One of Hollywood’s most enduring leading men will be the centerpiece of four film screenings and a lecture this weekend at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. The Cary Grant Film Festival begins on Friday evening, April 23, and will be highlighted by the Nancy Nelson Masterpiece Lecture at 6…
Artist Scott McCloud has long been a champion of comics. The comic book is a medium that the acclaimed storyteller feels is as legitimate and accessible as literature or film, not just fodder for big-budget blockbusters and the covers of kids’ lunchboxes. To heighten awareness of the expressive capabilities of…
Thursday, April 22 Frankie Manning, the acknowledged king of the Savoy lindy hop, might, incredibly, be ninety years old, but he’s still going strong, and so is the Frankie Manning Weekend — a local tradition, now in its eighth year, hosted annually by Karen Lee Dance Theatre. Age is apparently…
“I think John Kerry missed his calling,” Jello Biafra says by phone from San Francisco. “Now that Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing aren’t making those low-budget Dracula knockoffs, they need a new one. And FrankenKerry would’ve been perfect! I can’t get it out of my mind that he voted for…
FRI, 4/23 “My mission is to make something new out of an old piece of crap that nobody wanted anymore and to bring forth genius — satirical, irony-filled attitude — to a mundane world of fashion drones,” says Boulderite Rachel White, who will show her new designs at tonight’s Retrofit…
SAT, 4/24 Get ready for a royal thigh workout at today’s thirteenth annual Imperial Challenge adventure competition, held in Breckenridge. The contest begins with a 6.2-mile mountain-bike ride on unpaved roads to the base of Breckenridge Ski Resort’s Peak 8, followed by a 2,998-foot ascent of the Claimjumper run using…
WED, 4/28 The best-selling novel Getting Mother’s Body, by Suzan-Lori Parks, holds a chorus of voices from cover to cover. Indeed, the replication of voice — from simple syntax to each character’s unique inner psychology — is the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright’s forte, regardless of which medium she’s dabbling in. And…
FRI, 4/23 El Centro Su Teatro’s annual Neruda Poetry Festival and Barrio Slam events are all about instilling a new appreciation for literacy in Chicano youth through a series of in-school residencies designed to get kids excited about putting words together in a creative way. The wordplay culminates with tonight’s…
Not since the 1960s has there been so much aesthetic interest in popular culture. It all began a decade ago, when many contemporary artists grew tired of formalism and expressionism and began picking up on the pop-related styles of a previous generation. Some of these new-pop artists revived the original…
The spacious if grungy Andenken Gallery (2110 Market Street, 303-292-3281) near Coors Field is the perfect setting for the fourth annual Kinetic and Robot Show, which highlights art about actual and implied movement. Put together by Andenken director Hyland Mather, the exhibit is quite strange, mostly because the selections don’t…
Hidden Images. On the mezzanine of Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art is Hidden Images, which is dedicated to recent work by major contemporary Czech artist Adéla Matasová. The show is made up of a handful of things, including a group of conceptual installations that reconcile minimalism to movement. Three of…
Ellen McLaughlin’s Tongue of a Bird isn’t poetry, though it wants to be: It lacks conciseness, the sense of language reduced to its essence. Instead, it floods the stage with lyrical phrases and poetic images, as if the author were saying, “How’s this one? Didn’t move you? Didn’t quite work?…
As Communicating Doors opens, a leather-clad prostitute called Poopay enters a hotel room for an assignation and discovers that her customer, Reece, is a dying old man who doesn’t require her usual services. Instead, he wants her to witness his confession. In the course of his business dealings and the…
Bat Boy: The Musical. The character of Bat Boy is based on a recurring character in the Weekly World News — a two-foot-high boy, found in a cave in West Virginia, who endorsed Al Gore for president and later almost died after being sprayed by a pesticide truck. In the…
When we first see the title characters of Connie and Carla, a penny-dreadful imitation of one of Hollywood’s most inimitable comedies, they are loud-mouthed junior-high girls mugging in the school cafeteria. A minute later, they are loud-mouthed grownups (well, they’re the size of grownups) screaming out show tunes in a…
The six-month intermission is over; those of you left in the lobby wondering if Uma Thurman ever did kill Bill, may now return to your seats, unbuckle your belts and resume your gorging. Rest assured that Kill Bill Vol. 2, the final half of Quentin Tarantino’s fifth movie, offers just…
Claude Lanzmann’s agonizing epic Shoah (1985) remains, in critic Roger Ebert’s phrase, “one of the noblest films ever made” and, beyond all doubt, one of the greatest non-fiction works committed to celluloid. It runs almost nine and a half hours but never betrays its great length because (Ebert again) this…
Boulder musician and outdoorsman Loren Mach is a guy who’s thrown himself into his passions one by one: The owner of percussion performance degrees from the Oberlin and Cincinnati conservatories and a former percussionist with the New Mexico Symphony, he shucked a career on the skins to take a walk…
Thursday, April 15 Student moviemakers from around the world can bask in the limelight this weekend during the First Look Student Film Festival, a wide-ranging celebration of cinema’s bright future. More than sixty short films, including narrative, documentary, animated and experimental works, are set to screen today through Saturday at…
Terry Gross has mastered the quiet craft of listening. As the host of National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, she’s conducted more than 10,000 on-air interviews, and she faces everyone — artists, pornographers, international war correspondents, Tammy Faye Bakker and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog — with a willing ear and…
Denver fashionistas no longer have to make a run for the coasts to deck themselves out in red-hot designer duds. Now they can simply strut down to Skye, a newly opened LoDo boutique. “I really think it’s time to put Denver on the fashion map,” says owner Skye Forrest. “The…
FRI, 4/16 Think you play a mean pinball? Prove it. You’ll be up against the best of the flippin’ best at the Rocky Mountain Pinball Showdown, which starts today at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds. Elton John will be there, ready to whup your ass from behind the glass of his…
