John Merrick had a terrible disease (never correctly diagnosed, but now considered “Proteus syndrome”) that so disfigured him, he was known as the “Elephant Man” to the society that first abused and then protected him. Victorian England could be incredibly perverse in a way we scarcely can comprehend. Victorianism brought…
For thirty years Hollywood considered sports movies box-office poison–even after Rocky Balboa went the distance with Apollo Creed. The American sports mania didn’t hit the movie industry until the mid-Eighties–about the time Resume Speed, Texas, got wired for cable–but right now the white men who run the show can’t jump…
It’s ironic, isn’t it, that filmmakers keep trying to reinvent Don Siegel’s 1956 horror classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Philip Kaufman did it in 1978, and Abel Ferrara is taking his shot this year. Let’s hope that each of them grasps the implications of cloning a movie about the…
Wednesday February 16 Good as Goulet: Got those post-Valentine blues? Cheer yourself up with a little chivalry and romance–go see Robert Goulet reprise his made-to-order role as King Arthur in Camelot, on stage this week at the Buell Theatre, 13th and Curtis St. Evening performances are at 8 p.m. tonight…
Stock Show season traditionally gives Denver galleries a yearly opportunity, if not a mandate, to showcase art of the West. Most of it stereotypically portrays the romantic ideals of cowboy life, often expertly mimicking work from the era of the Golden West, say, 1860-1920. Among the herd, The West as…
Of all Tennessee Williams’s sometimes brilliant but always anguished works, Suddenly Last Summer is the most difficult to produce. The structure of the play is so awkward and the horrors so thick that melodrama sneaks in unbidden at every turn. The first of two one-act plays included in a program…
The late Sam Peckinpah’s lively chase movie The Getaway is unlikely to catch The Wild Bunch or Major Dundee on the all-time Peckinpah hit parade. For one thing, the acting skills of ex-model Ali McGraw, who co-starred with Steve McQueen 22 years ago, will never be the stuff of cult…
Johnny, the sardonic young drifter at the center of Mike Leigh’s startling new film Naked, is a kind of serial killer, but he carries no gun, rope or knife. A street-tough British bloke from Manchester, he can be physically brutal with women, but he specializes in maiming his victims emotionally–by…
Wednesday February 9 That ode black magic: Even bohemians need love–and this Valentine week, the beatest hipsters around can celebrate romance in their own style, thanks to the Daily Perc Coffeehouse, an Aurora java joint at 9875 E. Colfax. The Perc, which normally hosts an open poetry reading every Wednesday…
While making a good likeness is the consummate goal to most representational artists, some insist that resemblance to the subject and its mood aren’t enough. Painting and sculpture at two LoDo galleries find profound meaning in the realistic depiction of ordinary things. At 1/1 Gallery, Jim Alford uses airbrush and…
It’s natural enough–a full-blown, new-age interpretation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But while the Denver Center Theatre Company’s rendering explores the fantastic quality of dreams, building a fabulous world full of rich, bright magic, it sometimes palls–like having to listen to a fundamentalist sermon when you hold different ideas…
In Peter Medak’s Romeo Is Bleeding, Sergeant Jack Grimaldi is a crooked New York cop firmly in the pocket of a Mafia don. He’s also cheating on his wife with a cocktail waitress, and when he’s assigned to hole up with a beautiful killer who’s turned state’s evidence, she seduces…
Given the gruesome effects of German mysticism on the twentieth century, it’s wise to regard any new form of it with suspicion. That includes the films of Wim Wenders, a thoroughly postwar German who seems to embrace both pacifist Euro-modernism and traditional Catholic theology. To be a German filmmaker in…
Wednesday February 2 Mambazo kings: The name is the first mystery, but it’s really very simple. Ladysmith refers to a South African township, black symbolizes the black ox, thought to be the strongest kind, and mambazo is an ax. Put that all together and you’ve got Ladysmith Black Mambazo, a…
Two new shows stretch the definition of the photograph as art while offering original and exciting visual experiences. Experimental Vision: The Evolution of the Photogram Since 1919, at the Denver Art Museum, tracks the long, fascinating history of cameraless photos, dubbed “photograms.” And Beyond Photography, at Emmanuel Gallery, skips past…
Caustic and brilliant, August Wilson nails down the realities of racism in his plays. They are as revealing, humane and in-your-face as they are graceful, funny and entertaining. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, at the Denver Center Theatre Company, is a masterful piece of theater, competently mounted and performed with moments…
The limousine liberals John Guare satirized in his Broadway hit Six Degrees of Separation are the same kind of New Yorkers Woody Allen seems so genuinely fond of…and so profoundly incapable of understanding. Installed in lavish Park Avenue apartments, these posers have a passing acquaintance with both intellectual fashions and…
John Madden’s Golden Gate, a romantic soap opera badly disguised as a fable of McCarthyite bigotry and good-guy guilt, features Matt Dillon as an eager-beaver FBI agent assigned to root out supposed communists in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1952, and Joan Chen as the beautiful daughter of an innocent Chinese…
Wednesday January 26 Childish pursuits: Author Jonathan Kellerman can say without reservation that it pays to write what you know. He used to be a practicing child psychologist, but now writes full time about the mystery adventures of fictional child psychologist Alex Delaware. Kellerman will be on hand for a…
When the theater “holds a mirror up to nature,” it’s not always a pretty sight. The nature reflected there is frail, cruel, stupid and cold as often as it is brave, kind, bright and sympathetic. But the reflection can order and analyze human experience, making it easier for us to…
The messages you get from the presidential campaign documentary The War Room are multiplying at an alarming rate. Clearly, the husband and wife team of D.A. Pennebaker (Don’t Look Back, Monterey Pop) and Chris Hegedus meant it as a valentine to the efforts of candidate Bill Clinton’s smart-mouthed chief handler,…
Director Michael Apted has range. He’s made two dozen films for British television, the political documentary Incident at Oglala and five installments of his continuing 7 Up series, which has followed a group of disparate children, at seven-year intervals, to adulthood. Apted has also ventured into Hollywood features–notably the 1980…
