Did you know that when we use a Google search engine, scan Twitter feeds or compulsively reach for our smart-phones, we’re actually engaging evolutionary tools that have been with us for tens of thousands of years? And while these tools have aided our species survival, author Nicholas Carr argues that…
The nominees for Powder Magazine’s 2013 Powder Awards were announced last week, and Colorado film crews — including Denver-based Level 1 Productions, Boulder-based Stept Productions, and Crested Butte-based Matchstick Productions (MSP Films) and Two Plank Productions — are heavy in the mix in just about every category, including Movie of…
In 2012 Westword reported on the award-winning arty adventure films from the Carbondale-based collective of filmmakers known as Forge Motion Pictures nearly a dozen times — they just might be the hardest working film team in Colorado — and the crew is kicking off 2013 with a splash: over the…
When the words “true story” appear twice in a film’s opening disclaimer, it’s a guarantee that what follows will include at least one questionable fiction. The Impossible is inspired by the Alvarez Belons, a Spanish family of five who survived the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that claimed almost 300,000 lives;…
Rock and roll proves the coming-of-age crucible in Not Fade Away, Sopranos creator David Chase’s semi-autobiographical feature debut of shaggy hair, shagadelic beauties, and the joy and sorrow wrought from chasing, and failing to achieve, one’s dreams. Chase’s tale of showbiz striving has, in its basic form, been told before:…
“Like a lot of other stuff in my life, I sort of fell backwards into it,” says screenwriter Will Beall of his unexpected perch atop Hollywood’s A-list. Unexpected, because just five years ago, Beall was busy working for Tinseltown’s second-most famous employer, the Los Angeles Police Department, where he served…
David Chase looks like he wants to whack somebody. Not just anybody, mind you, but the middle-age guy with the bad dye job a few tables away from us in the Library Bar of the Regency Hotel. “Hiya!” bellows the dye job into his phone. “I’m sittin’ here watchin’ the…
For our New Year’s guide that was inserted in the issue of December 13, we asked thirteen of the town’s cultural tastemakers several questions — and the answers were entertaining, informative and, in many cases, enlightening. Although we posted their individual Q&As on Show and Tell last month, we’re doing…
On Saturday, Denver-based filmmaker Tristan Minton is premiering his new skateboard film H-DTS Mile High Alumni: Down to Skate at the BOPPO Warehouse at 4120 East Brighton Boulevard, Unit B13 ($5 at the door, screenings at 7 and 10 p.m.) The film stars Julian Christianson — a Westword Best of…
Jason Bosch won a MasterMind for his work with ArgusFest, showing important movies for trivial prices. And tonight, ArgusFest will be screening two more segments of Oliver Stone’s The Untold History of the United States. And as Bosch notes, “You don’t need to have seen the first parts to follow…
Salesmen are typically depicted in screen drama as the quintessential American phonies. That one set of phonies is being dramatically indicted by actors is an irony that we will leave hanging. Promised Land’s phony, played by Matt Damon, travels to small towns to sell the folks on fracking, the controversial…
Watching Django Unchained, it’s easy to imagine that Quentin Tarantino had such a blast making his last picture, the ebullient Holocaust fantasia Inglourious Basterds, that he decided to take his whole blood-spattered historical tent show on the road, this time putting down stakes in antebellum Dixieland. Although not technically a…
You can hear the people sing — really hear them — in the long-gestating screen version of that Broadway juggernaut Les Misérables. Countering the standard practice of having the actors in a film musical lip-synch their songs to pre-recorded tracks, director Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech) insisted that all of…
Most of the blathering this year about the death of film and film culture has already evaporated from the mind. But one gnomic pronouncement endures: Leos Carax describing cinema as “a beautiful island with a cemetery” following the world premiere of Holy Motors at Cannes. What are the contents of…
Quentin Tarantino has been Googling himself, and it’s starting to become a problem. The filmmaker, whose eighth feature, Django Unchained, opens on Christmas Day, is famously an analog evangelist: He writes his scripts in longhand; he bans cell phones from his sets and hasn’t owned one in years; he’s claimed…
Twenty years ago, Long Island teenager Amy Fisher became famous for shooting Mary Jo Buttafuoco — wife of her much older lover, Joey Buttafuoco — in the face. She served time in prison for the crime and has since attempted several media-attracting life reinventions as an author, porn star, Celebrity…
Eden Lane has hosted In Focus with Eden Lane, a weekly arts program on Colorado Public Television, since 2009, but unless she can raise $10,000 in the next six days, that program may go dark. “We’re only 25 percent of the way there,” Lane says. Media coverage of the arts…
Becoming van Gogh. Timothy Standring, the Denver Art Museum’s curator of painting and sculpture, is the brains behind the very compelling, very interesting and, most of all, very successful Becoming van Gogh, on display now. When we think of van Gogh, we are actually only thinking of the work of…
If you knew you were dying, and it was Halloween, your first impulse might not be to gather your whole estranged family together for one last night of spooky, costumed tomfoolery. Christmas is this whole other deal. From Michael Keaton’s dead dad in Jack Frost to Ed Asner’s dying father…
In his 2005 novel One Shot, writer Lee Child lays out nine rules for surviving a five-against-one alley fight, a challenge his hero, the ex-Army cop Jack Reacher, is about to face. These include “Be on your feet and ready.” “Identify the ringleader.” “Don’t break the furniture.” Rule number nine…
Sadly, country songwriters stand as nearly the only entertainers in our popular culture who craft memorable art on the subject of marriage, the state in which just fewer than half of Americans spend the majority of their lives. A few years back, Brad Paisley, one of Nashville’s best, wrote and…
More than ever, boiling this concluding year down to the 10 “best” movies feels both arbitrary and reductive. Ideally, I’d have 25 unnumbered slots. I’d cite another five, formally varied non-fiction films: Tchoupitoulas, Detropia, The Ambassador, Only the Young and How to Survive a Plague. And were I crafting this…
