Transplant the classic Western Shane to a ranch in modern-day Argentina. Spice it up with local politics. Add horses. And sheep. And freight trains. There. You now have a pretty fair take on Adolfo Aristarain’s A Place in the World, an engaging coming-of-age story wherein the filmmaker also manages to…
Wednesday September 7 The thrill of the hunt: No matter what side of the hunting dispute you straddle, a new book written by nature writer Ken Kerasote should prove fascinating. In Bloodties: Nature, Culture and the Hunt, Kerasote relates his experience traveling with Inuit hunters in Greenland and explores the…
This state’s prairie lands appear remote–spare, spacy, even boring. But Last Chance to Cope–photographs of Colorado’s northeastern plains on which sit the actual towns of Last Chance and Cope–finds a lot to look at out where most of us see nothing. This exhibit, now on display at Emmanuel Gallery, is…
The production of Crazy for You at the Buell Theatre cranks up a full head of steam–and the rest of us have to run with it. Fortunately, most of the time the sprint is worth the effort. After all, the music is George Gershwin’s and the lyrics are Ira Gershwin’s…
Before last week’s Denver preview screening of A Simple Twist of Fate, theater employees handed out little packets of Kleenex to the audience. Cute studio promotion, no? Prepare yourself, the gesture said, for a real tearjerker, a rare opportunity to bawl your eyes out in the dark and go home…
It seems a bit early for hotshot director Quentin Tarantino to beget a school of imitators, but then, instant genius is a cheap commodity in the slam-bang world of pop culture. Roger Avary is Tarantino’s pal from his days as a video-store clerk in California, as well as his writing…
Wednesday August 31 Evil lurks in Arvada: Local author David Van Meter set his new book, Necessary Evil, in suburban Philadelphia, which is where he grew up. But we can only hope the similarities end there–the psychological thriller is a gruesome tale about a boy-next-door type who turns into the…
What is real? What is illusion? Hunger Artists Ensemble Theatre poses these questions in its presentation of Tony (Angels in America) Kushner’s adaptation of French playwright Pierre Corneille’s miraculous L’illusion Comique. Kushner’s brilliant update of the 1636 play, redubbed The Illusion, is funnier and more relevant to a contemporary audience…
Raining Stones, a bittersweet comedy by Great Britain’s Ken Loach, is another bow to the tenacity of working-class people trying to keep their heads above water in hard times. Working in the same sort of grimy, northern city (Manchester, this time) where an earlier generation of British “kitchen sink” directors…
Those who have followed Oliver Stone’s bombastic career know that the reckless loudmouth in him usually gets the best of the deep thinker. Every intriguing conspiracy theory in JFK seemed to be inundated by a flood of bilge. Every pointed comment about the greed of the Eighties in Wall Street…
Wednesday August 24 Mambo king: Denver’s best-kept secret this week may very well be the two nights of outdoor performances being put on by Tito Puente & His Latin Allstars at the Denver Botanic Gardens. Puente, a master timbalero and bona fide living legend, has been making incredible music–Latin jazz,…
Artists Who Are Indian, the year-long exhibit at the Denver Art Museum, showcases strong new works of art, some exploring vital spiritual issues and all produced by living Native Americans who reject artistic stereotypes for the freedom–and equality–of the cutting edge. The seventeen contemporary pieces assembled for the show’s second…
One of the best jokes in playwright Jane Wagner’s one-woman show The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe is found in its title. The question is, just how intelligent is life on earth? Now in an exuberant production at the Avenue Theatre, Wagner’s play asks more questions…
Everybody has a story–sometimes several stories. But a good story isn’t enough; you have to know how to tell it well. So a retired sailor named Ralph discovers during the course of Ralph’s Play, the first and best of two one-acts now playing at the RiverTree Theatre. Denver playwright Pat…
Bruce Willis, psychoanalyst. That’s the first hurdle audiences must clear at Color of Night, and it’s not easy. Imagine Sylvester Stallone in the role of, say, a golden-hearted half-wit from Alabama who stumbles into the lives of presidents and pop stars. Envision John Wayne as Billy the Kid. Now think…
When a moviemaker wants to dabble in American social issues–but avoid confronting them head-on–the common refuge is the 1950s. That decade, growing gauzier and less distinct by the moment, has been reduced to a neat set of cliches suitable to the purposes of almost any storyteller burning to make a…
Wednesday August 17 King of the off-road: You could call it a last hurrah for summer mountain bikers, or it might just be a hearty affirmation of the popular sport. Either way, this year’s King of the Rockies Off-Road Stage Race and Mountain Bike Festival goes out of its way…
The siren call of stellar artists including Ed Ruscha, Red Grooms and David Hockney makes WORD, an exhibit at the Boulder Art Center, hard to resist. But this large show of text-based works fails to thrill, displaying many noncurrent (if not aged) creations, some that have been seen more than…
A great production of an excellent play can set you on fire with passion for the art form. You walk out of the theater knowing that something authentic has been uncovered about the very nature of human experience. And you realize that this particular revelation could only come via the…
When we first see old Chu, the bewildered father at the center of Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman, he’s doing what he knows best–steaming fresh fish in his sun-dappled garden, carefully roasting a just-plucked chicken, carving vegetables into exquisite rose-petal shapes. Lee observes these rituals in such concentrated, silent…
It has taken a couple of weeks to catch up with Andrew Bergman’s new comedy, but the rewards are still there. It Could Happen to You, a New York fairy tale about a sweet-tempered cop and a good-as-gold waitress who split a $4 million lottery jackpot, lightens up a bit…
Wednesday August 10 Tuff enuff: Listen to the album Strange Pleasure and you’ll wonder why Jimmie Vaughan didn’t leave the Fabulous Thunderbirds in the dust sooner. Vaughan, an able guitarist who’s lived in the shadow of brother and legend Stevie Ray, has finally come out on top with Strange Pleasure,…
