Jesus talked a lot about loving the underdog, the meek, the oppressed and the poor. He argued God is love and told his disciple to turn the other cheek. Jesus’s life ended in violence and bloodshed from which he could have liberated himself, but he chose not to fight –…
In the weeks since Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster Interstellar came out, geeks have been debating the need for scientific accuracy in sci-fi movies. In Disney’s 1979 clunker The Black Hole — which might be better titled The Sinkhole —scientific plausibility is galactically unimportant. “It’s bad. It’s ridiculously bad,” says Ernie Quiroz,…
As they bring in the new year, Denver theaters will spend much of January highlighting masterpieces and cult classics alike. Some of these films critique the movie industry while others are only worth watching because of how delightfully terrible they are. Several documentaries will ignite discussions about the function of…
“People sometimes write books and don’t know what to do with them,” says Arturo Garcia, editor at Ícaro Editores, a small press. “It’s a dream to see their work published. A lot of folks who get published, they want to fly with it. I tell them, be careful. Wings may…
The train whistle cuts through the roar of the interstate, and the smell of the nearby Purina dog food plant lingers in the air. On this cold morning, Shirley Valentine shoves her walker across her garage floor, loses her balance and then catches herself on the back of her Chevrolet…
Judy Chicago always wanted to be a professional artist when she grew up. She never noticed, while wandering the galleries at the Chicago Art Institute, that men had created most of the works on display. “So it was with a great deal of surprise, when I was in graduate school,…
The Starz Denver Film Festival is over and the holidays have begun. This December, expect a flurry of films, including holiday fare, movies made by luminary students, one geared for people with sensory disorders, a few wildly experimental films, a Technicolor classic and a social documentary. Whether you’re a Scrooge…
It took sixteen years for John Cougar Mellencamp, Stephen King and T Bone Burnett to launch Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, which lead actress Gina Gershon describes as “a Southern, rock, gothic, supernatural ghost story.” The musical follows Joe McCandless, whose older brothers, fighting over a woman, killed themselves and…
Experimental filmmaker Vincent Grenier’s work resists the idea of pristine, untarnished nature — something that, in any case, is difficult to find. “Nature has been almost totally mediated by human interventions,” Grenier notes. “All the forests in the Northeast, for example, are young forests, as the area was completely deforested…
Avant-garde film legend Stan Brakhage has been both mythologized and demonized. But few deny he was an unstoppable cinematic force, and his best-known works — Window Water Baby Moving, Mothlight, The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes and Dog Star Man — are critical parts of the avant-garde film…
Thinking of all the aches and pains of winter ahead, a group of holistic healers have banded together to give the public a chance to sample their offerings — everything from massage and herbs to acupuncture and psychotherapy — at the Holistic Health Care Fair. See also: Denver’s Zen Magnets…
In June, Eleanor Dewey learned about the murder of Zoraida Reyes. For many, Reyes was a statistic, just another name on a growing list of transgender women killed in the United States — at least eleven in 2014. But Dewey remembers Reyes as a friend, a fierce immigrant-rights organizer who…
“Race is not biology. There is no biology that separates us,” says History Colorado’s JJ Rutherford. That statement provides the basis for the museum’s upcoming traveling exhibition, Race: Are We So Different?, which shatters the notion that racial identity is born from our genetic makeup. The exhibit looks at the…
When mixed-citizenship families hear a knock at the door, they cower. It could be the immigration police coming to take away the parents, splitting them from their children, says Arturo Garcia, co-editor of Broken: The Forgotten Children of Immigration. Garcia, who will be discussing his book tonight at the American…
Jon Krakauer’s haunting biography Into the Wild tells the story of Chris McCandless, a young man who severed his ties with his family and ventured into the Alaskan wilderness, where he died. The book has become a modern-day classic, widely read in college classrooms and hotly debated by some who…
Every cause has its martyrs. Christians had Jesus. The civil rights movement had Martin Luther King Jr. The American right had those who died at Waco and Ruby Ridge. And every year, Denver Anarchist Black Cross hosts The Martyr’s Ball, a fundraiser for the organization that celebrates those who have…
In the early 1990s, journalist Jon Krakauer, who was working on the modern-day classic Into the Wild, invited Carine McCandless to talk about why her brother, Chris, cut ties with his family and journeyed into the Alaskan wilderness, where he died of starvation. Carine decided it would be best to…
Avant-garde animator Larry Jordan, who has crafted more than fifty experimental shorts since the 1950s, compares his creative process to alchemy. “The common conception of alchemy is trying to make gold out of lead. That was not really what it was,” he says. “It was trying to find something more…
For more than a century, anarchists have gathered together at annual balls to laugh, dance and joyfully share their views on social justice and political injustice. Denver Anarchist Black Cross took up the tradition more than five years ago and has been hosting the Martyr’s Ball fundraiser ever since. “It’s…
When Australian filmmaker Richard Tuohy says he makes experimental films, he means it. He runs Nanolab, an artist-run film-processing lab where he develops 16mm and Super8 film for fellow filmmakers. In his free time, he has devoted himself to exploring hand-processing, optical illusions and even cameraless films. Tuohy does not…
Mary DeForest believes in George Orwell’s theory that language rooted in Latin and Greek muddies communication and often covers up political agendas. And so she invented the Latinometer, a bullshit detector that analyzes text and determines how many words are rooted in Latin, German, French and Greek, then ranks the…
Each November, cinephiles around the state gather for the Starz Denver Film Festival, one of the year’s hottest film events. Because the festival has an stellar lineup of directors, actors and critics escorting viewers through the best contemporary and historical cinema, it can easily overshadow other must-see movie events around…
