When I was around six years old, my mother took a class in oil painting at Emily Griffith Opportunity School. I have vivid memories of her bringing home boxes of smelly paint and handfuls of those tiny books filled with child-sized reproductions of the paintings of Renoir and Van Gogh…
Beware the ghost with a bargain: The price for the ethereal gifts he offers may be too high. The hero of Charles Dickens’s The Haunted Man, now in a splendid new production by CityStage Ensemble, discovers just how high a price when he’s offered release from the sorrows of his…
The eagerness and all-out urgency driving John Singleton’s movies often overwhelm his common sense, but no one can fault the young filmmaker for lack of feeling or purpose. In Boyz N the Hood, Singleton threw himself into the streets of Los Angeles with both philosophical barrels blazing, and by the…
Susan Sarandon’s advisors shook their heads. Once you play a mother, they said, you’re stuck with mothers. You can’t go back. You can never outwit Tommy Lee Jones in court again. You can’t romance Kevin Costner in the bush leagues. You can’t rob convenience stores with Geena Davis. “That’s what…
Now that Cap’n Newt is steering the ship of state, how long will it take First Mate Helms to toss Pulp Fiction overboard and throw The Simpsons in the brig? While we wait for a little neo-Puritan backlash, here’s a safe, literate and, in places, self-righteous movie about the endurance…
Wednesday January 4 It’s all relative: Mom never wore neat shirtwaists and pearls in the kitchen the way June Cleaver did, and Dad is nowhere near as cute a roost ruler as Dr. Huxtable used to be. Your brothers and sisters had normal growing pains, not the contrived problems faced…
Any curator looking to find the best women artists from the Front Range over the last twenty years would do well to read the roster of the Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute. Begun in 1976, RMWI’s annual search for female (and, since 1993, male) artists, writers and performers boasts an impressive…
Sometimes a guy is better off when his wildest dreams don’t come true. After all, when real life intrudes on fantasy, it can be most disappointing. So the hero finds out in Last of the Red Hot Lovers, playing at the RiverTree Theatre through Saturday. Oddly enough, Neil Simon’s meditation…
Ludwig van Beethoven’s sundry biographers, wherever they’re sitting, may feel like throwing their hands over their eyes upon being subjected to the crass speculations in Bernard Rose’s Immortal Beloved. But they won’t cover their ears. Musical fidelity has always been more vital to composer biopics than historical accuracy, and Britisher…
How’s this for high concept? Hip, dreamy black dude from the Pittsburgh ‘hood evades loan sharks by passing himself off as square suburban businessman’s long-lost childhood buddy. Despite cultural clashes and comic missteps at the country club, impostor and entire dysfunctional family of white folks wind up friends. Bingo. Ring…
Wednesday December 28 The opposite sax: The Creative Music Works continues its Frontiers: Explorations in Out Music series tonight with an adventurous performance by Random Axe. The saxophone duo (Mark Harris and Glenn Nitta)–a pair of locals who both have been seen previously with Monkey Siren and various Fred Hess…
BEST TEN OF 1994 1. Pulp Fiction. Boy wonder Tarantino scores again with wickedly clever crime triptych. Travolta comeback in full swing. 2. Blue, White and Red. Polish master Kieslowski hits the trifecta, then announces retirement. 3. Cobb. Denver must wait for Tommy Lee JonesÕs brilliant portrait of savage, embittered…
The last time I checked, Albert Einstein was better known as the most brilliant theoretical physicist in human history than as a cute old prankster with white hair whose corduroys were always slipping over his butt. But then, I could be wrong. My SAT scores were lukewarm, I went to…
Out there in the forest primeval of moviedom, the “wild child” has long lurked, rustling around in search of edible tree bark and good box office. First Tarzan swung through the underbrush. Then Francois Truffaut discovered uncivilized, unspoiled Homo sapiens in 1969’s L’Enfant Sauvage. Werner Herzog rounded him up again…
In the Age of Jackie Collins, Anton Chekhov is not the first name that springs to mind when the prof starts talking lit. The Schwarzenegger crowd hasn’t read Chekhov in years, and no one pays 65 bucks a ticket anymore to see his stuff on Broadway. Thank goodness, then, for…
Wednesday December 21 A matter of chorus: Acclaimed lyric soprano Faith Esham and the Denver Gay Men’s Chorus will get together tonight at Boettcher Concert Hall, 14th and Curtis St. in the Plex, to prove all over again that Christmas and music are inseparable. The program, O Night Divine!, features…
The phrase “read you like a book” has some basis in fact: Most observers will agree that the human body can be read for meaning, much like a text. Some artists have taken the metaphor literally, concentrating on the direct representation of body parts or inventing ways for live bodies…
Charles Dickens understood the fine art of tearjerking. Nobody before or since could sentimentalize human virtue, family life or the death of a child with such unabashed exploitation and get away with it. But Dickens loved the rarer pleasures of supernatural horror as well, and his A Christmas Carol, now…
Thieves and murderers can turn into comic heroes–even guardian angels. The result in My Three Angels at the Westminster Dinner Theatre is an intermittently divine comedy. The play proposes three miscreants as benevolent figures who watch over a poor but honest family when a rich and treacherous relative tries to…
For seventy years Dorothy Parker’s adherents have been calling her “the first modern American woman” or “the wittiest writer of her time” or something equally absolute. Valued for her sardonic commentaries on failed love, suicide, heavy drinking and the bad plays she was forced to review, she is held up…
“Don’t look at me in that tone of voice.” Yes, Dorothy Parker said that, too. She also said, “Let’s go wild–there’s plenty of time to do nothing once you’re dead.” And she summed up a Katharine Hepburn performance with this famous jape: “The whole range of emotion, from A to…
Before the cameras even started rolling on Ready to Wear (formerly Pret-a-Porter), Robert Altman’s mordant sendup of the fashion industry, the filmmaker had offended delicate sensibilities from New York to Paris and beyond. John Fairchild, editorial director of Women’s Wear Daily, has led a massive preemptive strike against Altman in…
