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)…
At today’s Colorado UFO Briefing in Civic Center Park, attendees won’t find any alien stickers or anal-probe T-shirts for sale. There will be no UFO balloons or Martian characters. And costumed space explorers won’t be speaking Klingon or showing off their Vulcan hand signals. If you’re looking for a circus,…
Even in the heat of summer, our fine Colorado Symphony Orchestra toils, but rest assured, the beat is more relaxed. Witness the CSO’s laid-back Summer Coffee Concerts, a pair of mid-morning performances of works chosen precisely because they won’t challenge lazy, listless summer listeners. And here’s the kicker: Free Peet’s…
Globeville, the bastion of the working class, boasts a weathered history that most of us don’t truly appreciate as we whiz past on I-70. A multicultural crossroads where Denver’s old Eastern European and new Hispanic communities met under a miasma of meatpacking haze and smelter smoke, the neighborhood defines the…
The Charles Sawtelle GNU Mountain Jam keeps getting better with age. The jam has seventeen years of history, proving that it can offer quality folk, bluegrass and jazz music, authentic Texas barbecue and thirst-quenching local microbrews while maintaining a community feel. The event’s also a fundraiser for KGNU, which can…
Round ’em up and moo ’em out. For years, Denver looked on enviously as other cities around the globe hosted CowParades — or simply stole the basic idea and asked local artists to decorate totemic symbols that celebrated their town. Some cities went for horses, some crabs, some cowboy boots…
A little taste of Steamboat Springs can be had right here in the Mile High City this month during the Steamboat Wine Festival Denver Wine Dinner series, a scrumptious pairing of top chefs from the mountain resort with some of our own Larimer Square toques. Tonight’s partnership features Samba Room…
There’s nothing better than imbibing high-quality wine — except maybe doing it while watching a display of high-quality fashion. Throughout the summer, on select Thursday evenings, the Riverfront Park Wine & Fashion Series will prove the compatibility of sunsets, runway-walking, wine-tasting and music at the Millennium Bridge Plaza in Riverfront…
Two weeks ago, a colleague insisted that Superman Returns isn’t the remake of the 1978 original, as I wrote, but a reinterpretation — its melancholic flip side. Where the Christopher Reeve model was pop art and a cool breeze, the Brandon Routh version is heavy and solemn, weighed down by…
It would be a mighty sweet thing to see M. Night Shyamalan as the great redemptive storyteller he clearly thinks he is — or as he portrays himself in those American Express commercials. Genuine yarn-spinning, even as a doomed ambition, is virtually extinct in American movies; what had been the…
Originally, Ward Serrill set out to make a documentary — and a short one, at that — about Bill Resler, an avuncular tax professor at the University of Washington who thought he knew enough about basketball to coach the girls’ team at Roosevelt High School in Seattle. Never mind that…
In the latest extravaganza from executive producers Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis, millions of dollars and long hours in the digital animation studios have produced…a photorealistic, computer-animated, generic American suburb! Location costs must be getting pretty damn expensive nowadays. As Monster House begins, we follow a leaf slowly descending on…
Tour pros and frustrated duffers alike love Harold Ramis’s classic 1980 golf comedy Caddyshack — thanks in large part to inspired turns by the late Rodney Dangerfield as a foul-mouthed, wisecracking plutocrat, and Chevy Chase as a playboy hacker who doesn’t bother keeping score on fairway or green. Set at…
