No one’s done more for the green pepper than the great photographer Edward Weston, whose shapely black-and-white capsicums sport more curves than his nudes when placed side by side for scrutiny. Ditto for the shells and nearly everything else the man ever shot: Weston was a master of light, shadow…
I am the enemy you killed, my friend. I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed. I parried; but my hands were loath and cold. Let us sleep now… — Wilfred Owen Not even the dead will sleep tonight at…
Baby clothes in cardboard boxes, old coffee mugs stacked like Jenga towers, VCRs with Animal House stuck in the player and 25-cent price tags as far as the eye can see. It’s garage-sale season. And what’s better than browsing through other people’s junk? Getting nicely toasted while browsing through other…
Last year, Stephanie Beacher read Anita Diamant’s best-selling novel The Red Tent. The book chronicles the lives of the Old Testament figure Dinah and her four mothers, the wives of Jacob. Beacher was inspired by the tale: “Some of are sisters, and there’s all kinds of jealousy and things going…
Word of mouth, grassroots cooperation and a triple-espresso burst of communal energy are all it’s taken to blast Denver’s Scattered Arts Collective into the stratosphere. What began last summer as a brainstorm between a musician and a poet has blossomed into a series of multi-disciplinary art parties so popular that…
United 93 — which uses the hijacking of one plane on September 11, 2001, to tell the story of what happened to all four aircraft seized that morning — may be the most wrenching, profound and perfectly made movie nobody wants to see. There is no reason to think that…
The impassioned new documentary Sir! No Sir! never mentions the words “Iraq” or “Afghanistan.” It doesn’t have to. Unseen and unremarked-upon, those bloody venues nonetheless inhabit the entire 84 minutes of David Zeiger’s film like some deadly, creeping virus for which there’s no cure. Zeiger’s actual subject, which he says…
The Boys of Baraka, a fine documentary about a group of inner-city, at-risk boys who travel to Kenya to attend a special school, comes very close to greatness. For over an hour, the film is a sharp and blazing account of how boys with multiple challenges and little hope for…
At the opening of Lonesome Jim, a terrific new film directed by Steve Buscemi, a country song plays behind scenes of small-town desolation. “Good times’r comin’,” it promises, in the movie’s first joke. Nothing about these initial scenes — not the stark Midwestern landscape, not the sole figure running with…
Criticizing an action movie for being empty-headed is like calling out Brokeback Mountain for its lack of car chases. Likewise, when a teen gymnastics movie is derided as formulaic and dumb, one might logically ask: compared to what? Very well. Stick It sucks it compared to the modestly charming Kirsten…
If you’re a regular movie-goer with a gift for remembering unusual names, chances are you’ve started paying attention to Chiwetel Ejiofor, the black English actor with a chameleon’s talent for disappearing into a role. You may not have caught his breakthrough performance in Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things, but you…
The Darwinian theory that shlocksploitation must tighten its twist of the nuts with each new release will be tested strenuously for years — or at least several weeks — by Hard Candy. A pointedly s(l)ick cross between Oleanna and I Spit on Your Grave, thrown like raw meat to Lions…
Every year, when ESPN broadcasts the Scripps National Spelling Bee, a tiny flutter of hope rises in anyone who cherishes the life of the mind. Spelling is a sport? Sweet Jesus! For the duration of the competition, the brainy kid who gets his glasses stomped by knuckle-draggers on the playground…
Having people from both inside and outside the art world come to me and plug a show is a standard feature of my life as an art critic. What’s funny about it, though, is how many of them think they’re doing me a favor. You see, in their fantasies about…
The Sandra Phillips Gallery (744 Santa Fe Drive, 303-573-5969) has stumbled on a niche in the art market: featuring the work of well-known Colorado artists from yesteryear. Last month it was Ruth Todd, who is in her nineties, and now it’s Mel Strawn, who’s quite a bit younger. He’s in…
Apparition. The brand-new Gallery Severn, which is owned by art collector and retired executive Andy Dodd, aims to be what he has called a “launch pad” for emerging artists. This specialty in fresh faces instantly makes the place interesting. Also interesting is Dodd’s decision to feature only one artist at…
The United States could recover from an all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union in just two to four years…. Nuclear war is not nearly as devastating as we have been led to believe. If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it. Dig a hole…
The most interesting character in After Ashley disappears after the first scene. This is Ashley herself, whom we meet while she’s watching one of those smarmy television shrinks with her teenage son, Justin. The shrink, Dr. Bob, is giving advice to a sexually incompatible couple, and this leads Ashley to…
Impulse Theater. Basements and comedy go together like beer and nuts or toddlers and sandboxes. The basement of the Wynkoop Brewing Co., where Impulse Theater performs, is crowded, loud and energetic. Impulse does no prepared skits, nothing but pure improv — which means that what you see changes every night,…
Aeon Flux (Paramount) Many things about this surreal sci-fi flick defy explanation, but nothing more so than the mystery of how it got made in the first place. On paper, it’s an archetypal setup for a bomb: a mostly forgotten cartoon, notable for its visual style and incomprehensibility, revived as…
Casanova (Disney) Dr. Dolittle 3 (Fox) Elevator to the Gallows (Criterion) 50 Greatest Kid Concoctions (Time Life) Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children (Sony) The Heirloom (Tartan) Inspector Gadget: 4-Disc Set (Shout Factory) The Intruder (Fox Lorber) Magic (Dark Sky) Match Point (DreamWorks) The Passenger (Sony) The Patriot: Extended Cut (Sony)…
Boys are oiling their mitts, men have started playing hooky, and Dick Cheney just one-hopped it like a pussy. Yes, baseball season is in full swing, and our dip-juice cup runneth over. Normally, this is cause for heavy titillation — perhaps a strong lather or a well-intentioned fistfight. But 2006…
