United 93 (Universal) A suggestion to those who’ve put off watching the year’s most wrenching and essential film: Before rolling the feature, first watch the documentary in which the families of those who died on the plane give the filmmakers their blessing, without reservation. If the mother, father, and sister…
If, at this remove, we can imagine Vienna in the late 1890s, we behold a great imperial capital in ferment. Gustav Mahler is not only reinventing the harmonic structure of serious music, but he is getting his head seriously shrunk by Sigmund Freud. Arnold Schoenberg takes painting lessons from the…
By the time Trust the Man opens this weekend, it will have been nearly a year since it debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it was picked up for distribution by Fox Searchlight. Forget that it’s a year old; this thing tastes a good decade past its expiration…
After declining an invitation to “embed” with a U.S. Army unit in Iraq, film director Deborah Scranton went the military one better by supplying Sony miniDV video cameras to members of Charlie Company, 3rd of the 172nd Infantry (Mountain) Regiment. The result is the most compelling Iraq documentary to date…
Colorado Modernism: 1930-1970. Though some believe that Colorado art doesn’t stand up to scrutiny because it’s so far behind the times, they’re wrong. Take modernist abstraction, for example: Local artists, especially those in Colorado Springs, were working in styles such as cubo-regionalism, surrealism and abstract expressionism as early as artists…
Arrested Development: Season Three (Fox) The final collection of Arrested Development discs feels sadly incomplete: only 13 episodes this time, the result of Fox’s inability to attract viewers to one of TV’s greatest comedies and the network’s unwillingness to give it a full farewell. But none of that diminishes the…
One of the weakest and most ridiculous aspects of popular culture is its narcissistic now-ness. There’s often no then or later, and without past experience or the messy knowledge of life, modern entertainment media often seems poached in a neurotic teenage brainpan, entranced with its own ignorant tunnel vision. A…
Low — which is to say no — expectations can be a wonderful thing: Expect nothing, and maybe you’ll get that little outta-nowhere sumpin-sumpin that turns an otherwise unfulfilling occurrence into a vaguely rewarding experience. It’s not like Invincible boasts the most promising of credentials: a first-time filmmaker (Ericson Core,…
A first-time feature film about a failed indie rocker, his beautiful girlfriend and his sanctimonious nature-boy brother on a road trip: There are so many ways that The Puffy Chair could have gone wrong. But it doesn’t — not once. Like Funny Ha Ha, the casually raw 2002 faux-cinéma-verité indie…
There’s a fine line between artistic genius and pretentious wankery, and most cineastes will tell you that the films of Matthew Barney exist right around that line. Those who like his work usually admit that it’s almost too insufferably pretentious to bear; those with no patience for it generally acknowledge…
Snakes on a Plane represents the ideal of contemporary major-studio filmmaking, which is to say, major-studio marketing. Who needs word-of-mouth screenings or critics when you can sell the four-word pitch as written on a napkin? It points to a future that takes all the guesswork out of movie-going. A major-studio…
So you know how Parker Posey nearly always plays sarcastic, uptight smokers? In The Oh in Ohio, she finally stretches a bit: Here she’s a sarcastic, uptight career woman…who doesn’t smoke! Also, she wears her hair down, whereas it’s usually pulled back into some kind of tightly wound style more…
A one-night Denver premiere of Texas filmmaker Turk Pipkin’s Nobelity is scheduled at the Starz FilmCenter. A documentary that has been getting good buzz at film festivals and private screenings, it features conversations with nine Nobel laureates — including deceased nanotech pioneer Rick Smalley (Chemistry, 1996), cancer researcher Harold Varmus…
CHAIN REACTION. For the third time in two years, there’s a major show in town addressing how traditional Chicano art has progressed into what’s been dubbed post-Chicano art. This latest effort is CHAIN REACTION: Chicano/a and Latino/a Art in Colorado, which is being presented in the Vida Ellison Gallery on…
Veronica Mars: The Complete Second Season (Warner Bros.) Any concept along the lines of “high school hottie solves crimes” is bound to make for watchable TV, but who would have expected this? Equal parts 90210 teen soap, murder mystery, and comedy, Veronica Mars pulls you in with its sharp writing,…
A winning tale of sex, real estate and more or less immaculate conception, Quinceaera, as you might expect from a white-made drama about Latino life in Echo Park, threatens to be all about a pregnant teenager and a prodigal cholo in the hood. Yet this saucy, rowdy, heartfelt and terribly…
Jason Lethcoe’s book Amazing Adventures From Zoom’s Academy doesn’t particularly wow the reader with its prose, but the concept is solid — basically, Harry Potter with superheroes rather than wizards. The heroine, Summer Jones, is an awkward thirteen-year-old tomboy with a goofy father named Jasper who likes to tinker with…
No baseball fan who knows a sinker from a slider believes the grand old game should ever be played indoors — curses on your garbage-bag outfield “wall,” Minnesota Twins; good riddance, Houston Astrodome — and it sometimes rankles the purest of the pure that they must watch even a televised…
The Armory Group. In a summer art calendar that’s uncharacteristically filled with significant exhibitions, The Armory Group: 40 Years has got to be one of the most important of them all. The story begins back in 1966 in Boulder — specifically, in the fine-arts department at the University of Colorado…
Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier (Paramount) It’s all here, more or less: the 1979 theatrical cut of Francis Ford Coppola’s harrowing and still-hypnotic Joseph Conrad-in-Vietnam adaptation, the 49-minutes-longer-but-feels-24-minutes-shorter 2001 Redux edition, Marlon Brando’s entire 17-minute “The Hollow Men” monologue, even more “lost” and deleted scenes (including a spooky-shocking one, in…
Snort a few lines of Fame, screen Save the Last Dance a couple of times, and channel what you’ve learned from the bad-ass pose of a second-rate Eminem and you get Step Up, a dance romance with the originality of a paint-by-numbers set. First-time director Anne “Mama” Fletcher, the choreographer…
If Crash grew a pair of cojones, it might look something like Larry Clark’s cheerfully defiant Wassup Rockers, in which a pack of Latino skaters from South Los Angeles spend an afternoon marooned in the suburban jungle of Beverly Hills, cutting a swath through dense thickets of white privilege and…
