The fastest person in the world. The most career home runs. The best Donkey Kong player of all time. These achievements may seem inconsequential to outsiders, but to the people who pursue them, they can mean everything. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters follows the heated rivalry between…
I played college rugby for Humboldt State in northern California. When this comes up in conversation, people are taken aback. I watch their expressions as they think, “She seemed so mild-mannered, but really, she’s a barbarian!” I treasure those moments. Nobody messes with an ex-rugger. And Colorado is a rugby…
World War III has not yet happened. But a war rages in the heart of Africa that’s killed as many civilians as World War II. Dubbed the African World War, it’s allowed usurpers to strip the resource-rich nation of the Democratic Republic of Congo under the auspices of battle. Even…
This I believe. I’ve been listening to NPR long enough to appreciate those words and smile when I hear them, because I know someone is about to move or inspire me, or maybe just make me laugh. Bill Gates believes that “the power of creativity and intelligence can make the…
J.S. Bach hasn’t topped the charts at Amazon or iTunes recently. “Frankly, if we don’t start doing something, we are going to lose our classical-music audience in future generations,” says Jennie Doris, a Boulder musician and writer. So she and her colleagues are injecting a little David Sedaris into their…
“Amy Goodman is a goddess,” enthuses KGNU’s Joanne Cole, “and she is a real journalist in a day when there are very few, and she is a tireless journalist on top of that, and we are so thrilled to have her here.” And you should be, too: The host of…
Counting the days until the flurries fly? The fashion industry does a little slope-sharing tonight at Sideways Riders, where Essentials Clothing plans to lip-slide into fall by launching a sneak peek of its winter line at Vinyl nightclub. The snow and skate garb gurus have teamed up with FashionDenver to…
“I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to do a show with works taking whimsical ideas from The Wizard of Oz, or abstracting ideas from The Wizard of Oz — just using it as a starting point for inspiration?” says Kim Harrell of East End Applied Arts. Fun, indeed: Harrell’s idea…
Soviet socialist realism meets dada at the birth of America for a look at the “founding father” myth in the Komar & Melamid: American Dreams exhibition. The show features eight large paintings and a series of forty works on paper that recast strikingly familiar patriotic imagery of both the U.S…
Typically, first-person shooters are a lot like virtual shooting galleries: Great fun, yes, but not exactly thought-provoking. So it’s nice when an FPS comes along that’s trying to be something more — and even better when it actually succeeds. Sometimes you know it in the first few minutes. Take Half-Life:…
Andre Rieu: Live in New York (Denon) Away From Her (Lionsgate) Bones: Season Two (Fox) Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (HBO) Casper Meets Wendy: Family Fun Edition (Fox) Charmed: The Final Season (Paramount) DOA: Dead or Alive (Weinstein) Ever Again (Starz) Fantastic Four: World’s Greatest Heroes — Volume Two…
The Graduate: 40th Anniversary Edition (MGM) Fifteen years after its last home-video commemorative edition (extras from which appear here), The Graduate once more gets the bonus-laden makeover — and if ever a movie deserved its kudos, it’s Mike Nichols’ masterwork. That said, the movie is its own bonus; not since…
Clyfford Still Unveiled. A master and pioneer of mid-twentieth-century abstract expressionism, painter Clyfford Still was something of an eccentric in the artist-as-egomaniac stripe. His antisocial behavior led to a situation where 94 percent of his artworks remained together after he died — a staggeringly complete chronicle of his oeuvre that…
Some people follow art as though it were a religion, and I’d include myself in that eccentric group. But I think it’s just a coincidence that onetime houses of worship so often wind up as art galleries. That’s the case with the church-then-synagogue that is the Emmanuel Gallery on the…
All in the Timing. David Ives’s six one-acts are all about language, communication and understanding, and also chance and fate. The dialogue is light and funny and fizzy, and it gets your frontal lobes buzzing as you attempt to catch and process all the flying puns, allusions, jokes, rhythms and…
From the moment you walk into the theater and see the topsy-turvy set, the central metaphor of Vote for Uncle Marty is obvious. And although the suggestion that we live in an upside-down world isn’t particularly original, the play certainly is, since it arises from the collaborative work of Buntport’s…
Look at me,” Uncle Peck pleads to his young niece, the narrator-protagonist of How I Learned to Drive. “Listen to me.” And that’s just what she does. Deeply and over a period of years, she ponders her relationship with the uncle who first molested her when she was eleven, a…
It’s pretty much a toss-up which I love more: gorging on cinema or getting up at noon. And so, on the first day of the Toronto International Film Festival, in lieu of contemplating Bela Tarr’s The Man From London, I lingered in my pajamas anticipating The Breakfast From Room Service…
The Salton Sea is an ecological disaster, a man-made mistake that was supposed to become a resort to rival Palm Springs. Instead the sea has turned into a replacement wetlands refuge for sea birds whose habitats were consumed by such densely populated Southern California cities as San Diego and Los…
This is a mockumentary, right?” I’ve been asked that question at least a dozen times since The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters made its bow at the Slamdance Film Festival in January. Quite simply, some folks just don’t believe that Seth Gordon’s film about two men vying for…
In the new Neil Jordan movie, Jodie Foster plays New York talk radio DJ Erica Bain, who survives a vicious Central Park mugging and becomes an urban crusader devoted to cleaning up the city — with a Glock instead of a broom. Yes, The Brave One is that movie: the…
Some days I want to eat chicken feet. I want tripe and trotters, crispy fried intestine and all the assorted culinary weirdness that makes the world go ’round. I would be just as bored with cheeseburgers every day as someone living in, say, Addis Ababa would be with nothing but…
