in places laugh-out-loud funny. “Newborn. I open my eyes. I melt. Into the eternal night…” With dialogue like that, in voiceover and in French, who needs satire? But for all the absurdity, there’s also…
A likable hagiography as nuanced as a plaque at the Baseball Hall of Fame, Brian Helgeland’s Jackie Robinson bio 42 finds a politic solution to the challenge Quentin Tarantino faced last year with Django Unchained: how to craft a crowd-pleasing multiplex period piece whose villain is, essentially, “all white people.”…
Here’s what the five interviewees in Rodney Ascher’s Room 237 have come up with about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining: One believes that it’s an allegory about the genocide of Native Americans, another that it’s about the Holocaust. Yet another that it’s Kubrick’s coded confession to faking the moon landing. Ascher’s…
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is a film that inspires strong reactions, and people have been trying to pin down what it’s really about almost since the day it was released. With Room 237, first-time feature director Rodney Ascher has gone deeper down the rabbit hole than anyone before him, bringing…
If anyone still thinks that Mile High Social, the Denver-based reality show, will be just like all the other reality shows with their drama and negative focus, take a look at this latest teaser. In outtakes from the final callbacks, it’s clear that these are real women who are serious…
Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Littleton will host its first-ever Quote-Along tonight, and it’s chosen one of the most quotable films of all time to kick things off: The Big Lebowski. For those unfamiliar with the concept, a Quote-Along encourages the audience to recite the best lines of the film as it’s…
By Mad Men’s fifth season, Betty Draper had walked out of our lives, and a much plumper Betty Francis had waddled in. The audience response to this swollen version of a once-slender character: a collective cringe. Suddenly Betty became a joke. In no time, a parody of Ram Jam’s “Black…
Charles Partridge Adams. Rocky Mountain Majesty: The Paintings of Charles Partridge Adams highlights the career of a prominent turn-of-the-nineteenth-century impressionist who lived and worked in Colorado for decades. Adams first came to Colorado in 1876, when he was only eighteen years old. He was self-taught, but worked informally in Denver…
“It’s right out of a cheap melodrama,” one character remarks in From Up on Poppy Hill after a particularly extreme twist of fate — yet this film’s gentle storytelling manages to extract the emotional payoffs of melodrama without ruining one’s suspension of disbelief. A film about fathers and children, and…
Tattoo Nation documentarian Eric Schwartz isn’t inked himself — “I’m nicknamed ‘The Virgin,’ ” he admits — but when he started photographing tattoo conventions, he stumbled across an untold, half-century history of color and style inextricably linked to California. Unlike the permanent art they’ve created, these tattoo artists and their clients…
They do move in herds,” Sam Neill marvels, purportedly gazing at his director’s miracle dinosaurs but in reality directing his wonderment right into the camera — and right out at us, the viewers whose herdability made such smash successes of Jurassic Parks one and two. (Our failure to turn out…
The Place Beyond the Pines opens with a close-up of Ryan Gosling’s chiseled abdomen and heavy breathing on the soundtrack. Then, in a single, five-minute tracking shot, we follow Gosling’s character, Luke, across a fairground and into the tent where he and two other stunt motorcycle performers ride their bikes…
Soap operas are more wondrous and ridiculous than you may realize, especially if you’re under the misapprehension that soaps — especially daytime ones — revolve around nothing but steamy affairs, unplanned pregnancies and Maury-style DNA tests. In fact, we thought the same, until we started watching General Hospital to catch…
Four years ago, on assignment for The Comics Journal, I asked Robert Kirkman a tough question about his Walking Dead comic series, a question that now, after the TV adaptation’s third season finale, is still resonant: Why are all the strong female characters either crazy or dead? His response, from…
