China’s great filmmaker Zhang Yimou has never gotten along with his country’s ruthless government, and his stock recently dropped with his longtime leading lady, the ravishing Gong Li. But Zhang is absolutely dedicated to his art: Shanghai Triad is another astonishingly beautiful film in a line that includes Red Sorghum,…
To call John Woo a loose cannon is to understate the case. The former star director of the bloody, flamboyant, no-holds-barred Hong Kong cinema is a blazing wall of machine-gun fire and two halves of a severed freight train smashing together. Woo is helicopters bursting into balls of flame, fighter…
Wednesday February 7 Tuna melt: As a former member of San Francisco’s premier acid-rockers the Jefferson Airplane, Jorma Kaukonen was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last month. But Kaukonen has spent more years doing his own thing–acoustic country blues–than he ever spent soaring with the Airplane…
Our local cultural institutions do a mostly inadequate (and sometimes dreadful) job of nurturing the art of our region. It’s not as though there isn’t enough exhibition space–not when the vacant The End show by Edward Ruscha has had five months to befoul the Close Range Gallery at the Denver…
The ghostly and the ghastly haunt two stages at the Plex just now–one a folk tale metamorphosed into coolly intellectual high art, the other a literary classic mutated into a pop musical. Tony Kushner’s adaptation of S. Ansky’s A Dybbuk offers a rare window into nineteenth-century Hasidic culture with its…
Historians tell us that King Richard III’s reputation as England’s most ruthless monarch is a bit inflated. In all likelihood, he wasn’t even the original Tricky Dick: A century earlier, after all, Richard II murdered one of his uncles and confiscated his cousin’s estates before getting himself imprisoned in Pontefract…
If John Grisham wanted to sue the makers of The Juror for impersonation of a legal thriller, he’d have a pretty good case. Some might see the star combo of Demi Moore and Alec Baldwin as a Dream Team, but the movie is strictly lightweight stuff, and unintentionally dense to…
Wednesday January 31 To Sir, with love: Perhaps the scarcest ticket in town is a seat for Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser, a Denver Center Theatre Company production at the Ricketson Theatre, 14th and Curtis in the Plex. Starring veteran actor Tony Church, the play is set during World War II…
Nothing in history has saturated the world like American pop culture. For the past fifty years, American movies, television, graphics, and especially advertising have profoundly influenced the way the whole world looks. American fine arts have had a similar global influence. But interestingly, the popular media so commonly identified with…
All-male theater–what a concept. The feminist thing has got a number of guys confused, so they’re rethinking issues like the meaning of sports and male bonding, science and metaphysics and, in some instances, the use of profanity. At least that’s the initial impression one gets from Patrick Meyers’s K2. The…
A good journey makes a heroic tale–especially when the protagonist ultimately arrives at new insight. Terrence McNally’s A Perfect Ganesh, though flawed as drama by its own heady ambitions, is one such quest story. And the sterling production at Theatre on Broadway illuminates an already bright play with layers of…
Now comes 25-year-old Noah Baumbach to say his comic piece for the generation that disdains the label “X.” As a spokesman–at least for the affluent, white, college-grad segment of the group–his credentials are all in order: Recent degree from upscale Vassar (yes, they’ve had boys there for years), fashionably hip…
The shenanigans of Charles, Di and Fergie may intrigue the tabloid-TV crowd, but the present British royals are simply no match for their misbehaving forebears. You don’t even need to crack a history book to see the difference: Filmmakers have recently given us satisfying new interpretations of George III’s lunacy…
Wednesday January 24 Photo synthesis: A twentieth-century genius who created groundbreaking work in both commercial photography and revealing portraiture is the subject of Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light, a visually superb public-TV documentary focusing on Avedon’s celebrated fifty-year career. The program, a clean-edged insider’s portrayal as striking as a modern-day…
A common perception within Denver’s alternative scene is that everyone has an equal right to participate–and that that’s what “open” or “outsider” shows are all about. I’ve even heard it said during a panel discussion linked to an Alternative Arts Alliance event that all art is valid–which, if it were…
Angels and devils hover in the local theater this season–and it’s about time. First the Broadway road show Angels in America graced the Auditorium Theatre last fall with its tale of God in retreat. Now we have Lucifer Tonite, by Denver’s most intense writer/performer, Don Becker. But while Angels could…
August Wilson is one of America’s great playwrights. His rage, his humor and his humanity find their deepest expression in the construction of character; plot is not the point. Yet each of his plays tells a compelling story, and each story moves us because it strikes home as true and…
If there’s a less popular cause in the land of three-strikes-and-you’re-out justice than abolition of the death penalty, I don’t know what it is. Maybe a salary increase for Deion Sanders. Or amnesty for Saddam Hussein. The current occupant of the White House, cops sipping coffee down at the station…
God knows that American schools need inspirational teachers and that the funding cuts that threaten arts education everywhere are lamentable. But when Hollywood third-stringers get their hands on such material, the results are doomed to flunk the test. Mr. Holland’s Opus, in which Richard Dreyfuss portrays a budding composer who…
Wednesday January 17 West meets West: Old and new images of the American West meet magnificently in Western Visions: An Exhibit of Place and Culture, a major juried show now on display at Republic Plaza, 370 17th St. Featuring over eighty pieces executed in styles from traditional to contemporary in…
The dead of winter is the last time one would expect to find an art show with most of the work exhibited outdoors. Surely only a lunatic–or, at the very least, an oddball–would schedule such an event in the coldest and darkest time of the year. However, that’s exactly what…
Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s The City of Lost Children is a kind of crypto-Freudian fairy tale about a sinister mad scientist in a foggy harbor town who kidnaps children so he can steal their dreams. He also has philosophical arguments with a disembodied brain living in a tank of…
