After making a mint off a series about nothing, Jerry Seinfeld apparently decided his first feature film ought to be about something — in the case of Bee Movie, the enslavement and torture of bees for the pleasure and profit of humans, which is, like, hilarious. It’s rather tempting to…
Dan in Real Life has this much going for it: It is not the worst Steve Carell film of 2007. That honor, of course, goes to Evan Almighty, which even the Lord walked out of during the second reel. Fact is, Dan in Real Life isn’t really much of a…
Named for the spot in Christian-fundamentalist hell where sinners are condemned to spend eternity, Tony Kaye’s Lake of Fire is a provocatively beautiful movie on the hottest hot-button issue in American life: a woman’s right to an abortion. The British-born Kaye, an enormously successful maker of deluxe TV commercials, relocated…
Rock films come in two forms. The first is the concert/documentary variety, the best of which dynamically pinpoint a band’s musical moment within the context of its era: the Maysles Brothers and Charlotte Zwerin chronicling the Stones in Gimme Shelter, Martin Scorsese celebrating the Band in The Last Waltz. Then…
I gave up after about 100 pages of John Burnham Schwartz’s 1998 novel Reservation Road, a typically overwritten and contrived slice of mass-market literary pablum that hopscotches between the points-of-view of three people — the grieving mom, the grieving dad and the perpetrator — involved in the hit-and-run death of…
It’s Halloween, and you want to go see a scary movie, but you’re less than thrilled with your available choices. The Denver Film Society feels your pain, which is why, on October 30 and 31, Starz FilmCenter in the Tivoli is screening a Gruesome Twosome, featuring the flicks Murder Party…
Whether it’s $600 PlayStation 3s or the five bucks Nintendo shamelessly charges for 20-year-old NES games on the Wii’s Virtual Console, gamers have gotten used to assuming the position when it comes to the costs of their hobby. So if you’ve just heard about The Orange Box — five of…
Directors Series: Stanley Kubrick(Warner Bros.) Most of the old Kubrick DVDs were crap: full-screen editions with poor pictures and virtually no special features. This set makes up for them with 2001, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut (hey, who farted?), all looking great and…
The Adventures of Aquaman (Warner Bros.) The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Volume One (Paramount) Battleship Potemkin (Kino) Breathless: The Criterion Collection (Criterion) Commune (First Run) The Company (Sony) Fantastic Planet (Accent Cinema) Home of the Brave (MGM) Hostel: Director’s Cut (Sony) Hostel: Part II (Sony)Into Great Silence (Zeitgeist) The…
The setting is a hovel in England’s Cambridgeshire fens, a flimsy wood structure that offers only the barest protection from the elements, both natural and human. The protagonists are a pair of gardeners who have lost their jobs at Cambridge University’s Christ Church College — Wattmore because of accusations concerning…
The curtain call saddened me. As the performers gathered on stage looking jacked up and happy, audience members were already pushing along the aisles and heading for the doors. I could understand their impatience: It had been a long and unsatisfactory evening. At the same time, I think it’s rude…
Defiance. The second play in a projected trilogy (the first is Doubt, which took the Pulitzer Prize and will be staged at the Denver Center in spring), Defiance examines the state of the U.S. Marine Corps in 1971, when the Vietnam War had lost all vestige of legitimacy for most…
Last week, as I stood at the corner of 15th and Delgany streets and took in the nearly finished Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver, a part of me still couldn’t believe it had actually happened. In just over a decade, this little, privately funded and perpetually-strapped-for-cash institution had grown from a…
Don’t expect to see Movado watches, Venini vases, Barcelona chairs or any other luxury item in Substance: Diverse Practices From the Periphery, the large and ambitious design show at Metro State’s Center for Visual Art in LoDo (1734 Wazee Street, 303-294-5207, www.mscd.edu). Instead, curator Lisa Abendroth has given the show…
American Dreams. Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid were among the first artists to embrace conceptual realism in the 1960s. Although the two no longer collaborate, American Dreams, at the Singer Gallery, focuses on a body of work they did in the 1990s. The paintings and collages combine images of George…
For some, Greg Baumhauer is the foul-mouthed host of the open-mike comedy night at the Squire Lounge. For others, Baumhauer is the drag-queen waitress making you squirm, then over-tip, at the Bump ‘n’ Grind Cafe. For me, Greg is my comedy partner who recently broke both of his hands swerving…
Are you a theater junkie forced to stay home and wallow in an absinthe-induced haze because Denver stages are dark on Monday nights? Well, don’t start hallucinating yet: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (the Mike Nichols film) is playing tonight at 7 p.m. at Starz FilmCenter in the Tivoli, in…
Anaïs Nin once said, “I will not just be a tourist in the world of images.” According to Cynthia Morris, that quote “really sums up what I’m hoping to bring to people, to give them a chance to write in the moment.” That’s why Morris has organized the Writer’s Tour…
Joy Division leader Ian Curtis, who hanged himself in 1980, just prior to the planned start of his band’s first American tour, is among rock’s most famous suicides; in this country, only Kurt Cobain compares. Rather than dance around this topic, director Anton Corbijn uses it as subtext in every…
There’s a natural high associated with both shopping and giving to charity, so when you combine them, the feeling is ecstatic. Mod Livin’ (5327 East Colfax Avenue) hopes to invoke some pocketbook-inspired warm fuzzies with their Mid-centuri(red) campaign. Choose from a long list of red products online at www.modlivin.com or…
Leave it to laid-back Boulderites to approach Arts Awareness Month with as little hoopla as possible. Instead of a grand effort on the scale of Denver’s recent Arts Week, the Boulder County Arts Alliance board decided to highlight the ordinary: “We thought, why not get people to do what they’re…
If you had the misfortune to be trapped in a tragic Greek myth, one of the worst positions you could possibly find yourself in is that of Medusa. Once a beautiful nymph with many suitors, Medusa caught the attention of Poseidon, the Lord of the Sea. When Poseidon raped Medusa…
