Sadly, No Reservations is not the big-screen adaptation of Anthony Bourdain’s snack-gulping, risk-taking Travel Channel show; you’ll find no monkey brains here, nor any attempts to party down in Beirut while Hezbollah and Israel blow each other to smithereens. This is just more of the same from the franchise factory…
The raciest thing I ever saw my mother do was read a brown-paper-covered Penguin edition of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover on the London Underground. She didn’t fool all the other passengers carrying similarly disguised copies, and though I was only twelve years old in that fall of 1960…
In the observation room of the spacecraft Icarus II, passengers sit on a bench in front of a large, rectangular screen displaying a view of what lies ahead. They gaze at the spectacle as you might marvel at special effects on some ostentatious plasma monitor. A seething orb of gas…
When a Hong Kong action flick comes into your grasp, what else can you expect but fast, awesome martial arts? Triad Election shattered that stereotype, making me feel like the asshole who speaks slowly and loudly to anyone who looks foreign, only to be answered with “I speak English, dumbass.”…
The American Landscape and Carny. Rule Gallery has typically presented single solos since landing in its new space several months ago, but this time, there are two different shows in that long and narrow sales room. The two work well together, though, as both are made up of photographs about…
Nothing if not appropriate for summer blockbuster season, Werner Herzog’s latest feature, based on his 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, offers a suitably fantastic tale of war, freedom and fortitude, set in the jungles of Indochina and featuring an immigrant lad who turns out to be just as…
I wanted to hate I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, truly I did. Two straight guys pretending to be gay (insert fiscal excuse here); been there, done that (insert all known variants on The Odd Couple here). Rampant homophobia hiding behind liberal pleas for tolerance — blech. And it’s…
Did John Waters sell out? Or did our ever-more-metrosexual age merely render him irrelevant? Certainly long before Hairspray took up residence on the Great White Way in 2002, Waters had abdicated his throne as America’s elder statesman of underground smut in favor of a more lucrative career as a neutered…
I sometimes wonder how frightening The Shining would be if the soundtrack were muted. How scary would Jack Nicholson be if he were lugging an ax around without the creepy screech of violins and cellos like constant nails on a chalkboard? How troubling would a little kid be if his…
Fang Lijun: Heads. China is definitely on the ascendancy internationally. Not only does the teeming economic powerhouse produce all the junk that can be found in a suburban Wal-Mart, but it’s also turning out important artists who have taken the contemporary scene in the U.S. and Europe by storm. Adam…
Red Dawn: Collector’s Edition (MGM) John Milius’s 1984 war pic was a mighty bonkers release even back then; not since the 1950s had something come down the pike so rife with Commie paranoia. Russian and Cuban forces invade the U.S. with tanks and choppers and the whole shebang, only to…
Conveyer of ecstatic truths and filmmaker extraordinaire Werner Herzog’s latest is Rescue Dawn, an action-drama based on U.S. pilot Dieter Dengler’s harrowing survival struggle after being shot down over Laos during the Vietnam War. Herzog sat down to discuss the film. When was the last time you saw Dengler? Shortly…
Christian Bale is an actor who may be as well known for what he does to his body as he is for his body of work. He’s done extreme things to that body in the name of art. Turning it as hard and sharp as an ice pick for American…
The magic has returned to the Harry Potter franchise — albeit magic of the old, black variety. The darkest and most threatening by far of the five Potter films, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is also the only series entry outside of the third, Alfonso Cuarón’s Harry…
George Ratliff’s Joshua debuted at the Sundance Film Festival to raves from a particular breed of audience member: parents. Because, see, no matter how hard Fox Searchlight is trying to sell this movie as a horror picture — Rosemary’s Baby meets The Omen on the way to The Exorcist’s for…
The great thing about Thailand’s 2006 martial arts thriller, Kon fai bin — or Dynamite Warrior — is that it takes as much from American cinema as it does from Hong Kong. Besides being vaguely modeled after a high-noon Western flick, it also follows the American tradition of filling in…
Fang Lijun: Heads. China is definitely on the ascendancy internationally. Not only does the teeming economic powerhouse produce all the junk that can be found in a suburban Wal-Mart, but it’s also turning out important artists who have taken the contemporary scene in the U.S. and Europe by storm. Adam…
You’re Gonna Miss Me(Palm) A hit at the South by Southwest Film Festival two years ago, Keven McAlester’s doc about the Papa of Psychedelia, Roky Erickson, at long last gets its proper release. But time has done McAlester a tremendous favor: Had he shot the film too soon, he would…
Transformers twiddles its big, fat, stupid robotic thumbs for the better part of two hours before jabbing them into your eye socket and finger-fucking your brain in the last twenty minutes. Yes! It’s torture enough waiting for the iPhone and the second coming of Jesus without wondering when, exactly, this…
Upon finding out that The Private Life of Henry VIII was made in 1933, my roommate’s first reaction was “Dude, this is gonna suck.” I had higher hopes, thinking it would be kitschy, maybe, or at least slightly amusing because of the historical context. But good, probably not. How could…
Gary Lynch. The Emmanuel Gallery, in association with the Colorado Photographic Arts Center, presents Gary Lynch: A Memorial Retrospective. Lynch, a Denver native who was born in 1953, died unexpectedly in the fall of 2005. A well-known fine-art photographer who served on the board of CPAC, Lynch took up the…
Black Snake Moan (Paramount) The best place to see Craig Brewer’s mash-up of blood-boiling exploitation elements would be a Mississippi drive-in circa 1972. His tale of a black bluesman (Samuel L. Jackson) who chains up a seething, scantily clad cracker nympho (Christina Ricci) would’ve had the lot under martial law…
