SUN, 10/9 Taking cues from the legendary Earl Scruggs, the Czech Republic’s Druhá Tráva (which means “Second Grass”) has transformed a quintessentially American idiom into a unique synthesis of jazz, pop, folk, classical and Eastern European music. “Bluegrass has a long tradition in our country and became extremely popular in…
Robots (Fox) The story of a small-town ‘bot (voiced by Ewan McGregor) who bolts for the big city, Robots is the first non-Pixar film to compete with that studio’s razzle and dazzle. The thing’s stunning to look at, and frankly, it’s better to stare at than listen to, since listening…
Carlito’s Way: Rise to Power (Universal) American Pie: 3 Movie Pie Pack (Universal) Beethoven: The Pooch Pack (Universal) Billy Jack: The Ultimate Collection (Ventura) Blind Melon: Live at the Metro (EMI) Bouncing Souls: Live at the Glasshouse (Fontana) Britney & Kevin: Chaotic…the DVD & More (Jive) The Complete Monty Python’s…
The late Herbert Bayer, who spent a good deal of his life in Aspen, is one of the greatest artists to have ever worked in Colorado. He’s part of the international history of graphics and photography, but he did so much more, creating paintings, prints, sculptures, buildings and some of…
Herbert Bayer is probably best known in Denver for his monumental canary-yellow sculpture “articulated wall,” a striking constructivist composition erected in 1985, the year he died. Located within the Denver Design Center complex at 595 South Broadway, the tower rises more than fifty feet. It has an enormous steel mast…
Andy Warhol’s Dream America. Hot on the heels of its smash hit, Chihuly, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center is presenting yet another blockbuster devoted to the work of a household name in contemporary art: Andy Warhol’s Dream America. The exhibition was curated by Ben Mitchell of Wyoming’s Nicolaysen Museum…
More than a decade ago, I attended a production at the Gaslight, a theater in the basement of a beautiful Victorian house in northwest Denver. The play, Bent, was new then and revelatory, a terrifying examination of the plight of homosexuals in Nazi Germany. The play seemed almost incongruous in…
Five terrific performers and a slate of Fats Waller songs. How can you go wrong? I know that Ain’t Misbehavin’, a jazzy, bluesy Waller showcase that brings the world of 1930s Harlem to life, is often staged in a broadly presentational style, with lots of humor, shtick, dancing and acting…
The Fourth Wall, Playwright A.R. Gurney is a courteous, upper-crust kind of guy, so when he found himself enraged by national politics, he didn’t respond with agitprop or searing realism. Instead he imagined a comfortably middle-class housewife, Peggy, who — by way of protest — rearranges all the furniture in…
It’s almost impossible to watch Roman Polanski’s rendition of Oliver Twist without drawing parallels between the deprivations endured by the book’s young protagonist and the director’s own brutal boyhood. A Jew raised in Nazi-occupied Poland, Polanski first tackled the Holocaust head-on in his 2002 film The Pianist, but Oliver Twist,…
About once a year — twice, if we’re lucky — a first-time director shows up with something original, electrifying and humane, a film that shows us a new way to see, that presents complex and memorable people in whom we recognize ourselves. Last year it was Joshua Marston and Maria…
Anyone vaguely familiar with the rules of golf knows that you may not improve your lie, ground your club in a sand trap or — most grievous of all — subtract strokes from your score. This last one apparently never occurred to the makers of a new movie with the…
To the knowledgeable comic-book fan, all one need say about MirrorMask is that it was scripted by Neil Gaiman and directed by Dave McKean, with a final product that, while less plot-heavy than most of Gaiman’s writing, faithfully adapts McKean’s unique drawing/collage style into three dimensions. Since those who aren’t…
If The Memory of a Killer were not mostly in Flemish, it would be easy to mistake for a Hollywood movie. The story of a hit man with a conscience and the cop who’s always a step or two behind him as they pursue the same villains, it’s full of…
Any thing can be anything to anybody, particularly in the case of David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence. If you want to believe that his new film, a loose adaptation of a little-known graphic novel, is a work of damning criticism aimed at the hypocrisy of Americans who believe violence…
Into the Blue offers precisely what one would expect from the director of Blue Crush and the writer of Torque: beautiful stupidity. Its every frame dripping from a noxious recipe of suntan oil, summertime sweat and salt water, this heist movie (or whatever it is, which isn’t much) delivers a…
Serenity, Joss Whedon’s big-screen spinoff of the 2002 TV show Firefly, which didn’t even last a dozen episodes, is already a cult phenom well before its opening. The show’s DVD boxed set lines the shelf of every fanboy who dreamed of gunslinging in space alongside preachers and prostitutes, and already…
More than a decade before post-war revolutionists such as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and the other enfants terribles of the New Wave forever transformed French cinema, that country’s film industry endured the peculiar trauma of German occupation. Between 1940 and 1944, the Nazis purged French moviemaking of Jews and Communists,…
Written in 1947, Arthur Miller’s All My Sons tells the story of Joe Keller, a businessman who knowingly sold defective plane-engine cylinders to the Army during World War II, causing the death of 21 pilots. Although he was able to conceal his crime by placing all of the blame on…
Thursday, September 29 The dream event of every red-blooded Colorado beer-swiller is back: The Great American Beer Festival returns tonight to the new, improved Colorado Convention Center, with a 1,600-variety array of suds from nearly 400 breweries, large and small. Though the fest features plenty of sideshows, from book signings…
“The sun is a symbol of rebirth,” explains Tony Garcia. “In our culture, death is not an end. It’s part of a recycling.” The word “recycling,” though, fails to convey the mythic scope and spirit of El Sol Que Tú Eres/The Sun That You Are. A stage musical written and…
SUN, 10/2 At 4 p.m. today, after workers remove the pew cushions and burn some incense, the annual St. Francis Day Blessing of the Animals will commence at St. John’s Cathedral, 1350 Washington Street. “There’s always a certain degree of joyful chaos because we get a wide variety of animals…
