Why do we love A Christmas Carol so much that we see it again and again, year after year? It’s an annual pageant of redemption that gives us a villain we get to boo, and a reformed soul we get to cheer. Scrooge stands in for our guilty and regretful…
Singing elves. Dancing snowmen. The awkward beauties of stop-motion animation. Yuletides threatened by mad professors, insane dictators, giant buzzards and Arab stereotypes. Welcome to the world of Rankin/Bass, a company that took the shiny, pop-culture Christmas ball and ran with it, creating a demented body of video work that will…
More traumatizing events happen during the Yuletide season than during any other period. This time of year, you can’t throw a brick without hitting a holiday well-wisher — and believe me, we’ve tried. The crushing rush of Christmas is so culturally pervasive that you can’t escape the traditional holiday entertainments that…
The dismal march through Christmas kitsch continues. While we value love, kindness, faith and redemption, when you fetishize any values and work them over for their commercial value, they ossify. They sour. They become shorthand for real feelings. Then they take their place entirely. That’s when they become despicable. That’s…
Quentin Tarentino’s The Hateful Eight opens this week, the latest chapter in a long tradition of Westerns filmed in Colorado. The state’s epic scenery has made this a destination for filmmakers for more than a century, and many of them made Westerns. From film’s beginnings to the early 1960s, Westerns were…
This week we’ll post the 2015 winners of our My Best/Worst New Year’s Eve contest. To prime the pump, Brad Weismann is sharing his memories of not one bad New Year’s Eve, not two — but three. Keep reading for the sad stories. Ah, New Year’s Eve! That gala night…
“We’re not in danger, but we need help,” says Alex Weimer, Bug Theatre executive artistic director. That job title sounds impressive, but Weimer is going on eighteen years as the guy who sweeps up, fixes the toilets and keeps the Bug going. And what is the Bug? “The quintessential community…
Are you sick of it yet? We are drowning in a tidal wave of promotion pushing Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It’s everywhere you look, and the premiere set for next Friday, December 18, is the anticipated film opening in history. Things weren’t always this way, though. Creator George Lucas was…
After World War II, downtown Denver started to decay, and movie palaces disappeared. The Curtis Street pleasure row came down, and the grand old houses that remained turned into adult-film showrooms, places that sold beer, too, dark and dangerous and filled with stink. (The tradition of dirty movies downtown is old…
There are ghosts on the grid. The new owners of what was once the Webber movie theater at 119 South Broadway recently applied for a certificate of non-historic status — a first step toward allowing the building to be demolished. Losing landmarks is nothing new in Denver; waves of development…
“Sometimes you just gotta know when to pull the trigger. I’m a happy camper today,” says Chuck Rozanski, owner of Denver’s Mile High Comics. He should be: He just made a million bucks, free and clear. That’s because he sold his company headquarters for the past 29 years, a 22,000-square-foot…
An upended, dismembered piano sits in the middle of the floor at the ATLAS Black Box Experimental Studio, deep below the University of Colorado Boulder campus. Kneeling before it, a slight, older man is wiring the piano pieces to an array of electromechanical devices. He is the mononominate sound artist…
Here at the edge of the desert, a small miracle is taking place. Thirteen miles from the Utah border, an abandoned Rio Grande water tank sits on a small hill two blocks north of the main drag of Rangely. main drag. Made of welded, half-inch-thick steel plates, the tank is…
The fall opera season begins when Opera Colorado presents Verdi’s Aida at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House on Saturday, November 7, and if you aren’t waiting with bated breath, you should be. There’s lots of freakiness just waiting to be savored, and even those of us who dwell in the squalid village…
Director Olympia Stone has an artist’s eye, and she uses it to illuminate the life of art. The newest of her series of documentary films on the creative process comes to the Denver Film Festival this weekend. Curious Worlds: The Art & Imagination of David Beck will screen three times…
Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight, opening November 6 in local theaters, details how the Boston Globe uncovered the Catholic Church’s child molestation scandal in 2002. The newspaper’s work won major awards, and the film is now being prepped for Oscar reception, getting talked up almost everywhere as a serious film. (But then, so was…
The Oscar-winning screenwriter whose exploits are the subject of the upcoming biopic Trumbo, opening November 6 across the region, would be the first to snort at the thought of his life becoming Hollywood fodder. Then he would take the money and write the script himself. In recent years, Dalton Trumbo…
Most of us would rather be clocked in the head with a brick than look at another historical monument. Most of those memorials commemorate boring chapters in history or honor pioneer founders who made a pile, then raised a pile to themselves for a little posthumous backslapping. But far from the…
Sherlock Holmes is the most popular character in English literature, and the one most frequently portrayed in film history. More than seventy actors have played him in over 200 films and radio and TV series. Sometimes it seems that any actor in need of a hit just throws on an…
Why would a world-renowned philosopher come to Denver to talk at a free screening of an old film noir? “When I talk about German philosophers, people tend to tune out. When I talk about movies, I get a much better reception,” says Robert Pippin, a Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche expert at…
The people at CU-Boulder’s Fiske Planetarium are stoked, to put it mildly. On Monday, October 12, they learned that NASA had awarded them a cool $1,000,000 with which to make movies. “We are getting hammered with proposals already,” says Thor Metzinger, the planetarium’s video producer. The plan calls for the…
Our nation’s movie boogeymen have been around for a long time. We’ve seen some of the classic movie monsters – Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man and the Mummy — so many times they just aren’t scary any more; with no element of surprise, the bogeymen are now our buddies. We’ve…
