It’s been a long road between landmarks for Peter Fonda. When last we saw him, it seems, he was a lean young rebel perched atop a Harley chopper, the winds of freedom whipping his hair, with a little-known running mate named Jack Nicholson in tow. For a member of one…
Bring earplugs to Batman & Robin. A pair of noseplugs wouldn’t hurt, either. The fourth installment in the Batman franchise is one long head-splitting exercise in clueless cacophony that makes you feel as though you’re being held hostage in some haywire Planet Hollywood while sonic booms pummel your auditory canal…
Thursday June 12 Oh, you kid: Erstwhile kid-in-the-hall Scott Thompson is a dedicated Streisand-watcher. Not a fan, mind you, just a watcher. It has to do with the striking resemblance: In an interview in US magazine, Thompson said, “A little more nose bump and I’m there.” The fey Canadian, who…
The current revival of 1920s and ’30s academic surrealism has grown into an international school of contemporary painting, and it has local legs that stretch back to the 1970s. Its adherents employ traditional painting genres such as landscapes, portraits and still lifes. But rather than work with a straight face,…
Chip Walton is one of the brightest young talents to crash the Denver theater scene in years. He’s an accomplished actor who made an elegant, riveting Salieri two years ago in the Aurora Fox’s Amadeus. But Walton’s special gift is for directing. He has a filmmaker’s split-second timing, a poet’s…
The germ of Clare Peploe’s complex fantasy of the heart, Rough Magic, is a sweet, obscure piece of pulp fiction called Miss Shumway Waves a Wand, written in 1944 by an all-but-forgotten novelist named James Hadley Chase. To say that Peploe, once an assistant to Bertolucci and Antonioni, has transformed…
The heroine of Susan Streitfeld’s solemn, psychiatry-stuffed first feature, Female Perversions, is a tense, humorless Los Angeles lawyer called Eve Stephens. She favors expensive tailored suits, two-inch spike heels and, if she can fit it into her busy schedule, mid-day office sex with her insufferable male lover or, failing that,…
Thursday June 5 Girl talk: The quartet of professional Latinas in Luminarias is looking for role models more inspiring than what it calls the stereotypical “gang mothers, undocumented workers, hookers and suffering women kneeling before the Virgin.” Along the way, the four find time to discuss politics, racial issues, relationships…
The fine arts almost never get sucked into mass culture’s real Internet–television. And when art does land in the TV spotlight, it usually suffers. Typically, there are three circumstances in which an event in the world of the visual arts will arouse the attention of the networks and CNN: the…
The best comedies are serious business. The whole spectrum of human frailty is meat and drink for the great comic writers, and it takes a profound intelligence to make us laugh at human beastliness. Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol, a nineteenth-century Russian with a gift for satirical realism, was one such brain…
Theatre on Broadway’s Whoop Dee Doo! is a lot like a good fat-free dessert: Flavorful while you’re tasting it, but so light it doesn’t stay with you. This cheeky musical revue from the late Broadway costume designer Howard Crabtree is well-done–the performers sing and dance their hearts out–but in the…
John “The Scribbler” Grisham and those lawyer shows on TV should probably get three to five in the Big House for the attendant crime wave they’ve started–that is, for fomenting an epidemic of allegedly hilarious legal comedies that don’t withstand much audience grilling. Jonathan Lynn’s Trial and Error is clearly…
It wouldn’t be completely fair to say that the string of hits produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer from 1983 through 1996 are stylistically interchangeable. But it wouldn’t be so awfully unfair, either: A homogeneous, auteurial touch runs from Flashdance (1983) through Top Gun (1986), Beverly Hills Cop II…
The surreal concoction of farce, tragedy and go-to-hell defiance that put Trainspotting on the international movie map also permeates Kevin Allen’s Twin Town. If this is some kind of trend, like, say, Hollywood’s current bout of Tarantino Syndrome, it probably won’t be long before audiences of all ages start separating…
Thursday May 29 The mortal Coryell: Who but Larry Coryell could deliver an electrifying performance even when he doesn’t plug in? The mellowing guitarist, a rocked-up fusion pioneer in the ’60s and ’70s, now seems content to sit down with an acoustic instrument all by his lonesome and just play…
It’s quite unusual for Denver’s gallery-goers to be treated to more than one good photography show at a time. But this spring, interesting shows are popping up the way dandelions are sprouting on lawns. At Camera Obscura–where good things are always developing–the exhibition Willy Ronis provides a retrospective look at…
Since 1992, Nebula 9 has been Colorado’s best (and most popular) electronic-dance duo. But no more. At a time when the rest of the country finally seems to be catching up with the act’s style of music, the team of Jim Stout and Julian Bradley has split. Stout, however, is…
It’s been a long wait, but the Roundfish Theatre Company is back, bold and brassy, with Bobology. These three short one-acts by Denver playwright James R. Cannon present an absurdist attack on economic, political and religious fascism. And though the plays have their weaknesses, the production values are high, the…
Family entertainment doesn’t have to mean mush. The Denver Center Theatre Company began the year with a smart, edgy Peter Pan and followed it with a poignant Christmas Carol, an inventive Comedy of Errors and a delightful Life With Father. Now the DCTC is finishing up the family-fare portion of…
The fictional Yorkshire coal-mining town where English director Mark Herman’s Brassed Off! takes place is called, aptly enough, Grimley. You can feel the layer of soot that has settled into the lives of the beleaguered citizens, and you can sympathize with their struggle to remain human in the face of…
Here are the Joys of Summer…and the Oys of Summer, the nearly 100 movies scheduled to open between now and the end of August. Many of them may even make it to Denver. They’re listed in the order of their L.A. release: May 30 Drunks. Peter Cohn’s look at the…
Does this sound familiar? In Nana Djordjadze’s A Chef in Love, an uncompromising creator of high cuisine stubbornly opposes the philistines and fools who threaten his perfectionism, transforming his kitchen into a kind of metaphoric battleground. This is, of course, the premise of last year’s independent hit Big Night, with…
