Watching Out for Experimental Film

The International Experimental Cinema Exposition is offering back-to-back programs fro fans of experimental film. It kicks off tonight with Bright-Eyed Small Gauge, an exhibition of Super-8 material by Frankie Symonds and Jesse Kennedy. “It’s younger filmmakers who are working directly with the film itself and who have studied with masters…

Flick Pick

The grim and bloody adaptation of the second volume of the late Stieg Larsson’s best-selling Millennium trilogy — featuring journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) and computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace — moves the story into a very different register from the stand-alone murder mystery of The Girl With the…

Who’s Who

CORE New Art Space, which hangs open-entry shows quarterly, decided to turn this summer’s into an unofficial Biennial offering. Juried by Ken Hamel of Denverarts.org and curated by CORE member Mark Penner Howell, the resulting show, Locally Grown, puts the open-minded CORE stamp on a showcase of largely unaffiliated local…

Pipe Dreams

Pot-culture mover Mateo Pifaaso (yes, it’s an alias, but don’t we all have something to hide?) doesn’t flinch an inch when he says that the intent of this weekend’s first-ever Rocky Mountain Cannabis Convention and Wellness Expo is to “bring a little class to the grass.” The two-day con, which…

Wide Open Spaces

Terry Dodd loves environmental theater, and any play performed in the lobby of the historic Barth Hotel, built in 1882 and a longtime LoDo assisted-living facility overseen by Senior Housing Options Inc., is nothing if not environmental. That’s why the local stage director thinks Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin…

The King Swings at the Arvada Center

Set in a sad, colorless town in the Midwest, All Shook Up is a combination of Twelfth Night, The Music Man and Pleasantville set to 24 Elvis Presley songs. Opening with “Jailhouse Rock,” the show is about a young drifter who is released from a lockup and helps lift a…

Root of a Problem

When I requested two free street trees from the Park People’s Denver Digs Trees program and then purchased two more for my yard this spring, I thought I was part of the solution — providing shade, eliminating CO2, increasing my property value, not to mention contributing to Greenprint Denver’s Mile…

Going Green

There’s a lot going on at this year’s Colorado Irish Festival, including kids’ workshops with the Denver Gaels and O’Connor’s Irish Stout, named for festival president Kacey O’Connor. “She’s retiring from the festival this year,” says spokesman Pat McCullough, “so Coors had a contest, a Name That Irish Stout contest,…

History Retold

No one knows Denver neighborhoods quite like Phil Goodstein, who has written numerous books on historic topics and areas as well as regularly giving walking tours of the city. “There’s an interesting interaction that happens,” he says. “I’ve been giving walking tours of different neighborhoods for 25 years. A lot…

Strip Mall

Burlesque is very much alive and well here in Colorado,” notes Laura Ettinger, director of public relations for the Colorado Burlesque Festival. “And if you haven’t ever seen burlesque live, this is the time to do it, because you’re going to see the crème de la crème from across the…

Art at the Heart

As a chart-topping group in the ’80s, Atlanta’s SOS Band bridged funk’s past and R&B’s future. It’s only fitting, then, that the act is headlining the 24th annual Colorado Black Arts Festival. The celebration takes place this weekend in the southeast corner of Denver City Park; SOS will take the…

A Touch of Class

It’s not hard to understand local fashion maven Brandi Shigley’s love affair with the landmark Grant-Humphreys Mansion, a picture-perfect epitome of the word “elegant” — at least as it was conceived of during history’s Belle Époque. The sweeping, thirty-room Quality Hill Beaux Arts mansion first provided the backdrop for Shigley’s…

City Sites

Denver is chock-full of public art, from the Civic Center to the kingdom of Stapleton, but the best way to really see it is with a docent who knows exactly where and how to find it. That’s why the Denver Office of Cultural Affairs began offering its popular and free…

Now Playing

Garage Sale Loud: This Is It. Almost every summer, the folks at Heritage Square stage what is essentially a musical review with a thin sustaining plot line and the word “loud” in the title. The conceit is that T.J. Mullin and Annie Dwyer are siblings, and they’re reliving their youth:…

World Cup Final: Netherlands vs. Spain

With Sunday’s Final pitting the Netherlands against Spain, there will be a new country’s name joining the seven already engraved on the bottom of the FIFA World Cup Trophy. While this year’s edition of the quadrennial tournament is the 19th, there are only eight nations who have won soccer’s biggest…

Shows around town display a range of expressions

Contemporary art is characterized by stylistic diversity, with a wide variety of different approaches vying for attention — each with its own roster of adherents. This week, I’m looking at conceptualism, realism and abstraction, all of which have long traditions and yet are completely contemporary in feel. First, let’s look…

The City of Your Final Destination finds the cracks in an aristocratic life

James Ivory and cast make every scene flutter with feeling in this adaptation of Peter Cameron’s 2002 novel, The City of Your Final Destination, written for the screen by Ivory’s collaborator-of-fifty-years, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Omar (Omar Metwally), an American Ph.D. student, shows up unannounced at a secluded Uruguayan country estate…

Now Showing

Exposure. Eric Paddock is the Denver Art Museum’s first full-fledged photo curator to head up his own new department. To unveil the permanent gallery for photography in the Ponti tower, he’s put together Exposure: Photos From the Vault, highlighting a range of gems from the DAM’s collection. Collected in fits…

Freud and Oedipus underscore the dark humor of Cyrus

In Cyrus, a freakishly engrossing black comedy about excessively mothered men and the women who enable them, the excellent John C. Reilly plays John, a middle-aged editor who lives like a stalled graduate student in his cluttered Los Angeles cottage. That’s where his former wife and close friend, Jamie (Catherine…

Nick Sugar was made for the lead in Hedwig and the Angry Inch

At the start, Hedwig and the Angry Inch seems like a hipper, wilder, more raucous and contemporary variation on a theme that’s been around since Lanford Wilson’s The Madness of Lady Bright in the ’60s: the loneliness and ultimate psychic disintegration of a gay diva. But the show soon sets…

Get Your Kicks

For Ultimate Fighting Championship fans, the biggest bang of this Independence Day weekend involves a different kind of fireworks: After illnesses and postponements, the long awaited heavyweight match between two really big boys – Denver’s own Shane Carwin and formidable opponent Brock Lesnar – will air tonight on pay-per-view television,…

Four for the Fourth

There are so many Independence Day runs in Colorado that the Fourth of July is starting to feel like a celebration of running for our lives, not fighting for our freedom. Still, you can’t go wrong with the Liberty Run 4 Mile, which starts a few hours after dawn’s early…