It has taken 22 years to release When We Were Kings, Leon Gast’s documentary about the tumultuous October 1974 Muhammad Ali-George Foreman fight in Kinshasa, Zaire, because the filmmaker’s original backers kept running into bad luck. One of them died in a plane crash; another was shot by a Liberian…
The ingredients are familiar: Donnie Brasco stars Al Pacino as a Mafia soldier and Johnny Depp as an FBI undercover agent who infiltrates the mob. But there’s a twist. Based on a true story, the film is a grunt’s-eye view of the Mafia, and it’s not remotely “operatic” or Scorsese-ish…
Thursday February 20 Zoot up: The plain truth is that grownups never outgrow the juvenile yearning to dig around in Mommy and Daddy’s closet and play dress-up. So give in. Step into those old-fashioned puttin’-on-the-Ritz duds, hit the dance floor and give your girl (or guy) a whirl across it…
There’s an old joke about the University of Colorado in Boulder: A visitor to the beautiful Italian-style campus asks a student how to find the art building, and the student replies, “It’s the ugly one.” Ah, the contradictions of the art world. Another unfortunate confluence of art and architecture can…
Humor doesn’t get any darker than Chazz Palminteri’s Faithful–at least not without getting sickening. But unlike many purveyors of black comedies, the tough-guy actor-turned-playwright manages to raise the audience’s spirits by play’s end, much as Woody Allen does in his best comedies. Palminteri skewers vanity, self-deception and especially hypocrisy, and…
Industrial Arts Theatre continues to expand Denver’s theatrical horizons with the first of what it hopes will be a long series of Colorado Women Playwrights Festivals. Running in repertory are two “programs”; the first features a full-length play, along with an amusing short, and it gets the festival off to…
January and February are good times for taking a vacation–very good times. Not because the airfares are low or because the weather sucks, but because what a movie critic must endure at the beginning of the year is so grim. It is almost impossible to maintain any semblance of optimism…
The second most important room in their houses is the boudoir, so the sophisticated French are good at sex farce. If anything, the warm-blooded Italians are even better. The occasional American moviemaker–Billy Wilder, Mike Nichols, Woody Allen–can turn the trick, too, wedding absurdity to desire and coming up with dark…
Billy Bob Thornton isn’t going to snatch the matinee-idol title away from Tom Cruise, Kevin Costner or Denzel Washington anytime soon. At the age of 41, the former Hearts Afire regular is also a grizzled acting veteran of low-rent slasher flicks like Chopper Chicks in Zombietown and modest critical successes…
Irvin Kershner’s The Empire Strikes Back, the continuation of George Lucas’s Star Wars, is a classic fantasy in its own right. I vastly prefer it to the first film. Its textures are richer, its emotions deeper, and it’s an honest-to-Jedi movie–not a dozen jammed-together entries of a serial. On its…
Elmore Leonard’s Touch is identified on the paperback as a mystery and carried in stores next to Leonard’s celebrated crime novels (like Get Shorty). But this wan little book is actually the problem child of Leonard’s oeuvre–the only crime it involves is lack of truth in advertising, and that’s on…
Thursday February 13 Jane’s addiction: Husband-wife acting duo Linda Manning and Michael Pinney left for the East Coast several years ago after attending CU-Denver’s theater program and performing at Denver’s long-lived Changing Scene. Their literal scene change resulted in a well-received New York City production of Manning’s play Do Something…
Is it the bright clear light, the product of endless chains of cloudless days? Or is it perhaps the rugged scenery? Maybe it’s the history, mystery and charm of the ancient indigenous peoples. Whatever the reason, New Mexico has attracted accomplished painters for more than a century. And for most…
Surf’s up, Shakespeare. Tweaking the Bard is the latest rage on the stage–witness Theatre on Broadway’s current compressed version of his “compleat works”–and the Denver Center Theatre Company is hanging ten with its new production of The Comedy of Errors. It’s set on the beaches of sunny Southern California, where…
Dealing with the death of a mother is a wrenching experience for children–to say nothing of Mum herself. And that’s where playwright Edward Albee hooks you in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Three Tall Women: It’s hard not to reflect on your own family as you spiral through the dark corridors of…
For generations, the heftier works of Leo Tolstoy have challenged undergraduate lifting power and speed-reading skills as much as they have confounded the world’s moviemakers. That dark tribute to nineteenth-century adultery, Anna Karenina, was filmed in America three times, beginning with Garbo in 1935 and ending with Jacqueline Bisset in…
Since Baby LeRoy first put the screws to W.C. Fields back in the 1930s, the intractable child who torments the cranky old man has rampaged through movie history like a wild force of nature. The most celebrated recent example, of course, saw little Macaulay Culkin befouling the burglary schemes of…
In Absolute Power, Clint Eastwood plays Luther Whitney, a master thief who burgles on little cat feet. He’s as stealthy as the Pink Panther pilferer, though not nearly as amusing. Luther, you see, is presented to us as an artist. We first see him at the National Gallery dutifully copying…
Robert E. Howard, the subject of Dan Ireland’s wonderful debut film The Whole Wide World, created the sword-and-sorcery genre with his Conan stories. Howard had a grand yet coarse-grained consciousness. His Conan stories, set in a fictitious primordial age full of demons and killers, boasted swift, cartoon-flavored action (“He moved…
Thursday February 6 World party: Musicians from the four corners of Asia are holding a mini harmonic convergence in the area tonight, offering audiences sound bites crossing the gamut from exotic and otherworldly to heart-poundingly physical to aesthetically classic and staid. There’s nothing like freedom of choice. To begin with,…
It was in the fall of 1995 that Robert Motherwell, the great New York School artist who died in 1991, gained a special place in the hearts and minds of Denver art lovers. That’s when the Denver Art Museum worked out a special deal with the Dedalus Foundation, which controls…
Fast and funny, The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged) skewers the Bard and honors him, too. In fact, the more you love Shake-speare, the more amused you’re likely to be by this jolly nonsense, now in its regional premiere. The comedy, which replaces Shake-speare’s immortal verse with game-show pandering,…
