The first (and maybe the last) thing anyone will want to know about The Specialist is that an hour and a half passes before Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone pretend to copulate in the shower. Until then, what they do is model expensive sunglasses down in Miami and talk on…
Bad scholarship, new-age fantasy and publishers’ avarice have collided to produce the current vogue for Nostradamus, the sixteenth-century French physician and astrologer who is said to have predicted everything from Nazi Germany to AIDS to the JFK assassination. What he didn’t predict is that a movie this awful would one…
Wednesday October 12 Favorite haunts: That black pall hanging over the city is a little bit eerie, but…not to worry. It happens every year as people begin to gear up for the ghoulish costume balls and general mayhem of Halloween. And in preparation, several haunted houses are opening their doors…
Rejecting journalistic photography while investigating the uncharted neighborhood of the unconscious, three artists turn reality-based images into weird worlds full of symbols and suggestion at Mackey Gallery this month. Although the exhibit’s photographs are in black-and-white, they all display dark-hued psychological effects. Phoenix artist Linda Ingraham starts with grainy photographs…
Perhaps it takes an Eastern European to bring the Theater of the Absurd into the present; after all, people in that part of the world have seen so much more pointless cruelty up close. Pavel M. Dobrusky appears to be qualified, and the Czech director’s new Star Fever at the…
Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is one of the great dream narratives of all time. There’s a lot of sense behind the nonsense verse and the bizarre behavior of all those whom Alice meets on her adventure. But then, the life of a dream has a logic of its own…
The career (if you can call it that) of Edward G. Wood Jr. has become the stuff of cult legend because the man is widely acknowledged as the worst movie director of all time. In his 1950s heyday, such as it was, even Hollywood’s lowest shlockmeisters wouldn’t hire him. If…
For my money, the savage and savagely funny crime films of Quentin Tarantino are a welcome antidote not only to those witless action heroes who give off baby talk as they tear up the joint, but also to Hollywood’s current wave of sweetness, its creeping Gumpmania. Let the self-appointed morals…
Wednesday October 5 American flyers: Sometime between the early Seventies and today, Boston rockers Aerosmith rose from the status of fourteen-year-old boys’ cult favorites to their current berth as grand old band of the decade. Behind Steve Tyler’s fiery, acrobatic vocals and Joe Perry’s smart guitar work, the group’s arrangements…
The medium of printmaking still carries an Old World cachet–as well as equally exclusionary costs. The expenses involved in making a hand-pulled print on heavy paper puts the reproductive technique out of reach for many artists. To overcome this obstacle, some arts communities have worked to make printmaking facilities more…
Ever the sentimentalist, playwright Neil Simon nevertheless has a knack for recognizing the ordinary citizen as interesting. Despite his penchant for safe answers and shallow ideals, Simon still manages to build hilarious dialogue and create characters in whom we invest emotionally. He takes us all in, and most of us…
This autumn, baseball fans are getting too little World Series and too much Ken Burns. In all likelihood, the last thing the strike-stricken multitudes need right now is another gooey baseball movie that fields the usual lineup of sentimental caricatures. But that’s what The Scout is. Apparently, Hollywood hasn’t figured…
Until now, no one has mistaken the fine-featured, sublimely gifted actress Meryl Streep for a regular on American Gladiators. But in The River Wild, there’s not only muscle in Streep’s performance, there’s plenty of it on her frame, too. In this rip-roaring adventure, the beefed-up star can shoot a set…
Wednesday September 28 Back in action: In the real world, there are few things you can really count on to be pleasing all the time, but the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble has a way of dancing all over that theory. The group will put its trademark skill and elan…
After fifty years of disrupting the art world, the formerly disreputable style called abstract expressionism has achieved a kind of elder-statesman eminence. Paintings that once were the butt of endless I-don’t-know-much-about-art jokes now enrich museums and decorate corporate offices, hotels and movie sets. Unfortunately, all of this visibility hasn’t made…
When an ordinary bloke poses as a foreigner in a remote resort in Georgia, he becomes a magic mirror in which the good-hearted people around him see their better selves and watch their dreams of fulfillment unfold. The evil-hearted, on the other hand, are undone by what they see in…
It’s at the pinnacle of Western civilization, but King Lear is still, first and foremost, a ripping yarn. When a theater company pulls it off, the audience leaves thoroughly entertained and rich in wisdom. A new theater troupe has come to Denver, and the very first thing the Ad Hoc…
Boaz Yakin’s Fresh has its heart in the right place, but it takes a bewildering wrong turn. First, the acceptable news: Yakin again shows us the dangers and sorrows facing a good kid on the streets of the ghetto. Twelve-year-old Fresh (Sean Nelson) lives with his aunt and eleven cousins…
In the great scheme of evil–where the schemers always out-think the victims–the TV quiz-show scandals of the 1950s are minor infractions. In view of later events like Watergate, Iran-Contra or the O.J. Simpson case, we Americans can hardly be expected to get all worked up about a couple of TV…
Wednesday September 21 Meal ticket: Boulder’s favorite home and gourmet store (actually two stores) is throwing a four-day Peppercorn Anniversary Celebration, beginning today and continuing through Saturday. Each day will be loaded down with cooking demonstrations and myriad food tastings, with delicious wares from Colorado and around the world. Customers…
Given the current art-world trend to deconstruct every available style and medium, it was only a matter of time before the same turn-it-upside-down mania hit the furniture market. To fit postmodern strategy, the “new” furniture must look like it’s coming apart at the seams or defying gravity–as well as tradition–all…
We are all related to each other, separated by only six people–six degrees of separation. You may not think you have anything in common with a monk in Tibet, but if you could trace a path through the right six people, you’d find a direct connection. This intriguing, if dubious,…
