Bat Boy: The Musical ends like a Shakespearean tragedy, with bodies dropping all over the stage, while horrified onlookers shudder and weep. It’s just that in Shakespeare, the bodies don’t rise up again to sing the finale. The character of Bat Boy is based on a recurring character in the…
Art. Art begins and ends with an all-white painting — or an empty canvas, depending on how you look at it. Serge, a wealthy dermatologist, has just invested 200,000 francs (about $40,000) in this painting, which features diagonal white lines on a white background. His friend, Marc, is appalled at…
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in which a man has recollections of a soured relationship erased from his brain, may be the most romantic movie in recent memory, if you will pardon the unforgivable pun. Written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Michel Gondry, it’s about many things –…
Oh, dear. Angelina Jolie’s made another bad film. Is it too soon to give up on her? There’s no denying that Angelina’s sexy as hell. The tattoos, the knife collection, the exhibitionist streak, the bisexual vibe she gives off…totally hot, no question. Given her work with the U.N. and wild-animal…
Just in time for March Madness, and in the wake of the new Olympic hockey flag-waver Miracle, comes a revival of Hoosiers (1986), the ultimate feel-good sports movie. Starring the peerless Gene Hackman as a willful high school basketball coach with a shady past, and Dennis Hopper as the alcoholic…
Like most people with pulses, you gag on the gooey pabulum spewed by Norah Jones, Jason Mraz and their spindly ilk. So brace yourself for the full-blooded, muscle-toned vocal stylings of… The Iron Sheik? Born Khosrow Vaziri, the native Iranian wrestling legend began his career as a gold-medalist in the…
Thursday, March 18 No thanks to the Air Force Academy, the University of Colorado football program and Kobe Bryant, our state appears to be ground zero in what’s become a national debate. So it’s more than fitting that the Colorado Freedom of Information Council Public Forum will confront the topic…
It is almost impossible to turn on the television or flip through a magazine these days without seeing depictions of smiling, happy people finally enjoying life again — thanks to the mood-altering pills they’re taking. Boulder-based performer and playwright Jennifer Berry has a major problem with such advertising. In Big…
Perhaps the biggest complaint about Mayor Hicklenlooper’s first choice for the recently announced, fledgling One Book, One Denver campaign — Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River — is that it’s too easy, a bestseller chosen for its appeal to a wide literary palate. And besides, how does a small-town yarn…
SUN, 3/21 Cyclists throughout the state know Team Evergreen as the club that, among other things, assembles the annual torturefest called the Triple Bypass (motto: “For those who dare”). And while that grueling July test of body and sanity continues to be the hallmark of the club, Team Evergreen offers…
WED, 3/24 Get down and dirty this afternoon at a lecture and chisme with Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, author of The Dirty Girls Social Club. “I’m going to talk about the dangers of stereotyping, because I think everyone is stereotyped,” says Valdes-Rodriguez, a former reporter for both the Los Angeles Times and…
WED, 3/24 Tracy Turnblad has big ambition and a bigger bouffant. It’s 1962, and the tubby Turnblad dreams of dancing on TV’s Corny Collins Show, but when she splits hairs with the program’s most popular pre-pubescent starlet, she’s tossed into a teenage tangle that could crush her curls and squash…
Rule Gallery director Robin Rule has a taste for art with a less-is-more aesthetic, and she has made her place on Broadway Denver’s “minimalist central.” Over the years, she’s showcased first-generation minimalists from New York, including Carl Andre and Mary Obering, as well as local practitioners, notably Clark Richert, the…
The many spaces on the ground floor at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art (1275 19th Street, 303-298-7554) are dedicated to an expansive survey of contemporary Chinese photography. But on the mezzanine is a quiet solo, Hidden Images, dedicated to recent compositions by a major contemporary Czech artist, Adéla Matasová. The…
BECAUSE THE EARTH IS 1/3 DIRT. The CU Art Museum on the University of Colorado’s Boulder campus is an unlikely setting for a blockbuster contemporary ceramics exhibit — but here it is, anyway. The show was curated by a committee that included museum director Lisa Tamiris Becker and CU art…
Yasmina Reza’s Art begins and ends with an all-white painting. Or an empty canvas, depending on how you look at it. Serge, a wealthy dermatologist, has just invested 200,000 francs (about $40,000) in the painting, which features diagonal white lines on a white background. His friend, Marc, is appalled at…
There’s no question: Larry Parr’s script for Hi-Hat Hattie is two-dimensional and sentimental, open to all the shortcomings of the form — a one-woman show that tells the story of a famed historical figure. You can be sure the subject will be prettied up, and any nastiness or meanness in…
Flaming Guns of the Purple Sage. Flaming Guns is a manic, farcical take on the myth of the West mixed with a large dollop of gothic horror. It’s also a genuinely clever, funny and outrageous script. Bits and pieces of things you’ve seen before float to the surface: scenes from…
In the beginning, there was nudity. Along a bank of the Colorado River, cradled by jutting cliffs, a community of sun-kissed river guides bathed happily in the nude. They were young and lithe; they were wild and free; they were hirsute; they had nothing but time. It was 1978, and…
If you were expecting the first film to emerge from Afghanistan since the defeat of the Taliban to be even remotely celebratory, you’ll have to adjust your expectations. Radically. In Osama, filmed in 2002 and 2003 in a “suburb” of Kabul, writer-director Siddiq Barmak is not interested in showing us…
It’s a 48-minute advertisement for mass obsession that has no time for irony or skepticism, and halfway through, the non-committed may start feeling a bit carsick. But for anyone who savors the scent of burning rubber and understands what a restrictor plate is, NASCAR 3D: The IMAX Experience will be…
Elton John kicks my ass. Well, it’s not so much the big-goggles singer as it is his namesake 1975 Bally Capt. Fantastic pinball machine. I go through quarters — three balls for 25 cents — the way some people dump them in the slots at the Double Eagle. It’s like…
