North High School theater coach José Mercado loves working with his kids, but he occasionally gives adult actors the benefit of his directing skills. His latest effort, Beyond the Border, is a labor of love that pushed him to piece together an exploration of illegal immigration and cultural identity for…
“At the moment, I’m installing a giant carrot,” Lyons sculptor John King blurts into his cell phone. He’s helping to raise “Carrot on a Stick?” a sixteen-foot sailcloth veggie by Garima Fairfax, up a telephone pole. “Only in Lyons could you get permission to do this,” he adds. “This is…
If David Letterman ever did the Top Ten Reasons for Running on Colfax Avenue, “Damn, that cop is fast” and “That hooker stole my wallet” would clock in at, like, numbers two and three, while “I need exercise” wouldn’t make it as far as the cutting-room floor. But that’s all…
Find your inner movie producer/record-label executive today at the Disc Makers’ Road Show at the Airshow Mastering & Immersive Studios, 3063 East Sterling Circle in Boulder. The instructional seminar features a series of lectures on everything you need to know about mass-producing your blockbuster feature or Dad’s infectious pop album…
It’s appropriate that Robert Greer is the keynote speaker at Park Hill Bookstore’s 35th Anniversary Celebration. A local teacher and doctor, founder of the High Plains Literary Review and author of seven books, Greer has a background as eclectic as that of the bookstore, which started as a book co-op…
Keeping the final resting place of your loved ones in tip-top shape should be a priority — especially for those with larger family plots to attend — because there’s nothing sadder than a neglected grave. In that spirit, the Fairmount Heritage Foundation offers a Gravestone Restoration Project today and tomorrow…
At this late date, it’s hard to tell one digitally rendered talking animal from another. Madagascar blends into Ice Age looks like A Shark’s Tale sounds like Shrek might as well be A Bug’s Life turns into Antz feels like Chicken Little could be Over the Hedge, which is really…
You know its hard out here for a screenwriter. Youve got a surefire hit on your hands — an adaptation of the runaway bestseller The Da Vinci Code — and yet its all about talking and solving cryptic riddles, which isnt exactly suited to the visual medium. Its also a…
About ten minutes into Michael Cuesta’s 12 and Holding, the following thought came to mind: Not afraid to put children in harm’s way. Twenty minutes later, not afraid was replaced with compelled. As he did in L.I.E. , which introduced child molestation into a fetid tale of adolescent obliteration, Cuesta…
Trotted out like ol’ Trigger whenever there’s a movie with saddles and six-shooters, the term “revisionist Western” would surely be a cliche if there were enough Westerns to warrant its use more than once every few years. Fact is, any movie in a genre as depressingly out-to-pasture as the Western…
A new interpretation of Macbeth, filmed in Denver and the mountains west of Golden and set in contemporary corporate America, will have its world premiere on Friday, May 19, at Starz FilmCenter. The first feature produced by Commerce City-based Ionogen Studios, this Macbeth stars Clyde Sacks in the title role…
At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, artists were attracted to the West by its majestic scenery. Then, in the late twentieth and early 21st centuries, artists began to notice how people were wrecking those formerly perfect views. A typical approach for many of…
During the past ten years, the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design (1600 Pierce Street, 303-753-6046) has emerged as a local powerhouse. Although there are fewer students enrolled in the entire school than there are fine-art majors at Metropolitan State College of Denver, there have been more significant emerging…
Apparition. The brand-new Gallery Severn, which is owned by art collector and retired executive Andy Dodd, aims to be what he has called a “launch pad” for emerging artists. This specialty in fresh faces instantly makes the place interesting. Also interesting is Dodd’s decision to feature only one artist at…
A collection of monologues about the Iraq War based on the experiences of men who fought there, Sand Storm is raw and upsetting, but it also tells an old, old story. Hundreds of accounts like these followed the war in Vietnam, and they echo the observations in Chris Hedges’s seminal…
To be buried while alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality. That it has frequently, very frequently, so fallen will scarcely be denied by those who think. The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best…
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,…
Mom always says that videogames rot your brain. Hell, some say that Grand Theft Auto trains kids to kill. So Nintendo’s claim that its new portable offering, Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day!, actually makes players smarter has been received with a mix of curiosity, cynicism, and…
Winter Passing (Fox) Try this, should you be inclined to rent this downer from writer-director Adam Rapp: Skip from chapter to chapter and see whether they all don’t begin with exactly the same image, accompanied by exactly the same sound. There is always someone (usually Zooey Deschanel as a would-be…
All You’ve Got (MTV) American Soldiers (Velocity) The Big Valley: Season One (Fox) Con Air: Unrated Extended Edition (Buena Vista) Crimson Tide: Unrated Extended Edition (Buena Vista) Doogal (Weinstein) Duma (Warner Bros.) Funny Games (Kino) Garon Stupide (Picture This) Hill Street Blues: Season Two (Fox) My Mother’s Smile (New Yorker)…
“I was playing ‘Murderer Number Two’ in a production of Macbeth in Montreal in 1992,” says Toronto’s Rick Miller, “and I had a little too much time on my hands.” Between slayings, he worked out a skit that combined the words of William Shakespeare with spot-on impressions of characters from…
For many Coloradans, bicycles are a way of life. But for 39-year-old Denver real-estate agent Brad Evans, who rides a stealth-black, single-gear Schwinn Panther reissue, cycles and summer simply mean one thing: cruising. When Evans lived in Boulder, he regularly rode with the Thursday-night Boulder Cruzer Club. But eventually, Evans…
