Beware the exclamation point. When found at the end of a title, it almost inevitably signals a level of self-hype rarely justified by the content of whatever it hopes to name. In the case of the movie Saved! — an amusing if facile comedy about a good Christian girl gone…
The real Melvin Van Peebles shows up just once in Baadasssss!, a fictionalized account of his making of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song in 1971, and it’s at the film’s end; he sits silent, grinning, clutching his ever-present cigar. But he’s all over this movie, in which his son Mario plays…
Devotees of the Boulder Outdoor Cinema all know the drill: You bring your own lawn chair. Or bean bag. Or yoga mat. If you’re strong and ambitious and think you might need a snooze, you bring your own couch. Whatever you choose to sit or lie upon, you get it…
Where do you like to eat in town? Do you have any siblings? What kind of activities are you into? Welcome to the awkward world of speed dating, where an age-old cliche holds true: You never get a second chance to make a first impression. That adage rules at Saturday’s…
Thursday, June 10 Colorado College grad and former Denverite Thaddeus Phillips has done wonders for the curious and unexplored field of one-man tap-dancing as performance art. His imaginative, autobiographical signature piece, Lost Soles, has been thrilling avant-theater audiences across the nation since its debut four years ago in Philadelphia. Apparently…
“I don’t know many people for whom writing novels is a moneymaking proposition, unless you’re someone like Stephen King,” says Richard Price, whose latest book, 2003’s Samaritan, is being released this month in paperback. “I doubt there are fifty novelists in the country who can live and support a family…
SAT, 6/12 Back in 1979, the art of home brewing was just a bit of foam with possibilities, relegated to the garages and basements of plebeian beer tinkerers in such forward-thinking towns as San Francisco, Seattle and Boulder, where fermenting experiments bubbled forth from primitive barrels and jugs. Most of…
SAT, 6/12 Driven by the slogan “A day in the saddle, a world of good,” more than 500 riders will strap on helmets and pedal toward progress at today’s fourth annual American Diabetes Association Tour de Cure bike race. “Not only have we seen a rise in awareness since we…
THURS, 6/10 These days, you’re as likely to come across George Lopez on ABC as you are on HBO or Univision. His smiling face is everywhere: on stages across the country, on his hit weekly sitcom George Lopez, in films, on late-night talk shows, even on Inside the NFL. The…
TUES, 6/15 Menopause The Musical ain’t your daughter’s Vagina Monologues. Currently heating up theaters in eleven cities, the saucy show, set in a Bloomingdale’s department store, follows four forty-something women as they bond over their change-of-life experiences and a Bloomie’s black-lace bra. The score includes 26 popular baby-boomer tunes; audience…
Is it just me, or does it seem like the art world is the midst of high season? Nearly everywhere there’s some exhibit that’s worth taking in — and that’s really weird because the season should be shutting down for the summer. Ordinarily, June, July and August are the least…
Currently, there’s a touching two-part exhibit at the Edge Gallery (3658 Navajo Street, 303-477-7173) that honors Roger M. Beltrami, a long-time co-op member who died earlier this year. The show, birds of a feather, has two parts: In the front space is a memorial presentation featuring Beltrami’s own work, and…
Aaron Karp, Sushe Felix, Delos Van Earl, Lynn Heitler. There are four single-artist shows at the William Havu Gallery: Aaron Karp, Sushe Felix, Delos Van Earl and Lynn Heitler. The first is Aaron Karp, mostly made up of large paintings that illustrate the New Mexico artist’s classic style. Karp’s paintings…
I guess basements and comedy go together like beer and nuts or toddlers and sandboxes. The cellar 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,…
Some people think of critics as the artistic equivalent of meat inspectors; they see our job as going from place to place stamping performances as prime, choice, select or — heaven forbid — cutter. We’re the arbiters of taste who will tell them what to miss and what’s worth attending…
Alarms & Excursions. Alarms & Excursions is minor Michael Frayn, but it can’t help bearing the master’s stamp. A group of eight playlets examines the role of technology in our lives and its impact on human communication. In the first, a friendly dinner is interrupted by a series of sounds:…
Movie-goers familiar with the tides of recent Brazilian history will probably get more from Hector Babenco’s new prison movie, Carandiru, than the rest of us, because the filmmaker tells us so little about the society beyond the walls that helped shape the violent yet carefully ordered world within them. On…
As much of the civilized world now knows, the latest Harry Potter director is Alfonso Cuarón, best known for the explicit teen-sexual-awakening movie Y Tu Mam´ También. So it may come as little surprise that his Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban begins with the teenage wizard-in-training hiding under…
Ah, the peculiar genius that is Guy Maddin. Who else but the morose Canadian director, born and raised in one of the coldest cities in the world, would marry silent film, 1930s movie musicals, Prohibition, family melodrama, monster-movie gore and a critique of capitalist zeal in a surreal montage about…
Now in its seventh incarnation, the Aurora Asian Film Festival is a showcase for the burgeoning cinematic talents of China, Japan, Thailand, Cambodia, Taiwan and Bhutan. This year’s four-day festival will feature more than a dozen new films from Asia and the Pacific Rim, beginning Thursday, June 3, with a…
“A miserable yellow melancholy stream” was how Mark Twain described the South Platte River. Fortunately, the Greenway Foundation — established thirty years ago to transform the Platte from a dumping ground into an urban amenity — chose the riverway less traveled by when it first floated a boat past Confluence…
Thursday, June 3 It’s just the start of a whole spool of fiber-art exhibits about to unwind along the Front Range this month in conjunction with the upcoming Handweavers Guild of America conference in Denver, but it’s an auspicious beginning. The Metro State Center for the Visual Arts, 1734 Wazee…
