In The Fifth Element, the all-knowing, all-powerful Supreme Being of the Universe turns out to be Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), an orange-haired babe in a skimpy, Band-Aid-thin mod outfit who speaks in a kind of Slavic scat and cries a lot. It’s as if the filmmakers started out to make a…
If you happen to be a highly civilized yuppie couple from Massachusetts and you’re driving a $30,000 sports/rec vehicle to California, don’t bother stopping off in cactus-and-enchilada country. After all, the black-clad varmint at the wheel of that sun-scorched pickup truck just ahead has a Dalton Brothers mustache and a…
Thursday May 1 What’s new? In every swarm of musicians, there are always a few adventurous souls who aren’t satisfied with playing the same old thing. Now a handful of the area’s intrepid music makers, the Modern Chamber Players, with help from the Boulder Philharmonic, are celebrating la difference with…
We may or may not have seen the last of the snow this year, but signs of renewal–such a part of the ritual of spring–are visible everywhere. Blossoming along with all of those tulips is the city’s local alternative-art scene, where a veritable nosegay of important events are helping ease…
East German playwright Heiner Muller is not well-known in America, so the Lida Project’s production of HamletMachine presents a rare opportunity for Denver audiences to experience his wild woolliness. And what an experience: Such extravagant craziness is hardly ever this controlled and involving. The play is based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet–a…
A controversy over racial stereotypes has dogged the remounting of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Show Boat. But the art and soul of this 1927 musical remains the beautiful song “Ol’ Man River.” Sung by a character who is an ex-slave, it reflects both a protest against the subjugation…
It’s probably just a matter of time until Newsweek and the major networks start hailing necrophilia as North America’s hottest new lifestyle. For now, though, copulating with the dead remains largely the province of a few social visionaries like Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy. Face it: Most of us have…
When Masterpiece Theatre aired a multi-part Anna Karenina to mark the novel’s centennial in 1977, series producer Joan Sullivan said, “I think that great stories are what the series is about.” Now Bernard Rose, the writer-director of the new movie version, talks about how lucky he was to discover “this…
If you’re hankering to see a movie that sends up swinging ’60s London and Carnaby Street and vintage James Bond movies, don’t bother to check out Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. What the movie mostly sends up is its star and screenwriter, Michael Myers. That’s not all bad: Myers…
Think you know gypsies? Dark, swarthy types with yard-long coils of blue-black hair set off by huge gold earrings, right? In the back room, Madame Salona will read your palm for fifty. Gypsies all speak an impenetrable language from another planet. Always staging personal-injury accidents in the produce department at…
Thursday April 24 Sister act: One by-product of having lived 100 years is a sweeping, first-hand sense of American history that most of us can only cull from books. Having Our Say–an autobiographical, two-woman dramatic adaptation based on the best-selling true story of African-American sisters Miss Sadie and Dr. Bessie…
Painters Jack Balas and Wes Hempel are fixtures on Denver’s art scene despite residing in what might be called the Outer Mongolia of the Front Range–the sleepy northern Colorado town of Berthoud. To a great extent, their in-town fame is the product of the enthusiastic support they’ve received from an…
It takes a little taste and a lot of guts to mount a 1920s or 1930s musical–and a keen artistic eye to keep it true to its period. The Country Dinner Playhouse’s vivacious 42nd Street is truer to that dazzling dance era than most. A pretender like One Foot on…
The dreams of youth can be so noble, so passionate and so hard to fulfill. Without a rigorous integrity and the warm watering of inspiration, noble ideals can dry and fade away, leaving very little behind but the stain of regret. English playwright Simon Gray’s astonishingly poignant drama The Common…
No one has exploited the historical-epic form better than David Lean. At his peak, he used its spaciousness and breadth to develop characters with conflicting points of view so that audiences could feel viscerally swept away, emotionally engaged and mentally sharpened–all at once. With the help of inspired actors, he…
Volcano is set in Los Angeles, and audiences get high watching the city crash and burn. For L.A. haters, Volcano could prove a peak experience. You don’t even have to hate L.A. to enjoy it–love/hate will do. That’s why the film closes with Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.,” a facetious…
The eight heads in 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag don’t look much like heads. They look like what they are–big, squarish rubber things from the studio makeup department, each with a goofy expression and a crummy wig glued on top. That’s because the makers of this raucous black comedy…
Jon Robin Baitz’s The Substance of Fire, produced on stage in New York and L.A. and now making its appearance as a movie distributed by the tastemakers at Miramax, is about another traumatized family struggling to work out its problems. In that, it sustains a dramatic tradition stretching from the…
Thursday April 17 Purple prose: Controversial scholar, feminist and prize-winning author Alice Walker is best known for her bestseller The Color Purple and the ensuing inspirational Steven Spielberg flick. But her newest book, Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism, is a whole different kettle of fish, collecting…
It’s been anything goes in the art world since the 1980s, and the upside of that scattershot approach to culture is that there’s something for everyone in the local galleries. The current spring shows range from sophisticated contemporary expressions to solid traditional offerings–and nearly everything in between. At the cutting-edge…
You can’t go wrong with the Gershwin boys. No matter how you stack their tunes, they still buzz after all these years. And they buzz best with a snazzy tap-dance routine to bolster them–like the bright numbers in My One and Only, a vulgarized revision of the 1927 film Funny…
Denver native Steven Dietz has had eighteen plays produced–several of which even made it to Denver (notably, God’s Country, The Lonely Planet and Trust). That distinguished career got another boost last week in Louisville, Kentucky, where Dietz’s new play, Private Eyes, received its premiere at the Humana Festival of New…
