Something is happening at the University of Delaware’s theater program, from which the Colorado Shakespeare Festival has drawn a fair amount of its acting talent in the past few years. I imagine an elderly English actress running the place, dispensing advice on diction and elocution over china teacups. From the…
The Ballad of Baby Doe. Central City Opera is celebrating the fiftieth birthday of Douglas Moore’s famed piece with a lively, glowing production full of beautifully proportioned sets that look like Victorian Christmas cards, a talented, energetic ensemble and a cluster of glorious voices. The opera conjures up all the…
Native American heroes are a rare commodity in video games. Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, released a decade ago, is the most prominent example. Now Turok finally has company. The best way to describe Prey is “Doom meets Cherokee mysticism.” And while most critics are fawning over this first-person action/horror title, don’t…
V for Vendetta (Warner Bros.) Illustrator David Lloyd calls this adaptation of the comic he made with writer Alan Moore “very good” — so why did Moore beg to have his name removed? The intentions are noble, sure; name another big-studio blockbuster in which a government manufactures fear to keep…
Beavis & Butt-head: The Mike Judge Collection, Volume 3 (Paramount) Blind Beast vs. Killer Dwarf (Panik House) Broken Saints: The Animated Comic Epic (Fox) Dallas: The Complete Fifth Season (Warner Bros.) Elvis: ’68 Comeback (BMG Heritage) A Fish Called Wanda: Deluxe Edition (MGM) Girls Next Door (Fox) The Graduate (MGM)…
If you ask me, the Colorado Dragon Boat Festival, which made its debut at Sloan’s Lake in 2001, is just about the best thing that ever happened to summer in Denver, brimming over with just the right amount of everything you’d possibly want from a fest: First and foremost, it’s…
Buntport Theater was formed by a group of hyper-creative Colorado College kids who shared an affinity for quirk: The theater’s production history includes Kafka on Ice, a freewheelin’ biodrama about the existential, roach-centric German writer, set in an ice rink; and Donner, a documentary-style tragicomedy about Santa’s reindeer. This kind…
When I watched Ferris Bueller’s idyllic ditch day for the first time — as a teen growing up in the same Chicago suburbia immortalized by John Hughes — I related more to the straitlaced best friend Cameron, who was destined to get busted for taking his dad’s fabulous car downtown…
Take it from someone who’s walked through at least six dozen houses with her boyfriend in recent weeks: Touring homes can be romantic. There’s a daydream quality that comes with imagining what your lives might look like against a host of different backdrops — especially before you do the math,…
When the fourteenth annual AmeriVespa National Scooter Rally rides into town tonight for a weekend of parties, rides, competitions and clinics, don’t expect raucous, all-night bonfire melees or drunken, topless Harley chicks. Scooterists are a far cry from motorcyclists, after all, and AmeriVespa ain’t no Sturgis. “We typically don’t wear…
Believe it or not, Denver’s beautiful formal park gardens — from the famous plots of Civic Center, Alamo Placita and Washington Park to the lesser-known plantings in such places as Montbello Civic Center Park — don’t just pop up out of the ground each year. As you’re reading this, more…
For 35 years, Woody Allen was a long shot to stray into the Bronx or Staten Island — much less the alien reaches of London, England. The creator of Manhattan has always been joined to his chosen borough like pastrami on rye, so when he ventured abroad last year to…
Michael Mann’s Miami Vice is like a car that’s been stripped of everything but its two bucket seats and rebuilt from the ground up. The protagonists are still a pair of detectives named Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx), and a cover of Phil Collins’s “In the…
The Ant Bully is based upon a very short children’s book by John Nickle, who wrote and illustrated the 1999 work all by his lonesome after years of providing illustrations for the Wall Street Journal and Sports Illustrated, not to mention other works of kiddie lit. The book, as most…
From the moment a naive college student discovers a severed human ear in a suburban parking lot, David Lynch’s classic Blue Velvet perversely begins to alter our perceptions about the true qualities of American life. Even twenty years later, Lynch’s overdoses of murder, depravity and kinky sex retain the power…
I’ve recently wondered why everyone seems to be so retrospective right now, with so many of the latest exhibits highlighting the state’s glorious aesthetic past. In the last several weeks, I’ve promoted a group of these shows, including the groundbreaking Decades of Influence, Colorado 1985–Present, being jointly presented at the…
Tracy Felix’s Colorado Modernism: 1930-1970 (see review) at Foothills Art Center (809 15th Street, Golden, 303-279-3922) brings together the work of around three dozen painters; one sculptor, Robert Mangold; and a single photographer, James Milmoe. There are only three Mangolds, which is in line with the other artists in 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…
The Ballad of Baby Doe. Central City Opera is celebrating the fiftieth birthday of Douglas Moore’s famed piece with a lively, glowing production full of beautifully proportioned sets that look like Victorian Christmas cards, a talented, energetic ensemble and a cluster of glorious voices. The opera conjures up all the…
Flight sims — games that emulate the experience of being in a cockpit — are plenty popular on PCs, but have never taken off on home consoles. This is partly due to their inherent complexity. When it comes to recreating an entire cockpit’s worth of buttons, levers, and gizmos, the…
Feed (TLA) Remember the old jokes about “What’s grosser than gross”? The makers of Feed do, as they prove in the first 10 minutes — one-upping their opening scene featuring a voluntary victim of cannibalism by bringing in a guy who gets nekkid and shoves cheeseburgers down the throat of…
2005 Academy Award Nominated Short Films (Magnolia) Animaniacs: Volume 1 (Warner Bros.) Ask the Dust (Paramount) Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That! (ThinkFilm) The Benchwarmers (Sony) Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story (Shout! Factory) Bogie & Bacall: The Signature Collection (Warner Bros.) Chappelle’s Show: The Lost Episodes (Paramount) Electric Shadows (First Run)…
