The Video Station: (303) 440-4448

I wish I had the time to watch again The Doors (biopic) and read again No One Here Gets Out Alive (biography of The Doors). I could add to this review a comparison of these other treatments of the lives of Jim Morrison and the other Doors. But here’s my stand-alone review [...]

The business of fashion, like the business of art or the music industry, is a shuck and jive. But this isn’t news and our reactions to these institutions are always the same. Where anything creative is involved, we’re jealous because we can’t do that and aren’t privy to the glamorous life that goes with [...]

In 2005 Werner Herzog made Grizzly Man about Timothy Treadwell, a man who lived among Alaskan grizzly bears and was ultimately killed by one. The kindest thing to say about Treadwell was that he was a lost soul who’d finally found his calling, but in the film he came across as needy and delusional, not [...]

Let’s say the electric guitar had never been invented. Pop music wouldn’t be the same. Would all the artists on the Billboard charts ‘lo these many decades have even existed? What colors would be missing from music if you take away how an electric guitar acts/responds through different amplifiers and effects? One answer is the [...]

It’s interesting that the word ‘rational’ is defined as “sensible, sane” or “endowed with reason,” but to put together a line of reasoning, to ‘rationalize’, means to offer an explanation that’s “plausible but wrong”. Shouldn’t taking action on something be an extension of its true meaning? The problem lies in that a “rationale” is a [...]

So there was a lot of hype when this came out last year. My more conscientious friends told me I had to see it. Well, I put it off for a long time, because, growing up the way I did, in a hippie new age environment, I felt that I probably knew all about its [...]

Suspension of disbelief. Subverting the analytical part of the brain that says “that can’t be” is key to the experience of film, more so for the theatre. Is it easier, in these days of movies driven by computer enhanced special effects? A striving for realism or an overwhelming of the senses, a CGI three card [...]

Anvil! The Story of Anvil is the true story of the failing 80’s real life “Spinal Tap”. Having said that, don’t go into this hoping to see miniaturized European landscapes, cucumbers wrapped in tin foil or any sort of amp that goes to eleven because you won’t. Unlike Spinal Tap, Anvil is a real band, [...]

Trumbo, based on a stage play of the same name, tells the story of Dalton Trumbo. Mr. Trumbo was a novelist, a screenwriter, and an accused communist. As one of the Hollywood Ten, he was blacklisted for his supposed beliefs, and for refusing to name names during the HUAC trials.

A fascinating little film on an infamous fashion designer, Valentino was born in Italy in 1932. He became interested in fashion at the young age of seventeen. After many years of study, he opened up his very own small fashion store in Rome. Although small, his fashion house became the signature for couture fashion. Valentino [...]