Don Imus’s hateful, racist 2007 remarks about “nappy-headed hos” underscored the immense fear of, and fascination with, the hair follicles of African-American women. Chris Rock, the host, co-writer, and co-producer of first-time director Jeff Stilson’s Good Hair, never mentions Imus’s outburst; his interest in the political, social and sexual entanglements…
Like the ominous fingernail moon early on in Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, the bloodsucker trend is again in a waxing phase thanks to the mass cult followings of the Twilight saga and HBO’s True Blood. However, the only authentic vampires in this first (and, I can all but…
Another one for the bad-stuff-happens-to-stupid-people file, The Canyon might at least offer the satisfaction of a few squirmy thrills if it weren’t so insistent on treating its central couple’s plight as the stuff of high tragedy. When newlyweds Nick (Eion Bailey) and Lori (Yvonne Strahovski) find their dream of riding…
Anna Kaye. The conceptual framework that underlies the drawings and watercolors that make up the handsome if small Apparition: works on paper by Anna Kaye is the effect of forest fires. Toward that end, Kaye captures the forest by employing a high level of drafting that make her drawings seem…
Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. Why? Because it’s thick with sludge. Moving briskly through a stranger-than-fiction, serpentine narrative that is still unfolding, Joe Berlinger’s remarkable documentary Crude recounts an infuriating litany of South American exploitation, back-room glad-handing and bureaucratic dead ends that has, among other collateral…
Directed by Spike Jonze from a 400-word children’s picture book first published in 1963, Where the Wild Things Are may be the toughest adaptation since Tim Burton fashioned Mars Attacks! from a series of bubble-gum cards. Tougher, actually: Burton was working with ephemeral, anonymous trash; Jonze is elaborating on a…
The Yiddish shtetl shtick that opens Joel and Ethan Coen’s new movie — a Jewish peasant stumbles on an old Hasid who may or may not be a dybbuk — is pretty clumsy, but at least it tips its hat to the great existential comedy that A Serious Man might…
Al Wynne. Al Wynne is one of the greatest artists to have ever worked in Colorado, and his accomplishments rank right up there with those of acknowledged masters such as Vance Kirkland and Herbert Bayer. And Black Forest Magic: Paintings & Sculpture by Al Wynne proves it. The Colorado native’s…
What’s remarkable about Still Walking, Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s seventh feature film and one every bit as sensitive as his previous triumphs After Life (1998) and Nobody Knows (2004), is that the familiar comes across as fresh. Despite recycling potential clichés — the grouchy elderly father, the disenfranchised second son — Kore-eda imbues the story…
Al Wynne. Al Wynne is one of the greatest artists to have ever worked in Colorado, and his accomplishments rank right up there with those of acknowledged masters such as Vance Kirkland and Herbert Bayer. And Black Forest Magic: Paintings & Sculpture by Al Wynne proves it. The Colorado native’s…
Most movies dealing with terrorism these days treat it as fundamentalist insanity or societal cancer. In contrast, 1962’s Le Combat Dans L’ile turns the subject into, of all things, a complicating factor in a love triangle. The marriage of mood-swingy Anne (Romy Scheider) and rich kid Clément (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is…
The ushers at a packed screening of Michael Moore’s latest movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, came proudly decked out in T-shirts bearing slogans like “Make Love, Not Capitalism” and “Capitalism, We Have a Problem.” The shirts and the movie are brought to you by those filthy Reds: Overture Films, which…
Al Wynne. Al Wynne is one of the greatest artists to have ever worked in Colorado, and his accomplishments rank right up there with those of acknowledged masters such as Vance Kirkland and Herbert Bayer. And Black Forest Magic: Paintings & Sculpture by Al Wynne proves it. The Colorado native’s…
Like Memento, The Escapist, screening as part of the University of Colorado’s International Film Series, freshens what could have been a genre exercise by fiddling about with the overall structure. At its most basic level, director/co-writer Rupert Wyatt’s offering is a standard get-out-of-jail-and-be-free tale, in which a group of fairly…
Set in the bucolic suburbs of early nineteenth-century London, as fresh and dewy as a newly mowed lawn, Jane Campion’s Bright Star recounts the love affair between a tubercular young poet and the fashionable teenager next door. It’s more conventionally romantic than wildly Romantic — but no less touching for…
Currents. Traditional American Indian art is a well-established genre, and many Native American artists still practice the old forms of weaving, pottery-making, metalwork and basket-making. But there are also contemporary artists among the tribes, and this latter group is the focus of Currents: Native American Forces in Contemporary Art. The…
The title of 1950’s Rashomon is invoked whenever a filmmaker depicts the same event from multiple, often contradictory points of view. But despite having contributed a term to the cinematic lexicon, the movie itself is far from an academic exercise. Many of director Akira Kurosawa’s pictures boast epic running times:…
As evidenced by The Informant!, it’s a hell of a tricky thing turning real-life pulp into floss sugar. The story of Archer Daniels Midland biochemist-exec-turned-crooked-federal-snitch Mark Whitacre is a tragicomedy. Journalist Kurt Eichenwald spent five years trailing the bipolar fuckup, and his 2000 book, The Informant, is so densely, richly…
Currents. Traditional American Indian art is a well-established genre, and many Native American artists still practice the old forms of weaving, pottery-making, metalwork and basket-making. But there are also contemporary artists among the tribes, and this latter group is the focus of Currents: Native American Forces in Contemporary Art. The…
When, in the early ’00s, I worked as a freelancer for a publication two floors below Vogue — this was pre-Devil Wears Prada — each sighting of Anna Wintour, from no matter how great a distance, was terrifying enough to immobilize me for a few seconds, leading to a sweaty…
Sophie Barthes’s clever metaphysical comedy Cold Souls has been dubbed “Being Paul Giamatti” more than once since its Sundance 2009 debut. But if comparisons to the films of Charlie Kaufman are inevitable, the similarities go only so far. Sure, Paul Giamatti plays “Paul Giamatti,” another “real” actor unwittingly embroiled in…
Fort Collins’s three-day TriMedia Film Festival showcases a handful of movies featuring recognizable faces, including Trucker, co-starring Michelle Monaghan and Nathan Fillion, and Broken Hill, with Timothy Hutton. But the curators also serve up a potpourri of more obscure offerings that encourage, and frequently reward, cinematic spelunking. Documentaries include Blue…
