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…
Nothing in the house for dinner? Just step outside, scoop some little critters off the ground and pluck a few berries from the garden, and you have the makings for a tasty snack of “black currant and roasted ant tarts.” That’s just one of the delicacies on the menu at…
There’s something special about vinyl. It could be a record’s versatility, its maneuverability, the crackle of the needle skimming the surface — whatever the je ne sais quoi element happens to be, it’s kept records around longer than any other music medium. Emile Berliner patented the first gramophone sound system…
“It’s a wagon with slightly clunky wheels, but that’s intentional,” says performance artiste extraordinaire Nina Rolle. “It’s a traveling medicine show that pitches a tent in whatever town it’s in, and then these rogues show up and put on a production. It’s got that kind of flavor.” It’s tough to…
Few things bleed post-modernism more profusely than the films of Andy Warhol. The prolific artist shot more than sixty stories from 1963 to 1968, among them Sleep, which shows a man sleeping for eight hours, and Blowjob, 35 minutes of fellatio footage. And although Chelsea Girls was certainly his most…
Today in history, Robert Oppenheimer — daddy to the atomic bomb — was born in 1904; in 1915, Germany first used chlorine gas cylinders in World War I as a weapon against the French army at Ypres; and in 1970, during the Nixon years, the first Earth Day was celebrated…
Vast legions embrace the thing as gospel. Skeptics dismiss it as ecstatic nonsense. In any event, James Redfield’s peculiar novel, The Celestine Prophecy, has been a bulwark of new-age metaphysics since it first hit the bestseller lists back in 1993. By recent estimates, there are 14 million copies in print,…
Wanna knock the prez? Let’s make a show — preferably on television. Paul Weitz’s new satire American Dreamz imagines the Bush regime as an episode in the history of American entertainment and American Idol as the quintessence of U.S. democracy. So what else is new? The vision of America as…
If you can tell a society by its smut, America in the 1950s couldn’t have been just a Frigidaire of repressive hysteria. Hidden somewhere in the closets of Pleasantville and Peyton Place, after all, was a stack of fetish mags bearing the face and hourglass figure of Bettie Page and…
Amid brutal competition from A History of Violence, Caché (Hidden) and Last Days, the top prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival went to L¹Enfant (The Child), a Belgian drama about a twenty-year-old hustler who sells his infant son like a bag of weed. The makers of this provocative movie,…
If you’re craving an antidote to the sanctity of repressed gay cowboys, you could do worse than Adam & Steve. This good-natured comedy from writer-director Craig Chester uses gently sly wit to poke fun at neurotic gay singles, coming of age in the 1980s and dating in the era of…
