November 2, 2003|Over a thousand people packed into The Rise nightclub for the 26^th Starz Denver International Film Festival's opening-night gala reception. A cavernous space with booming music, the venue was a drastic departure from last year's sedate to-do at the DCPA's Temple Buell Theater, and it was in one of the upstairs rooms that I first met Wentworth Miller, the tall, handsome, calm, and extremely courteous young star of–and, lucky for me, the best thing about–Robert Benton's pretty awful The Human Stain. I met him again the next morning for official purposes at Denver's also surprisingly tall Mag Hotel, plopped in the middle of the busy intersection of 19^th and Stout along Banker's Row in lower downtown Denver. Best known for his guest appearances on television shows like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Popular" (and as an athlete with a literal bleeding heart in the seventh season premiere of "ER") as well as for the "Luke Skywalker" role in the unfortunate Dinotopia, Miller is receiving what could potentially be his big break, stealing the show from Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, and Gary Sinise playing a role that's surprisingly close to home.

October 26, 2003|For all the praise afforded it in recent years, Michael Mann's 1992 The Last of the Mohicans is still an undervalued film of big emotions, boasting of a macho sensibility more bracing than any number of post-modern ruminations on the cult of manhood. Above all its technical achievements and ecstatic scripting, it offers Magua, perhaps the most important modern depiction of any minority character and one that arguably, single-handedly, made the casting of the Native American as the impossibly noble Child of the Earth suddenly déclassé. Wes Studi is much of the reason for the success of Mohicans, his portrayal of Magua revealing depths that reverberate with me still, offering hope that Asians in American cinema might one day be as difficult to minimize as Native Americans have become. Tied in with that respect, however, is of course the reality that roles for Indians have become relatively scarce in recent years.

October 19, 2003|It's in a subterranean hotel breakfast nook with fountains and a tiny little glassed-in room for God knows what that I meet the manic Scott Caan, who wears a tight baseball t-shirt and demonstrates yo-yo tricks to the slight consternation of a publicist eyeing the glass enclosure, I thought, a little nervously. After showing me a trick of his own devising, the Caan Machine Gun, I asked him to repeat it so that I could photograph it:

October 12, 2003|Talking with actors, especially young actors, is always an iffy proposition: the craft of acting is a difficult one to articulate, its choices obscure or instinctual, ideally, and in the case of a fresh talent, anecdotes are fewer and of less interest. So you find yourself, often, repeating the junket line: How'd you get started? What was it like working with X? Who are your influences? What's your next project? Questions, all, that only really need to be asked once in this day of fast, permanent information.