Late in Rendition, in case you’ve been blind and deaf enough not to have cottoned to the drift, a tense Washington exchange on the legitimacy of bundling dark-skinned Americans off to secret prisons abroad takes place. On one side is a driven young senatorial aide (Peter Sarsgaard), on the other…
“Beautiful” and “cruel” — that’s how director Ang Lee describes Eileen Chang’s 1979 short story about obsessive love and effortless betrayal in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, a tale upon which Lee has based his epic-length Lust, Caution. Writing in the afterword to a recently republished version of the 54-page story, which took…
Love him or despise him, head Jackass Johnny Knoxville has made millions from getting kicked in the yambag. Had YouTube arrived before Jackass, Knoxville, Steve-O, and the show’s other gutterpunk masochists might still be slinging French fries, getting burned by hot grease in a strictly nonrecreational way. But with a…
Transformers(DreamWorks)No doubt, Michael Bay’s slam-bang action-figure commercial doesn’t play nearly as well on TV, no matter how high or high-def your screen; this demands to be seen on a screen the size of a skyscraper and heard on speakers as large as jet engines. So the first half-hour plays flat,…
AC/DC: Plug Me In (Sony) Bob the Builder: Ultimate Adventure Collection (Hit Entertainment) Bully 911: Stop Being a Victim (Bayview) Believers (Warner Bros.) Best Picture Collection (MGM)The Hoax (Miramax) Hollow Man: Director’s Cut (Sony) The Invisible (Disney) Ironside: Season 2 (Shout) The Jazz Singer: Three-Disc Deluxe Edition (Warner Bros.) The…
As I was going up the stairI met a man who wasn’t there.He wasn’t there again today.I wish, I wish he’d go away. Thom Pain (based on nothing) is a strange, hour-and-some-long monologue. It contains passages about both a sad little boy and a failed love affair, and some viewers…
My Old Lady begins like a clash-of-cultures comedy of manners, as Mathias Gold, a penniless, middle-aged American, enters the stylish Paris apartment he’s inherited from his father and discovers the apartment’s one drawback: Under a typically French agreement called a viager, the place comes with its previous owner, who is…
Defiance. The second play in a projected trilogy (the first is Doubt, which took the Pulitzer Prize and will be staged at the Denver Center in spring), Defiance examines the state of the U.S. Marine Corps in 1971, when the Vietnam War had lost all vestige of legitimacy for most…
The idea of creating contemporary art that refers back to traditional art while still breaking new ground is called conceptual realism. Though the movement embraces a range of expressions, what connects it all is recognizable imagery used to some kind of conceptual end, and often with a sarcastic, sardonic or…
Last weekend, during the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) convention in Denver, the Denver Art Museum announced the hiring of Darrin Alfred (pictured) to the newly created post of AIGA assistant curator of graphic design. He was introduced by DAM director Lewis Sharp and AIGA executive director Richard Grefé…
Artisans & Kings. For its first extravaganza of the season, the Denver Art Museum has unveiled a sprawling blockbuster in the Frederic C. Hamilton Building that focuses on the royal collections from the Louvre. You don’t have to know much about art to have heard of the Louvre, so Artisans…
When Pumpkin King Jack Skellington stumbles from Halloween Town to Christmas Land, no one — except, perhaps, his perceptive little friend Sally — can foresee the impending disaster that will arrive when Jack attempts to take over Christmas for a year. He gets the Halloween Townspeople to help create toys…
“Who doesn’t want to put on cowboy boots and swing around a couple of six-shooters?” asks director Geoffrey Kent about a new production of Macbeth that has undergone a downright do-over. An eighteen-member boots- and bridle-shuckin’ Colorado cast, led by William Hahn and Karen Slack, has carved the classic Shakespearean…
Already got your board and boots waiting by the front door? Take a break from watching snow reports to view something that’s sure to make you even more frantic for the season’s start: the Denver premiere of Enjoy, the newest ski film from Rage Productions, which takes place tonight at…
When fashion crosses over into art, the subtle collision really hits on why we care about what we wear in the first place: It’s an aesthetic choice we make every day that keeps us in touch with our creative innards. What happens when fashion designers cross over to become fine…
Ever wondered what a Björk song would sound like interpreted by a barbershop quartet? Or what if someone decided to play Philip Glass using glasses filled with water? These are just some of the many original musical performances that have taken place in the past two years during the School…
An accident in I-70’s Eisenhower Tunnel uncovers a forty-year-old conspiracy at the heart of American history in the first chapters of The Mongoose Deception, the latest CJ Floyd mystery. Floyd is up against the biggest mystery of his life, and perhaps the biggest of all time: Who really killed JFK?…
Maybe it sounds like bad sci-fi, but I’m writing today because of an extraterrestrial alien. Forget mind-control beams or flying saucers: My alien involved an eighth-grade science project in which everyone designed an ET evolved to a specific foreign environment. I mark that assignment as the moment I started taking…
In the past, author Richard Russo, the guest of honor at a book-signing tonight, has described himself as essentially a comic writer. Nonetheless, Bridge of Sighs, his newest offering, is “a deeply melancholy book,” he concedes. “This is the first book of mine that’s probably tipped over into, if not…
Most Americans know the late Mario Moreno, aka Cantinflas, from 1956’s Around the World in Eighty Days. But his resumé is much longer in his native Mexico, where he was a beloved performer once dubbed “the world’s greatest comedian” by Charlie Chaplin. According to Su Teatro artistic director Tony Garcia,…
According to PlatteForum founder and artistic director Judy Anderson, current resident artist Rory Golden is a fascinating character who paints into the wee hours, creating images drenched in an honest, egoless interest in righting wrongs and taking on social issues. A book artist with branches, Golden works with unusual materials:…
Today’s FastFilm Festival in Boulder is so quickly paced that filmmakers will enjoy just ten minutes of fame rather than the requisite fifteen. But that’s kind of the point. The compendium of seven-minute films (with three minutes at the end of each movie for a mini Q&A session) is the…
