(Mexico City) Less than 24 hours after the Oscars capped the remarkable year of the so-called three amigos by handing out three awards to Pan’s Labyrinth and one to Babel, I boarded a plane bound for Mexico City and the fourth edition of the Mexico City International Contemporary Film Festival…
Realism doesn’t work with Tennessee Williams, nor do most kinds of stylization. His work requires a passionate, heightened, over-the-top romanticism from both cast and director. Unless you’re swept away by the magic of the language, by the hyper-inflated and hugely sexualized emotion, these plays can seem hyperbolic and dated –…
The University of Colorado is the state’s premier learning institution, and Boulder is the region’s only true college town, on par with Madison, Wisconsin, or Ann Arbor, Michigan. Changes initiated by Hank Brown, the school’s president, have put a damper on the famous party atmosphere there, but there’s still a…
The University of Colorado’s Department of Art and Art History, as good as it is and as talented as some of the faculty are (see review, page 46), has long been the campus stepchild, as indicated by the rundown building in which it’s been housed for decades. While other academic…
Breaking the Mold. In 2003, Connecticut collector Virginia Vogel Mattern donated some 300 pieces of contemporary American Indian art to the Denver Art Museum. For one of the special shows inaugurating the new Frederic C. Hamilton Building, Native Arts curator Nancy Blomberg has selected over a hundred works for the…
Revenge of the Nerds: Panty Raid Edition (Fox) Revenge of the Nerds is a great movie. No, really. It’s got a bitching new-wave soundtrack and some truly inspired performances — memorable enough to wreck the careers of Robert Carradine (Lewis) and Curtis Armstrong (Booger). But mostly it’s the mix of…
From the newest iPod to the Olsen twins’ collective waistline, the world loves all things mini. The Nintendo Wii embraces this digestible format once again for Wii Play, a collection of nine easy-to-play mini-games that comes bundled with a free Wii controller. However, the result is like a Happy Meal:…
A Brush With Death (New Light) Buster Crabbe Collection (St. Clair Vision) Captain Horatio Hornblower (Warner Bros.) Care Bears: Friends Forever (Lions Gate) Commissar (Kino) Confetti (Fox) Death Row (Anchor Bay) The Electric Company’s Greatest Hits & Bits (Shout) Fast Food Nation (Fox) The Full Monty: Fully Exposed Edition (Fox)…
If you’ve been slacking, then it’s time to get your hands sewing and styling because March 7 is the deadline to enter Tamarac Square’s Fashion Project. The four-week Project Runway-style competion will feature a dozen or so designers each trying to win tickets to fall Fashion Week in New York,…
From images of Mayan goddesses and Mexican madonnas to hand-wrought works of fiber and clay, Primavera: A Spring Celebration of the Divine Feminine — an all-woman show opening today at the Chicano Humanities and Arts Council — delivers its theme on a veritable Botticellian half-shell. “A lot of us do…
“For me,” begins Laura Cuetara, associate professor of theater at the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center, “the big white ball — the moment when I decided, yeah, I really have to do this — was when I was looking in the library at taking out some…
As the inspiration for the Rolling Stones’ 1968 anthem “Street Fighting Man” and a former comrade of the late John Lennon, British Pakistani writer, historian and filmmaker Tariq Ali knows a thing or two about dissent. “Tariq ranks among the foremost critics of U.S. foreign policy,” says David Barsamian, founder/director…
“We just went to this tournament of twelve teams in the Western division,” reveals Jen Frale — aka She Who Cannot Be Named of the Rocky Mountain Roller Girls. “The teams are so fast, and the girls are so agile and physical; these people are athletes. It’s amazing to see…
The cause for Africa is almost as large as the continent itself, and it’s not just Angelina Jolie who has a vested interest in African children. Kelsey Horine, marketing director for Alliance Française de Denver, spent last summer volunteering at an orphanage in West Africa and wanted to do something…
For Amanda Rea, balancing creativity with making a living has not been easy. The fiction writer has had to juggle multiple low-paying jobs, sometimes getting up at 4 a.m. to write. When she moved to Denver, the Lighthouse Writers Workshop helped her create a writing routine. Today she’ll join in…
Ever wondered how Bovine Metropolis Theater comes up with its comedy sketches? Here’s a behind-the-scenes walk-through, provided by Bovine director Eric Farone, of the complicated creative process behind one of the sketches created for the theater’s new production, Cows on a Plane, which runs at 8 p.m. tonight and every…
It may be hard out there for a pimp, but it ain’t too hard for a writer-director to make a movie whose marketing hinges on the lurid spectacle of Samuel L. Jackson pulling a half-naked Christina Ricci around on a chain. This sort of cheap trick is what they used…
When the editorial cartoonist turned amateur sleuth Robert Graysmith published Zodiac, he wrote that the tale was “the most frightening story I know.” His sprawling and meticulously researched account of the eponymous San Francisco serial killer was written in 1985, some sixteen years after the Zodiac’s last confirmed attack, and…
Wild Hogs — in which John Travolta, William H. Macy, Tim Allen and Martin Lawrence play emasculated suburbanites taking a cross-country motorcycle trip to rediscover their masculinity — doesn’t even sound like a real movie when you describe it to people. They give you that yer-shittin’-me stare, as though it…
Let us applaud, on principle, Anthony Minghella’s return to small-scale storytelling. Breaking and Entering marks his first original screenplay since the oddball romantic comedy Truly, Madly, Deeply (1991), and a retreat from the jumbo-sized period pieces of his Miramax-to-the-max phase. Overrated as they are, The English Patient, The Talented Mr…
I’ve been worrying about Frankie and Johnny all day, trying to figure out whether or not they’ll stay together. Which is odd, because they’re a fictitious couple dreamed up by playwright Terrence McNally in his Frankie and Johnny at the Clair de Lune and brought to life by Emily Paton…
I know that August Wilson is a great playwright in the same way I know that Notre Dame is a majestic cathedral, but whenever I re-encounter his work, I find myself trying to figure out exactly why it’s so great. In past reviews, I’ve used words like “rich” and “multi-layered”…
