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…
New York Times chief film critic Manohla Dargis once said Phil Solomon “makes films that look like no others I’ve seen.” When asked to describe his own work, Solomon pensively characterizes it as “something like moving, poetic, musical paintings.” While we may never have a consensus on how to classify…
This past year has been tough for many people, and we’re eager to kiss 2012 goodbye. In hopes that 2013 will turn out to be much luckier for many, we invited some of the town’s cultural tastemakers — entrepreneurs and entertainers we’re lucky to have in Denver — to answer…
While some kids grow up following the antics of such superheroes as the Green Lantern and Wonder Woman, millennials in Denver with theater-savvy parents have grown up following tRUNks. Buntport Theater’s live serial comic book began in December 2005, presenting a show every other week focusing on its own universe…
The work of Everything is Terrible! is hard to describe.The easy way out is to note that it’s video collage, but that doesn’t begin to convey what this crew does with video. The videos themselves are dense, context-busting pastiches of pop culture and pure insanity. But as if that weren’t…
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…
Any Day Now is homo history repurposed as courtroom soap opera. Director Travis Fine, greatly embellishing a script written decades ago by George Arthur Bloom — who based it on a real-life, high-camp Brooklyn neighbor (played by Alan Cumming) and the mentally challenged kid he looked after — has virtuous…
Set some sixty years before the events depicted in LOTR, The Hobbit tells of another unassuming Shire-dweller’s grand mythopoeic adventure in the company of wizards, elves, and — this time around — a merry band of thirteen dwarfs. The hobbit in question is one Bilbo Baggins — uncle of Frodo…
It’s dispiriting that a film about the romantic life of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who cultivated a small coterie of mistresses, should exhibit so little interest in what so engaged its hero: the women’s individual hearts and minds. Instead, Hyde Park on Hudson quickly introduces us (and FDR) to the president’s…
The idea behind the VOICES Mobile Film Festival is simple: using only a mobile device for filming, shoot a one- to two-minute movie about a woman that inspires you. While editing software and external microphones, lighting and tripods are allowed, even encouraged, the content must come from a non-traditional movie…
The year 2012 was a big one for creeps — living, breathing, oozing, killing-Batman creeps. So we asked Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl to choose the year’s twenty baddest from the scores of contenders. Continue reading for his picks — a spoiler-free selection of this year’s spookiest screen villains…
Joel Haertling is one of Boulder’s more unusual fixtures: a globetrotting advocate for experimental film and music, over the years he’s worked with Stan Brakhage and toyed with noise as Architects Office, all while curating the Boulder Public Library’s free film series. See also: – Architect’s Office is a one-man…
