In recent years, there’s been a spate of documentaries that traffic in what you might call “guiltertainment,” dissecting a common problem, rivetingly revealing how awful it is and then telling you how you’re complicit. Food, Inc. is that kind of documentary. Tackling the evils of giant agribusiness, Food, Inc. makes…
In most ways, the differences between Denver and L.A. are good for us — far less soul-killing vapidity here, for example — but if there is one thing we tend to miss out on, it’s that there aren’t too many movies set here in the old hometown. And there definitely…
Unless you’re a troglodyte who lives under a rock and hates freedom, you’ve seen A Christmas Carol. The play, the cartoon, the movie, the movie adapted from the play that is also a cartoon based on a true story — you know the storyline like the underside of your house-rock,…
Everyone gets angry sometimes. The key is to channel that anger toward something positive, like exercise, or making a nice macaroni angel, or sometimes just counting to ten. Because if we’re not careful, our anger can get the best of us — which actually brings up another good way to…
If you’re anything like us, all you need to know about beer is that it’s good for filling the void of existential desperation and it makes driving a car way funner. But if you’re one of these hoity-toity “liberals,” you probably also want to know a bunch of worthless facts…
In the realm of cult classics, Killer of Sheep is king: Arguably one of the most cultish and the most classic films ever made, the movie boasts a compelling lore that involves a budget of less than $10,000 and a release that didn’t happen until more than 30 years after…
Living in Denver — especially if you live in Capitol Hill, as I do — it can be easy to forget that, despite our fancy skyscrapers and hoity-toity public art, we still living in the wild American West, if a slightly more urbane one in within the blue insulation of…
The Bill of Rights guarantees many protections: Protection of free speech, protection from self-incrimination, protection from undue government imposition in private affairs. Perhaps it was that last one that got misinterpreted by a California man who told a Transportation Security Administration officer in San Diego not to touch his “junk,”…
Judge me if you will: I love The Jersey Shore. I love the uber-clever film editing designed to highlight the characters’ duplicity and incompetence, I love the fact that it’s inexplicably in Miami instead of New Jersey this season, hell, I even, in a weird way, love the Guido gang…
Vern Nieto knows his way around some Zuni fetishes — and no, you pervert, it’s not at all what you think. In the Zuni tradition, a “fetish” is a spiritually significant art object, a small, intricate charm carved from precious or semi-precious stone to reflect an animal of symbolic import;…
A little over six months ago, in late April, the celebrated scientist Stephen Hawking made some, well, some kind of weird comments about sending messages out to possible extraterrestrial life in space: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed…
If you don’t have the $12.50 admission price to cough up, you’re generally SOL on seeing the Denver Botanic Gardens — free days are not particularly common, and those prison-style walls pretty much preclude seeing so much as a shrub at no cost. This weekend, though, from tomorrow all the…
It wouldn’t be the first time Bossip, a tabloid site devoted to black celebrities and culture, has espoused seemingly racist views about, ahem, black celebrities and culture. Take, for example, the actor and model Djimon Hounsou, who Bossip has consistently mocked for his particularly dark skin — the site has…
Perhaps more than ever in this reality show age we live in, it can be difficult to know what the hell famous people are even famous for — and nobody, besides maybe Paris Hilton, exemplifies that “famous for being famous” phenomenon better than Tila Tequila. In her completely un-clamored-for memoir,…
Republicans are flag-flying rubes who drive enormous pickup trucks and lap up mass-produced reality dreck like it was a case of shitty domestic beer. Democrats are effete, pasty elitists who drink tea with their pinkies up and prefer “sophisticated” TV programs nobody cares about. These are the stereotypes basically confirmed…
When Gene Siskel walks out of your movie a half-hour into it, you just might have a cult classic on your hands. The iconic television personality and film critic reportedly drew the line on 1980’s Maniac during the film’s notorious “Disco Boy” scene, in which effects guy Tom Sevini, here…
If you’ve seen Seinfeld, you kind of already know Carol Leifer: Besides working on the show between its fifth and seventh seasons, Leifer is also the legendary “real Elaine Benes,” having at least partially inspired the character. Now, that’s comedy street cred. More recently, Leifer penned a book of humorous…
When Denver-based filmmaker Neil Truglio listened to the music of Iron & Wine, he was inspired. In fact, his emotional reaction to the band’s first album, The Creek Drank the Cradle, was the impetus for his brand-new flick, We Are the Sea. “It’s about an English teacher at a high…
Although the popular perception is that Hollywood has always been the epicenter of the movie universe — and it has been for about 100 years now — David Emrich, a Colorado film historian and author of Hollywood, Colorado, notes that it wasn’t always that way. “If you went to Hollywood…
We all know that reading Westword can warp your soul and leave you broken and twitching in an irrigation ditch outside of Rocky Flats, but did you know it can also teach you something? That’s according to Adriana Nieto, chair of the Richard T. Castro Distinguished Visiting Professorship committee at…
If you don’t like opera, it’s probably because you’re a cultureless rube ― but it also might be that you just haven’t seen the right opera yet. To that end, you could probably do no better than La Bohème. “This is the opera that makes people fall in love with…
Robert Dubac got tired of dicks. The actor, standup comedian and star of Free Range Thinking used to be in television, “but I gave it up, because we all know television is pretty homogenized,” he says. “That’s kind of why I wrote these shows — because people just get tired…
