British director John Boorman’s fondness for exotic locations and quasi-mystical quests give his best films, like the memorable Southern river trip Deliverance, an air of heightened reality, while his botched forays into Arthurian legend (Excalibur) or Amazonian splendor (The Emerald Forest) reveal the boisterous-tourist side of him, along with a…
A wise man–or was it a wise guy?–once cautioned that there are two things you should never watch being made: sausage and movies. (Consider the ingredients.) Nonetheless, directors have convinced themselves from time to time that the moviemaking process itself is suitable material for a movie. Most notable was the…
Wednesday August 23 Someday your prints will come: The Denver Public Library’s new Central Library isn’t finished yet, although you can go there to check out a book. But little by little, the witty structure, already brimming with character, is gaining a bit more–as is its excellent, if staid, Western…
A principal benefit of following the Denver art scene is the wealth of local artists who pursue their work oblivious to the shifting sands of contemporary trends. Sometimes, though, a solitary approach can lead an artist right into the middle of those trends. That’s apparently what’s happened with Roland Bernier’s…
For nearly twenty years, the Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute has chosen a handful of writers, dancers, visual artists and others to receive “associateships”–essentially $1,000 stipends. Since the institute’s founding in 1976, more than 100 individuals–not all of them women–have been selected. And from these awards has emerged an annual art…
Playwright David Mamet understands how people really converse. He articulates the rhythms of the inarticulate, because he grasps how hard it is sometimes to talk and think at once, even to finish sentences. The mind and the emotions race so far ahead of the mouth. Mamet also appreciates the fact…
“Poetry theater” as defined by the Denver troupe called the Open Rangers is part theater, part poetry, part dance, part music and part chutzpah. Sometimes exhilarating and sometimes embarrassing, the Open Rangers try for authentic and immediate artistic expression in their current production, The Reign of the Scar Clan, with…
The most unnerving–and delectable–skill of film noir masters like Huston, Wilder and Dassin may have been the way they turned all of human relations into a slippery fiction, a pack of lies, an extended alibi. In the dangerous netherworld of these movies, no love was true, no emotion sound, no…
If you work mainly at home, get your mother to do the catering and play one of the lead roles yourself, you might be able to eke out a feature-length movie for $16,000. That’s what 27-year-old Edward Burns did. The surprise is not that Burns got The Brothers McMullen into…
Wednesday August 16 Burke’s lawman: Like Dave Robicheaux, the fictional Cajun detective he created, Edgar Award winner James Lee Burke has an exacting eye for detail. And eight novels into the Robicheaux series, Burke continues to use his gift to not only plot another mystery, but also to conjure time,…
Short plays, like short stories, must be skillfully wrought to involve the audience instantly, delivering their substance with comparatively little development. So their goals tend to be more modest than those of longer works, and their action more obvious. Still, they can make powerful, lasting impressions. Theatre at Muddy’s 10…
A man lies dying, and his wife, his best friend, his grown children and his mistress gather in the next room to wait for his death. It soon becomes clear that the man was a public figure who made a lot of money and wielded a great deal of power…
With hearts full of hope, the people at 20th Century Fox are trumpeting A Walk in the Clouds as Keanu Reeves’s debut as a romantic leading man–despite a resume that lists party animal, acrobat cop and ersatz Buddha as his most notable movie accomplishments. Predictably, neither the clatter of press…
Like Keanu and company above, the restless young characters in French-Canadian director Denys Arcand’s Love and Human Remains are also searching for love and family. But most of them are initially so unlikable that we don’t care much if they succeed. Consider the gay actor-turned-waiter David (Thomas Gibson), a hard-shelled…
Wednesday August 9 Listen and learn: Jazz and Japan are the culturally diverse subjects at two separate lecture series in the area. The Chautauqua Forum Series ends its season at 8 tonight with a time-honored tradition–a concert lecture given annually by Willie Hill, University of Colorado College of Music professor…
Buildings are among the most public of artifacts–they’re really out there, literally. So it’s a shame that most of Denver’s built environment is so bad, more “narcotecture” than architecture. On the bright side, this sorry situation makes the good structures all the easier to recognize, even for neophytes. And surely…
The second series in The Changing Scene’s annual festival of new plays called “Summerplay” opened last weekend with four short pieces as different from one another as fruit, vegetables, rocks and rice. Some of it is digestible, some of it isn’t. But each play gets a full-bodied production, intelligent directing…
When Bertolt Brecht first staged his scathing The Threepenny Opera in Berlin in 1928, it not only delighted his middle- and upper-class audiences, it made him money for the first time in his theater life. Maybe it was the sheer naughtiness of its womanizing, murderous, thieving antihero, Macheath (aka Mack…
Discussing 1993’s year in movies, veteran Hollywood scriptwriter William Goldman–who wrote the screenplays for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men and Marathon Man and authored the classic how-to book Adventures in the Screen Trade– singled out Free Willy as a story he wished he’d written. He…
Wednesday August 2 Foo’s paradise: Not one to dwell on past events, ex-Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl surged forward after Kurt Cobain’s suicide with his own band, Foo Fighters, thrashing around old and new musical ideas with a do-it-yourself confidence not generally expected of a man firmly ensconced behind his traps…
Between the First World War and the 1930s, the United States experienced an internal population shift unprecedented in its history. More than 1 million rural blacks left their sharecropper farms in the South and came north in search of factory jobs and better living conditions in the industrialized urban centers…
Different people, different points of view: That’s the modest message behind 10 Percent in Maple Grove–a collection of disconnected scenes about gay and straight interaction in a small Midwestern town. Playwright Mark Dunn’s world-premiere show at Jack’s Theater is not about sex, AIDS, hate or self-pity, but rather about understanding,…
