The raunchy cult favorite Unholy Rollers (1972) features gorgeous Playboy Playmate Claudia Jennings as the rebellious star of a Roller Derby team that’s amply stocked with resentful teammates and bitter rivalries. The heroine’s good looks and singleminded pursuit of fame make her a target at every game, and it isn’t…
Denver’s Pictorial Photographer. The Colorado Photographic Art Center no longer has a permanent home, but it’s still going. The group has held on to its impressive permanent collection, which is where the material for Denver’s Pictorial Photographer at Gallery Roach comes from. The title refers to R. Ewing Stiffler’s work…
The Mel Brooks Collection (Fox) Talk about taking the good with the bad; how else to describe a boxed set containing Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein (Brooks’ silly masterpieces), and Robin Hood: Men in Tights and History of the World, Part 1 (both overrated, even by people who can’t stand…
You want an easy job, go join the Red Cross,” someone says well into Thank You for Smoking, a gleeful farce about capitalist mendacity based on Christopher Buckley’s 1994 bestseller. The implication, made drummingly plain in the film’s every bon mot, is that our ethical barometers skew lazily toward goodness,…
We all want to believe that in even the most dangerous or frightening of situations, we would have the courage to stand up for our convictions — that we would not name names, that we would not betray our friends or our ideals. Thank God most of us will never…
We are in the middle of a B-movie renaissance, if you haven’t noticed. For years now, the politics of the multiplex have forced films to be either big-budget, Burger King-cup blockbusters or tiny “indie” projects about college-educated Caucasians with emotional problems (and viewed by college-educated Caucasians with emotional problems). But…
Balletomanes are bound to adore Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine’s lavish documentary Ballets Russes (2005), which recalls the glory days of that legendary emigré dance troupe through rare footage of its opulent performances and interviews drawn from a 2000 reunion of its surviving stars, most of them in their eighties…
Building Outside the Box. With the Denver Art Museum’s outlandish Hamilton Building by Daniel Libeskind taking shape at West 13th Avenue and Acoma Plaza, there’s a lot going on outside the place. Inside the gorgeous Gio Ponti tower, it’s a different story. Up until the opening of the Hamilton next…
Wonder Showzen: Season One (MTV) On the surface, the way this MTV2 puppetfest explores adult concepts through a kiddie-show format seems fresh as a Nantucket limerick. But Wonder Showzen’s execution is so bold and frankly hilarious that it feels wholly new. Whether it’s exploring diversity with a forbidden homosexual love…
According to the posters for V for Vendetta, the film is “an uncompromising vision of the future from the creators of The Matrix trilogy.” Uncompromising? It simply isn’t possible to translate Alan Moore’s multi-layered comic-book masterpiece into a two-hour movie without making cuts that oversimplify; and it’s certainly not feasible…
John Fante’s novel Ask the Dust, published in 1939 and all but forgotten till its 1980 reissue with a Charles Bukowski foreword, is very much a work of thinly veiled autobiography; only the names have been changed to protect the guilty. Its protagonist, a struggling writer named Arturo Bandini, shared…
It should be too early in the year to expect a good movie, yet here it is, the first — dare we use the term that’s been all but stripped of meaning by journalistic hacks — masterpiece of 2006. And from the director of 9 Songs, last year’s sex ‘n’…
So wait. It’s a movie about the longest criminal trial in U.S. history, it’s directed by the legendary Sidney Lumet, and it stars…Vin Diesel in a wig? In a role originally intended for Joe Pesci? Can Lumet be serious? Actually, no. The characters may be based on real people, with…
It can’t be easy making films about war. It’s so inherently dramatic that, as a setting for art, it’s overdetermined; it drips with meaning even before the first scenes are set. And so much has been said already: War is hell. War is noble. War is surreal. War is absurd,…
Hollywood’s a sucker for cross-dressing. When the American Film Institute chose the 100 greatest comedies of all time, a pair of drag films — Some Like It Hot and Tootsie — earned the top two slots. From Operation Petticoat to White Chicks, slapping falsies on a dude is the fast…
Get out the whetstone and the blade, kids. Two of the most extreme Japanese samurai movies ever made are headed (or beheaded) for Boulder this weekend. Kihachi Okamoto’s Sword of Doom (1966) stars the brooding Tatsuya Nakadai as a sociopathic swordsman bereft of scruple, compassion or code — a new…
Auditioning Gods, et al. Arvada Center curator Jerry Gilmore has organized a quartet of shows devoted to recent work by Colorado artists. In the lower galleries, Bryan Andrews presents Auditioning Gods, which continues the “fetem” sculpture series he’s been pursuing for years. These hand-carved wooden sculptures are an attempt to…
Through the Fire (Disney) He’s averaging just nine points in his second season for the Portland Trail Blazers, but considering where he came from and what he’s overcome, Sebastian Telfair is doing just fine, thank you. Jonathan Hock’s fascinating documentary takes us back to the young New York basketball legend’s…
It’s hard to imagine President Dwight D. Eisenhower shackled in a cage at Guantanamo Bay. But if Ike were around today to say what he said in 1961 in his famous farewell speech to the nation, the radical nationalists of the Bush administration would surely not take kindly to it…
If you plan to see The Libertine, an artful and brooding period piece about a scandalously debauched earl of the English Restoration, a few words of advice before you go: Take a peek at the sun; drink in some fresh air; consider bidding goodbye to the majority of the color…
A star who turned into a black hole somewhere between the release of, oh, The Wedding Planner and Sahara (or How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and Two for the Money — really, where to draw the line?), Matthew McConaughey is better known of late for shooting tequila…
Anyone who remembers the 1977 Wes Craven film The Hills Have Eyes, which was and remains a piece of Milwaukee-beer shit, remembers it because a) they had a memorable fuck-or-puke night at the aging neighborhood drive-in; b) Michael Berryman’s uniquely hairless mug, which glared from the video-store horror sections for…
