A winning tale of sex, real estate and more or less immaculate conception, Quinceaera, as you might expect from a white-made drama about Latino life in Echo Park, threatens to be all about a pregnant teenager and a prodigal cholo in the hood. Yet this saucy, rowdy, heartfelt and terribly…
Jason Lethcoe’s book Amazing Adventures From Zoom’s Academy doesn’t particularly wow the reader with its prose, but the concept is solid — basically, Harry Potter with superheroes rather than wizards. The heroine, Summer Jones, is an awkward thirteen-year-old tomboy with a goofy father named Jasper who likes to tinker with…
No baseball fan who knows a sinker from a slider believes the grand old game should ever be played indoors — curses on your garbage-bag outfield “wall,” Minnesota Twins; good riddance, Houston Astrodome — and it sometimes rankles the purest of the pure that they must watch even a televised…
In January 2007, Dianne Perry Vanderlip, the founding curator of the Modern and Contemporary Art department at the Denver Art Museum, will retire, giving up the job she’s held since 1978. Vanderlip has been the most important and influential person in the Denver art world — something that will not…
Michael Burnett’s Space Gallery (765 Santa Fe Drive, 720-904-1088) is one of the highlights of the Santa Fe Arts District. It’s especially nice that it’s right across the street from the area’s flagship, the Sandy Carson Gallery — though if you’re tempted to jaywalk to get from one to the…
The Armory Group. In a summer art calendar that’s uncharacteristically filled with significant exhibitions, The Armory Group: 40 Years has got to be one of the most important of them all. The story begins back in 1966 in Boulder — specifically, in the fine-arts department at the University of Colorado…
There are certain actors whose name on a cast list gladdens my heart. The presence of any one of them on stage pretty much assures that I’ll have a good evening at the theater, almost regardless of script, direction or supporting cast. These actors are hugely different in terms of…
Impulse Theater. Basements and comedy go together like beer and nuts or toddlers and sandboxes. The basement of the Wynkoop Brewing Co., where Impulse Theater performs, is crowded, loud and energetic. Impulse does no prepared skits, nothing but pure improv — which means that what you see changes every night,…
Like a real war, Chromehounds involves long stretches of tedium, occasionally broken up by a few moments of sheer terror. After what feels like weeks of ponderous marching from point A to point B in your titular “Hound” (a walking tank), combat erupts. The fighting is fast and ferocious and…
Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier (Paramount) It’s all here, more or less: the 1979 theatrical cut of Francis Ford Coppola’s harrowing and still-hypnotic Joseph Conrad-in-Vietnam adaptation, the 49-minutes-longer-but-feels-24-minutes-shorter 2001 Redux edition, Marlon Brando’s entire 17-minute “The Hollow Men” monologue, even more “lost” and deleted scenes (including a spooky-shocking one, in…
Benito (Lions Gate) Cape of Good Hope (New Yorker) Clark Gable Collection, Volume 1 (Fox) Don’t Tell (Lions Gate) The Hard Corps (Sony) Hong Kong Phooey: The Complete Series (Turner) Hoot (New Line) James Stewart: The Signature Collection (Warner Bros.) Land of the Blind (Bauer) Lemming (Strand) L’Enfant (Sony) Machined…
Denver might have a reputation as a cowtown, but you’d never know it to look at the array of gourmet restaurants and fine-dining programs available in this fair city. One thing’s certain: We know how to dish out some fantastic grub, and we’re not shy about sharing our fabulous food…
Would you run into a burning building to rescue someone you don’t know? Would you climb high into a tree to save a cat that’s going to scratch the hell out of you and isn’t even yours? Probably not. But firefighters do all of that and much more, routinely. According…
Ted Striker: Surely you can’t be serious! Dr. Rumack: I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley. Airplane! has got to be one of the best movies ever made. Its blend of wacky, over-the-top silliness out-funnies Adam Sandler and Jack Black — even after 26 years on the video-store shelves…
Scott Brown is no stranger to mountain festivals. He helped start the Telluride Bluegrass and Film Festivals, so believe him when he says the Telluride Tech Festival is different from any other high-country celebration in existence. “It’s about being smart,” Brown says. “Telluride is isolated, in a sense,” he adds…
Some people just aren’t okay with the word “ass.” Last year, the captain of a team competing in the Wild West Relay: Get Your Ass Over the Pass asked coordinator Paul Vanderheiden if he would change it to “mass.” Whatever getting your “mass” over the pass may entail, Vanderheiden says…
I have never won a game of bingo. My problem is this: I can’t play more than one bingo card at once, so I’m never the first to place my dabbers on five consecutive squares. Well, all those bingo pros out there had better watch their backs, because I’ve discovered…
Disc golf is the perfect poor student’s sport — the friendly competition of “ball golf” without the high-priced equipment. The first course was installed at the University of California at Berkeley in 1970, and most of the courses are still near colleges (like the picturesque School of Mines course tucked…
Snort a few lines of Fame, screen Save the Last Dance a couple of times, and channel what you’ve learned from the bad-ass pose of a second-rate Eminem and you get Step Up, a dance romance with the originality of a paint-by-numbers set. First-time director Anne “Mama” Fletcher, the choreographer…
If Crash grew a pair of cojones, it might look something like Larry Clark’s cheerfully defiant Wassup Rockers, in which a pack of Latino skaters from South Los Angeles spend an afternoon marooned in the suburban jungle of Beverly Hills, cutting a swath through dense thickets of white privilege and…
World Trade Center is about just that — the attacks on, and the collapse of, the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. But 45 minutes in, a viewer might easily forget the movie is set during that nightmarish day. There is little talk of terrorism, and scant suggestion that a…
When the clueless U.S. men’s soccer team got dumped in the first round of the World Cup, American sports fans generally shrugged and went about their business. Aside from its popularity among millions of suburban schoolchildren, what most other earthlings call “the beautiful game” still arouses about the same passion…
