There’s not a lot of new news about the proposed sale of Copper Mountain from Intrawest to Powdr Corp beyond the press release I reported on Tuesday, but it looks like a done deal, pending U.S. Forest Service approval, with sale price speculation in the $100 million-plus range. The initial…
Elaine Calzolari, an important Denver artist known for her many public commissions in Colorado and nationwide, died November 8 after a long battle with ovarian cancer. Born in 1950 in Albertson, New York, she studied sculpture in France and earned her bachelor’s degree in 1973 from Hofstra University, where she…
Big Love. In a plot lifted from Aeschylus, fifty sisters have been promised by their father to fifty cousins; on their wedding day, they flee from Greece to Italy in search of sanctuary. They land at the home of hyper-civilized Piero, who wants to help but doesn’t want trouble —…
Another poor, massive, uneducated African-American teenager lumbers onto screens this month, two weeks after Precious and obviously timed as a pre-Thanksgiving-dinner lesson in the Golden Rule. But unlike the howling rage of Claireece Precious Jones, The Blind Side’s Michael “Big Mike” Oher (Quinton Aaron) is mute, docile, and ever-grateful to…
In her broad outlines, Claireece Precious Jones risks sounding like the epitome of ghetto cliché: an obese, illiterate sixteen-year-old; mother to a four-year-old Down syndrome daughter and now pregnant again; physically and psychologically abused by her mother; repeatedly raped by her father, who is, also, the father of her own…
Recent American films about families, like last year’s Rachel Getting Married and Revolutionary Road, all too often pierce eardrums with unrelenting shrieks of dysfunction and misery. Amid the din, French filmmaker Claire Denis’s sublime 35 Shots of Rum stands out all the more for its soothing quiet (one character is…
In the bowels of the hautest of New York’s haute cuisine restaurants, would-be actor Sam mans the phones. All may be elegance, soft-spoken service, expensive food and flattering lighting above, but here in the basement there’s grubbiness and clutter, drab green walls and constantly ringing phones. Also a jarring, flashing,…
In Well, playwright Lisa Kron has created a character, Lisa Kron, who’s writing a play —an exploration, insists the on-stage doppelgänger — dealing with Lisa Kron’s relationship with her mother. It has to do with illness and healing, she informs the audience (no pesky fourth wall here), and the fact…
Another poor, massive, uneducated African-American teenager lumbers onto screens this month, two weeks after Precious and obviously timed as a pre-Thanksgiving-dinner lesson in the Golden Rule. But unlike the howling rage of Claireece Precious Jones, The Blind Side’s Michael “Big Mike” Oher (Quinton Aaron) is mute, docile, and ever-grateful to…
In Jonathan Swift’s classic “A Modest Proposal” (circa 1729), the narrator suggests that the Irish sell their poor children as food for the rich. “A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food,” Swift writes. It was an absurd solution to…
I first saw Riverdance more than ten years ago on the other side of the planet, in Perth, Western Australia. That just goes to show you how far the phenomenal Irish music, song and dance performance has come from its humble beginnings. “It’s interesting to know that this show started…
Keith L. Hatten, artistic director for Shadow Theatre Company, cites two very important experiences as inspiration for his direction of Christmas of the Angels. The first is hearing his office manager tell the story of being rescued from the 97th floor of the World Trade Center’s second tower by a…
Bollywood is big business these days: First it was Slumdog Millionaire, then the Oscars, and the next thing you know, the East Indian dance style is popping up everywhere, from So You Think You Can Dance and America’s Best Dance Crew to SpongeBob SquarePants. But as local Bollywood dance maven…
Every parent has the same experience. When you look at your own child, you see the most beautiful creature in the universe, an ever-changing bundle of dreams, quirks and personality in a glowing flesh-and-bone package that you know so well, yet not at all. That’s the bittersweet nut of parental…
I still remember the first time I ate at Rosa Linda’s Mexican Cafe, years ago. It wasn’t much to look at, particularly then, but it was clearly a family affair, with the kids and dad Virgilio Aguirre taking orders and bussing the tables and mama Rosa Linda hard at work…
Against the backdrop of the Starz Denver Film Festival and all its attendant hoopla, local company Listen Productions will stage its own mini-fest this weekend, featuring world premieres of two Colorado-made flicks at Buntport Theater. The first, DNC Mediamockracy, is a 65-minute documentary about the making of a local multimedia…
It’s only right that a benefit for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBT civil rights organization, should have a wedding theme: The folks who support the group do so in part because they would dearly love to get legally hitched in their own state, and gay marriage is…
When C.V. Howe, speaker of the brewhouse for the “beer geeks gone berserk” at Boulder’s Avery Brewing, talks about “big beer,” he’s talking about “beer with intense, bold flavor, something that is immediately at odds with the traditional notion of what the average American has been taught beer is supposed…
Forget about that bumper-to-bumper winter-weekend drive to and from the high country. Today, Rocky Mountain region pro-am boarders will be riding the rails right here in the heart of Denver — in the street, no less — as part of the Backyard Bang Rail Jam, hosted by the Art Institute…
People around the world today are celebrating the official release of the 2009 Beaujolais Nouveau, and local food and wine lovers are no exception. “Historically, Beaujolais is made with the first grapes of the season,” says Angela Bruns, assistant director and event coordinator for the French American Chamber of Commerce,…
One can only hope that this will be the beginning of a beautiful relationship: The Museum of Outdoor Arts and Hudson Gardens are teaming up this season to host Hudson Holiday, an outdoor holiday lighting extravaganza that runs the gamut from traditional to, well, downright artsy. And with MOA wizard-in-residence…
There was a time when a town’s sports geeks would line up only for the stars themselves. In the age of Internet stardom, though, it’s the guy who tells jokes about the stars who attracts the Sharpie-wielding masses — like tonight, when Bill Simmons, ESPN’s Sports Guy, stops by the…
