The young filmmaker Todd Solondz insists that the unsettling picture of preteen trauma he gives us in his astonishing Welcome to the Dollhouse is not autobiographical–even though Heather Matarazzo, the eleven-year-old actress he cast in the part of a lonely, terrorized seventh-grader, bears a striking physical resemblance to him, and…
The Germans are not exactly the kings of comedy–not in this century–so it’s always a little startling to come across a German film speckled with yuks, even when those yuks are largely about dissolution and death. Case in point: Doris Dorrie’s Nobody Loves Me is a kind of bedroom farce…
Thursday June 13 Let’s go Dutch: Windmills, wooden shoes and tulips are just some of the attractions at the Bethesda Dutch Festival, an annual event starting today on the Bethesda Hospital grounds, 4400 E. Iliff Ave. Featuring a picturesque Dutch village with shops and costumed denizens, dancers, old world food…
In its relatively short history, the Center for the Visual Arts, Metropolitan State College’s gallery in LoDo, has celebrated the diversity of the art world. Sally Perisho, the center’s founding director, has paid special attention to art by women, gays and ethnic minorities. And she has mixed things up: One…
A troubled mind struggling for decency, the neighborly hand held out to a wretched man–these are the elements of Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana, for my money the most meaningful of all the great American playwright’s works. Other Williams plays may be more poetic or tragic or psychologically…
Gospel, the musical form that arose at the turn of the century with Pentecostal revivalism in African-American churches, has had a lasting and profound effect on American music during its century-long evolution. While rhythm and blues and soul took off from gospel roots, gospel itself has retained its identity and…
Europe’s favorite movie comedian, Roberto Benigni, carries the Buster Keaton chromosome and the Jim Carrey chromosome–joined together in bedroom farce. American audiences know him best as Tom Waits’s talkative cellmate in Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law, as Johnny Stecchino, or as Inspector Clouseau Jr. in the ill-considered Son of the…
If you decide to catch only one of this summer’s zillion-dollar action movies, make it The Rock. The high-profile Simpson/Bruckheimer production team, Bad Boys director Michael Bay and a battalion of stunt people blow up even more stuff–Humvees, yellow Ferraris, cable cars, a Navy weapons depot, some big chunks of…
Thursday June 6 Sip away: Swilling’s not your style? The Winer’s Club, a unique society at the Hotel Boulderado’s Teddy Roosevelt American Grille, caters to the sophisticated palate by offering points for every glass of vino you imbibe (accumulated points are good for restaurant gift certificates and the like). How…
In spite of a century of modern art jam-packed with things like abstraction, minimalism and conceptualism, the venerable tradition of depicting the human figure in art has held on admirably. As the modernist twentieth century comes to a close, artists working with the human body as their subject seem to…
Musicals seem to be the one theatrical form in which outright silliness is not only acceptable but desirable. A farce has to have some underlying intelligence, some razor-sharp insight into manners and mores, in order to satisfy. But a musical needs only vivid tunes, lively dancing, sympathetic characters and perhaps…
Much of what makes us laugh in comedy arises out of pain. And Dale Stewart’s subversive, poignant comedy Harvey’s Boy is sore all over. However, there’s nothing morbid or crass about this one-man show. Stewart’s reminiscences about his childhood and young adulthood add up in the end to a warm…
If you want to get all star-struck, it’s probably a good idea to aim a little higher than the assorted frauds, mannequins, paralyzed junkies and ten-cent philosophers who drifted into Andy Warhol’s orbit in downtown New York in the late Sixties. At Max’s Kansas City in those days, the signature…
For more than half a century, science-fiction movies have been asking if there’s intelligent life in outer space. The Arrival makes you wonder how much of it is left on Earth. Imagine Charlie Sheen as one Zane Zaminski, a goofy science nerd with a bad crewcut, fogged-up glasses and a…
Thursday May 30 New dimensions: What constitutes a finished work of art? The Completed Image: An Exhibition of Drawings, opening today at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, makes a case for the drawing, a medium often relegated to the stature of a preliminary sketch or study. For…
He’s midway through his solo exhibit at the Close Range Gallery of the Denver Art Museum, but Phil Bender still acts embarrassed about all the attention. In fact, Bender’s taken an “Aw, shucks” approach–which works perfectly with his thick Texas drawl–to the accolades heaped on his signature grids of found…
The archetypal story of Beauty and the Beast has taken many, many forms in practically every culture of the world. The most common of these involves a beautiful woman falling in love with a prince who has been hexed into ugliness. In other forms of the story, the Beast figure…
Part myth-making, part absurdist exercise, part political allegory and part youthful hell-raising, The Eclipse of Lawry, by Gwylym Cano, is fun, stimulating theater. It’s hard to follow some of the dialogue, since the repartee rips rather fast and is complicated by a Texas drawl meant to underscore the cowboy theme…
The silly season is upon us, so the best you can hope for down at the local multiplex these days is silliness with a touch of style, a dash of sense and an absence of tornadoes. Enter Dragonheart, which combines the romance of huge, toothsome beasts with the classic movie…
Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell is being billed as Japan’s coming-out party in the world of big-time animation, as well as another visionary take on the future. But before cartoon freaks get too carried away, it might be useful to note that Oshii’s drawing style can be stiff, cold…
Thursday May 23 The write stuff: So much for the theory that all critics are frustrated artists–modern Latino literature connoisseurs and scholars Graciela Limon and Bruce-Novoa both switched gracefully from criticism to fiction and poetry and back again, each winning acclaim for their efforts from other critics. The pair will…
The construction of Denver International Airport has meant many things to many people. For most of us, DIA has meant an extra hour or two of travel just to get to and from the remote facility. To many who were more intimately involved, especially in the airport’s financing and its…
