Most sequels are born of good box office rather than good ideas – if you build it and they come, you simply must build another one – but it’s hard to imagine a more calculating, creatively bankrupt piece of real estate than The Hangover Part II. Trade out Las Vegas…
A U.N. premiere! A Vanessa Redgrave cameo! Zionist hoodlums! Distributors the Weinstein Company and director Julian Schnabel overcome their well-documented aversion to media attention to address the Israel-Palestine question, pleading peace, compromise and the creation of a self-governing Palestinian state. While Jewish advocacy groups swarm to Schnabel’s bait, it bears…
Alex Cox, who wrote and directed cult favorites like Repo Man and Sid & Nancy, is joining CU-Boulder’s film studies faculty this fall and will teach screenwriting and film production, as the Daily Camera reported. Cox, who grew up England, studied film at UCLA, then lived in Mexico and Spain…
Oprah is returning to her home planet this week. Or she’s leaving daytime television. Or something like that. Everybody loves Oprah. Even if they’ve never seen her television program, they know Oprah is “truth.” She’s solid, she’s the bridge between different cultures and the essence of what it means to…
Even though it’s been shitty and cold and raining for approximately nine weeks now and it doesn’t feel like summer at all, it’s still late May, and that means that it’s time for the ceremonial rolling out of the summer blockbusters — so avast, because even more ridiculousness than at…
Johnny Depp gotta eat. And pay his mortgage. And Disney pays very well. Maybe that explains why he looks so thoroughly bored in the new Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, opening tomorrow. Captain Jack Sparrow was endearing because he felt, in many ways, like Depp’s id run amok…
SORP Films wants to share a story with you, but they need your help. You see, they’ve got this great tale of a mutated nurse looking for revenge, but they’re a little short on funds, so they’ve turned to Kickstarter for a little help. If you’re wary of donating to…
This week, Mountainfilm in Telluride promoters released the full program for the 32nd annual festival (May 25-30). Since there are more than 70 films on the schedule, we caught up with Mountainfilm’s program director Emily Long to bring you a sneak peek at some of this year’s most hotly anticipated…
What with Tobey Maguire all sincerely pining for Mary Jane and the (admittedly badass) spectacle of CGI overload in the new Spider-Man movies, we occasionally long for the good old days, the days when Spider-Man was shittily drawn and was sort of a dick. Well, that second part isn’t necessarily…
Come Saturday, Colorado’s poised to have more incoming messiahs than anybody ever asked for, including the evangelicals; besides being the scheduled day of Jesus’ second coming according to Biblical number-cruncher Harold Camping, it’s also the day Bono comes to Denver with U2 for a show at Invesco Field — all…
15 Colorado Artists. The Kirkland Museum is presenting a historical show that tracks the beginnings of post-war modernism in Denver using the artist group 15 Colorado Artists as an index. The story goes that the Denver Artists Guild was hostile to modernism at the time. This led to a split,…
Pick a reason to balk at this spot-on, garishly threadbare paean to ’80s no-budget sleaze: It apes a genre that was already creaky when its director/co-writer, Jason Eisener, was still in nappies; it’s nauseatingly violent; it began life (and arguably should’ve finished it) as a mock trailer for faux-grindhouse gazillionaires…
After sinking into self-important tedium with its prior two overstuffed installments, Pirates of the Caribbean seemed destined for burial at sea. And yet the soggy franchise and Johnny Depp’s foppish rapscallion return again for On Stranger Tides — to search for the fountain of youth, no less, a quest that…
An earnest, intermittently droll dramedy about a manic-depressive toy manufacturer and his bewildered family, The Beaver is a parable that’s not easily parsed. While director Jodie Foster fails to maintain a consistent tone — could there be such a thing as inspirational satire? — the movie’s lopsided wobble is undeniably…
Judging by this weekend’s Facebook frenzy over the Denver Film Society’s “Bargain Bin” film selection of picks for the 2011 season of Film on the Rocks, there is just no fucking with moviegoers. On Saturday night, Karla Rodriquez, Director of Social Media for the organization and its summer program, dropped…
After watching Drew Barrymore’s Whip It with her daughters two years ago, Robin Bond — the Denver-based filmmaker behind the new documentary Derby Baby — set out to chase down some roller derby dreams of her own. She didn’t get very far. “I’m fairly athletic, and had started skating a…
OMG like how hot are vampires right now? So hot, is how hot they are right now, but as everyone knows, Dracula is pretty much played out and the whole vampires-as-sexy-brooding-potential-lovers thing is already taken — what we need is a new angle on vampires. So let’s see… how about…
We miss Saturday mornings sometimes, when we would run downstairs filled with sugary cereal and spend the day watching cartoons and “educational programming.” Even though these days we’re well aware of the alphabet (some of us, at least — mostly those that don’t comment articles on the internet) and the…
Yogi Berra: the man, the baseball legend and the quote machine. Over the course of his life, Berra — born Lawrence Peter Berra on this very day in 1925 — has come up with countless expressions and sayings, golden nuggets in the English vernacular that are still quoted today in…
15 Colorado Artists. The Kirkland Museum is presenting a historical show that tracks the beginnings of post-war modernism in Denver using the artist group 15 Colorado Artists as an index. The story goes that the Denver Artists Guild was hostile to modernism at the time. This led to a split,…
“The circus is tough and beautiful,” says a talking head in Circo, Aaron Schock’s documentary on the small, struggling, family-owned Circo Mexico. It’s an apt description of the film itself, a riveting patchwork of interconnected dramas that include difficult in-laws, arguments about money and familial exploitation, and the wrenching tensions…
Bridesmaids is a high-profile test case. Directed by Paul Feig (a sitcom journeyman most lovingly known as the creator of Freaks and Geeks), it’s the first female-fronted comedy produced by Hollywood kingpin Judd Apatow, who has weathered criticism in the past for his brand’s dude-centric point of view. It’s also…
