La Cage Aux Folles. This is a big, splashy musical with lots of big, splashy song numbers. But unlike many such musicals, La Cage Aux Folles also has heart, humor and a good story to tell. In a time of intense mean-spiritedness and prejudice, it carries a message of tolerance…
Marley was dead.” Those are the first words of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, although he still pops up again a couple of times: Scrooge sees his old partner’s face in the door knocker, looking like “a bad lobster in a dark cellar,” and Marley’s ghost later appears festooned in…
The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Volume Two — The War Years (Paramount) Alien Apocalypse (Anchor Bay) Balls of Fury (Universal) Black Moon Rising (Anchor Bay) Boy Eats Girl (Lionsgate) Braveheart: Special Collector’s Edition (Paramount) Bring It On: In It to Win It (Universal) Cinderella II: Dreams Come True Special…
Once (Fox)Easily the year’s most perfect pop album — damned good movie too, the finest “musical” of the past 20 years. The disc’s making-of refers to it as a “modern musical,” but Once is as old-fashioned as it gets: Guy (Glen Hansard) meets Girl (Markéta Irglová), they fall in love,…
Nothing says “holiday spirit” quite like stabbing a terrorist or hammering a goombah, as the hottest games this season invite us to do. But no matter how cutting-edge the stars of 2007 may be, they are also unmistakably familiar. This week, we stack the holiday hits of today against the…
Simmering below the squeamish elder-care euphemism “uncharted territory” is a fearful awareness that when it comes to dealing with the growing army of senile parents, we have no idea what the hell we’re doing. Tamara Jenkins plumbs the depths of that terror in her new film, The Savages, and jacks…
Kites fly high over the San Francisco Bay and Kabul (okay, China), but not much else soars in Marc Forster’s flaccid adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s vivid 2002 novel, which covers three decades of Afghanistan’s misery under serial totalitarian rule. Arriving on the heels of Atonement, The Kite Runner tells a…
As an actor, John C. Reilly is the opposite of Mr. Cellophane. He doesn’t disappear into a role; roles disappear onto him — the unlikely porn sidekick of Boogie Nights, the inadequately adequate family man of The Hours, the cutup cowboy of A Prairie Home Companion, all stamped and imprinted…
Hell of a thing, getting Mike Nichols to adapt the yer-kiddin’-me story of Charlie Wilson, the congressman from Lufkin, Texas, who damn near single-handedly helped the Afghans kick out the Russians in the 1980s. Seems about par for the course with this story, in which everybody knows somebody who can…
Here’s the thing: Tim Burton pulled it off. Nearing the end of an uncommonly strong year for American movies, he’s taken a hallowed classic of the modern musical theater, hemmed in the narrative from well over two hours to well under, cast confessed non-singers in the principal roles, and somehow…
I was trying to squeeze my body through a hole at the bottom of the fence when the truck drove up. But my jacket got hooked on a wire, so all I could do was lie there and stare back like an idiot when the driver looked at me, then…
The three friends approached the old factory. It was mid-morning on Sunday, September 9, so traffic on South Broadway was slight, reducing the likelihood of being seen. They scanned the perimeter, took a quick glance back. Then they walked through the unlocked gate and into the alleyway, looking for a…
Today, the Colorado Springs Police Department is under continuing pressure from local and national media to divulge all pertinent details related to the shocking December 9 murder of two people and the wounding of several others at New Life, the megachurch made famous by disgraced pastor Ted Haggard. But prior…
Dear Mexican: USA citizens are sick and tired that for more than forty years, Latin American elites have lived like monarchs because they pimp their poor to American businesses for cheap labor that American taxpayers have been forced to subsidize with health care, food, housing, education and so forth, costing…
My mother is teetering on the edge right now. She acts like she’s holding it together, putting up a good front and saying relevant, timely things like “Christmas gifts,” but inside she’s falling apart. Her baby is having babies, and she’s made herself sick with worry. No, one of my…
Over the past three Saturday mornings, the Children’s Museum of Denver has hosted “Snack With Santa,” where kids noshed, chatted and got their photos taken with Ol’ St. Nick. But at the most recent event, moms got something extra with their price of admission: Santa Claus was encouraging them to…
Just in time for the holiday crush, Denver International Airport has a new attraction — and no, it’s not the bathroom where Idaho senator Larry Craig reportedly issued another one of his wide-stance invitations (“Stalled,” December 6). This attraction encourages travelers to join another mile-high club altogether, by having their…
“It’s sad.” All day, the shoppers keep coming into All American Vogue, pausing to look at the Fiesta ware, to read the anti-Bush bumperstickers, to finger that ’50s jacket they’ve fingered so many times before, and then to stop before the man standing behind the counter. The stretch of Broadway…
“Blackburned,” Alan Prendergast, December 13 Questionable Judgment Thank you, Judge Blackburn, for setting aside the jury’s ruling and award, and letting your personal vendetta against Mr. Brennan take precedence over what really matters: the firing of Mr. Cadorna. Now Mr. Cadorna must go through another trial because you don’t give the…
Monday Tuesday Wednesday: I awoke this morning before the sun. I opened my blinds to a firey orange suggestion that it may soon follow my lead. I arrived at work bleary-eyed and as I approached the glass doors that lead into the cafeteria, I hit an icy patch that sent…
It’s Christmas time again in the Mile High City. That means you can count on a few things: Festive, postcard-worthy lights adorning the city and county building, seeing a proliferation of Santa hats on drunken weekend warriors from LoDo to SoCo and, of course, the return of Blister 66’s annual…
Why give anything an intent listen and fair assessment when I can review 5 albums in a matter of 225 seconds? Bullet for My Valentine Scream Aim Fire EP 20-20 Entertainment 00:30-01:15 of “Eye of the Storm” ARG! This is really, really, really bad metal. I believe that someone from…
