Already a blogosphere punching bag for right-wing Christians, Creation — about Charles Darwin’s writing of On the Origin of Species — commits the sin of thoughtfulness, and is quite moving in the process. Director Jon Amiel, working from a screenplay by John Collee, injects flashes of artsy craftsmanship (time-lapse photography depicting…
Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, a florid art shocker that Paramount welcomed into the world with the strained enthusiasm of a mutant baby’s parents, begins with U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) seasick, head in the toilet. The film is his prolonged purging, with Daniels coughing up chunks of his backstory…
Because they’re crafted outside the Hollywood system, you might assume that this year’s Oscar-nominated live-action and animated shorts stand in sharp defiance to conventional mainstream cinema. But the best of these ten entries are, in some ways, the most familiar — their most radical element being that they operate in…
Eventide is a sequel of sorts to Plainsong, which the Denver Center Theatre Company produced two years ago. Plainsong was a triumph, a perfect marriage of production values and novelist Kent Haruf’s words. A luminous and over-arching sky dominated the action, and Plainsong became less a story about individual people…
Truth is, I don’t like Eugene O’Neill’s work much, and I really loathe Long Day’s Journey Into Night. I’m not proud of this. I remember once reading another critic who insisted that Shakespeare was overrated and thinking this said far more about the critic than about Shakespeare. O’Neill is one…
A couple of weeks ago, I discussed the persistence of representational imagery in the fine arts by zeroing in on a group of shows in which artists created contemporary versions of realism (“Real Time,” February 4). This week, turnabout being fair play, I’ll look at the equally astonishing longevity of…
When improv hotshot and Bovine Metropolis player Justin Franzen began the weekly J&K Fun Hour (with Kerstin Caldwell) at the Mercury Cafe more than a month ago, his goal was to give Denver an independent long-form evening in a bar setting similar to what he had in the back room…
Candy Smith, the woman who created the Tuaca Body Art Ball, says it all started with her identical twin sister. “She was the executive producer of the Art House, a theater house in Dallas,” explains Smith, “and it was going broke. So we had one last-ditch effort for a fundraiser…
When “locavore” won word of the year in 2007, it was proof that the local food movement was gaining momentum. People were shopping at farmers’ markets and starting gardens as a way to save money and eat better. But you can’t live on vegetables alone, so to help round out…
When he was a kid, Tim Flynn dreamed of owning a hardware store — not one of those sleek big-box operations, but a cozy shop that reeked of grass seed. Life took him on a different course, though, and this fantasy of Flynn’s never came to pass, but that hasn’t…
First impressions don’t always hold true. So if you think CU-Boulder’s Goldberger Week of Jewish Culture is synonymous with dull and academic, think again. Designed this year to tie in with the university’s ambitious ongoing series MoVeRs: Jewish Mavericks, Visionaries and Rebels, the week’s programs include not only the lectures…
When dumpster-diving art collaborators Matt Doubek and Sam Mobley open the doors tonight on Carnival of Fictional Amusement, their new joint show at Pirate: Contemporary Art, what awaits will be anything but the same old, same old. That’s partially because Doubek and Mobley are men of facile resources; you might…
During the decade when Peter Frampton, Kiss, Springsteen, the Eagles, punk and disco all strangely intersected in popular music, photographer Henry Horenstein photographed a completely different musical milieu: honky-tonk culture, from the lowliest Southern backroads to its pinnacle on stage at the Grand Ole Opry. His evocative images of rising,…
Good news for folks who like to talk books over a cozy potluck: Chris Cleave’s book-club-ready novel Little Bee is out in paperback. Inspired by the London author’s time spent years earlier listening to the desperate stories of people living in a British detention camp for refugees seeking asylum, the…
Cantaloupe Music isn’t a household word. But the adventurous, avant label does have some big names on its roster: Laurie Anderson, Aphex Twin, Don Byron, Brian Eno, Steve Reich and Terry Riley are just a few of the artists who’ve recorded for Cantaloupe. The stable of musicians it represents on…
Norma Moore, the artistic director of Stories on Stage, is “a crazy reader,” notes executive director Abbe Stutsman: “She reads hundreds of short stories a year. She’ll then try to find a theme that courses through different stories. Norma’s quite brilliant.” That should be evident to anyone who’s ever patronized…
Behind the ubiquitous Warner Bros. entertainment brand stand the now nearly forgotten Warner brothers: Jack, Harry, Abe and Sam. The story of these four men and the multimedia empire they built is the subject of The Brothers Warner, a documentary from Cass Warner, granddaughter of Harry. “It was a lot…
“Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.” Those are the words of the great American playwright Eugene O’Neill, from his play The Great God Brown. And in Lazarus Laughed, quoth he: “Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.”…
Dolphins are among the most intelligent creatures on the planet. But dolphin-human interaction isn’t exactly all Flipper and Sea World antics. In fact, Ric O’Barry — the man who captured and trained the five dolphins used in the Flipper television series — had a change of heart after getting to…
Reservation lines all over town are ringing off the hook with customers snatching up seats for Denver Restaurant Week, which begins today and, as you may already know, is really two weeks long. “We did a survey of restaurants, and the vast majority favored two weeks,” says Rich Grant, communications…
Denver may be a cowtown at heart, but we hold our own when it comes to producing creative people. Just take a look at Artopia, the Westword-produced party that joins live music, a fashion show, poetry, dancing, painting and whatever other surprises are being cooked up this year — plus…
“Film and standup are two separate worlds in my head,” says actor and comedian Aziz Ansari. “My goal with the new hour I’m working on is to be even more aggressive with the material, more confident and just overall make it a better set.” Ansari’s confidence has taken him far…
