For the characters in Train, the latest book by Pete Dexter, golf isn’t a gentleman’s game; it’s an eighteen-hole lesson in existentialism. After one player loses a bet, he curses “like he just saw life’s grand design, as often happened in golf.” And later, Dexter says, “I talk about how…
THURS, 11/13 Why, exactly, does brown mustard suck? Find out tonight at the premiere of a new Denver-based sitcom, So Dope, to be screened at the entertainment extravaganza So Dope: An Evening of Comedy.”It’s a story about two lifelong friends who don’t want to work their corporate jobs anymore, so…
THURS, 11/13 At age 78, skiing and filmmaking legend Warren Miller shows no sign of slowing down: The powder runs, rail slides and freefalls are more extreme than ever in Journey, Miller’s 54th annual high-energy ode to winter sports.The filmmaker’s familiar voice opens the film with “Let’s get the freak…
THURS, 11/13 Mayor Hickenlooper doesn’t have to worry about cleaning up the city after The Day It Snowed Tortillas. Fortunately, the edible precipitation will be confined to the Denver Puppet Theatre, 3156 West 38th Avenue. The 45-minute Southwest-inspired production tells the story of a small town in which villagers save…
THURS, 11/13 When Denver resident Jason Bosch first attended the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival in July 2001, he realized that knowledge, not ignorance, was bliss.”I felt kind of ashamed that I was so ignorant about the world,” says Bosch, adding that the New York-based festival “gives people the…
FRI, 11/14 When does an independent film become a work of art? The International Experimental Cinema Exposition (TIE) poses that question to nearly fifty featured directors who carve and sculpt in celluloid. The result is a sort of dadaesque feast for the eyes in which said filmmakers manipulate their avant-garde…
Even when people were watching Will Ferrell on television every Saturday night, they weren’t seeing Will Ferrell. They saw no more than a glimpse of him, beneath wigs and behind glued-on beards and buried under characters who became almost better known than he during his seven years on Saturday Night…
In the 1970s, contemporary art fractured into a riot of diverse styles. The anything-goes situation in which we find ourselves today is the inevitable product of this explosion. Now that artists have had decades to work out the various logical extensions of this cornucopia of ideas, contemporary art encompasses a…
In the past couple of months, Bryan Andrews created dozens of large sculptures for his solo show, which is now playing at Cordell Taylor Gallery (see page 55). That would seem like a lot of work, but somehow Andrews had some spare time on his hands. How else to explain…
Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle is a bracing black comedy, an exploration of the nature of evil. But if the topic is murky, the play is not. It’s as straightforward, clean and ruthless as a pen stroke. The action takes place in a milieu we recognize from Alan Bennett and…
Playwright Kenneth Lonergan is, among other things, a poet of confused and disaffected youth. He’s perhaps best known for writing and directing the film You Can Count on Me, which involves a young woman and her charmingly feckless brother — played, respectively, by Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo. The protagonist…
Tis the season and all that jive; beneath the tree this first week of November, you will find two films set during the final week of December, when sugarplums and candy canes go on sale at the concession stand for all the good little girls’ and boys’ parents to buy…
The spooky beauty of Elephant, Gus Van Sant’s strange take on the Columbine massacre, arises not from the shock of sudden violence, but from the filmmaker’s steady gaze at the numbing routines of life inside a suburban high school. With what first looks like cool detachment, Van Sant (My Own…
When performance artist Holly Hughes blows into Boulder this Thursday to speak at the Open Door Fund’s eighth annual Monsoon Dinner, she’ll raise some money — and maybe a few eyebrows, too. The feisty Obie Award winner and outspoken lesbian artist created quite a squall in the early ’90s when…
11/6 A trunkload of gorgeous specimens — including Navajo weavings from Ganado, Teec Nos Pos, Wide Ruins, Crystal, Burnham, Shiprock and Two Grey Hills — will go on the block today during One Hundred Navajo Rugs, an annual silent auction to benefit the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Museum of…
Shepard Fairey works by night. Since 1989, when the then-Rhode Island School of Design student created his first sticker — a depiction of wrestler Andre the Giant’s head over the phrase “Andre the Giant Has a Posse” — Fairey’s been skulking in the dark all over the world. He reclaims…
Photos shed light on black history By DeNesha Tellis If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the works included in Reflections in Black: Smithsonian African American Photography add up to an encyclopedia of the black experience in America.The three-part exhibition, on tour since January 2001, explores the history…
The Arvada Center weaves a spell with Charlotte’s Web By Ernie Tucker Few books hold the timeless appeal of E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. The classic tale of a precocious spider’s rescue of a pig even found a second life as a children’s-theater staple. But no matter how many times…
Ways to beat the pre-holiday shopping crush By Susan Froyd On your marks, get set… Halloween’s over, and the holiday shopping season is here. But while everyone else is waddling through the mall like a flock of penguins in a sea of molasses, you’ll run with a crowd of a…
The Champions brings sports all-stars to life By Hart Van Denburg You may not know Denver’s Rich Clarkson, but if you’re a sports fan, you’d probably recognize his photographs. For fifty years, Clarkson has covered college and professional teams for publications such as Sports Illustrated and Time; included in his…
The Shangri-La acrobats whirl into town By Julie Dunn Combining balance with pretzel-like contortions, formidable kung fu moves and a dash of Chinese comedy, the world-renowned Shangri-La Chinese Acrobats will share their unique brand of entertainment tonight at the Lakewood Cultural Center, 480 South Allison Parkway in Lakewood. “We’ve never…
It would be accurate to call BLOOD: Lines & Connections, the fall-winter exhibit at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art, a bold effort. It would also not be too far wrong to call the show — or at least parts of it — outrageous, confrontational and over the top. MCA director…
