In November there will arrive on newsstands a music magazine edited by Alan Light, who left Spin to embark on his endeavor of publishing a journal devoted to that long-ignored audience: the over-30 CD-buyer, the old fart for whom “new music” is a mystery left to be fathomed by The…
Whenever the stars of the adolescent street-racing fantasy 2 Fast 2 Furious were feeling balky or temperamental on the set, as movie stars are wont to do, the cure was probably easy: an oil change and a tuneup. John Singleton’s adrenaline-spiked sequel to the surprise summer hit of 2001, The…
The French government should officially proclaim actor Jean Rochefort a national treasure. A fixture of Gallic cinema for five decades, he is best known to American audiences for his comedic turns in such sex farces as Pardon Mon Affaire and The Closet, and, of course, his near-miss as Don Quixote…
Once the enfant terrible of post-war German cinema, the single-minded director Werner Herzog made half a dozen great films in the 1970s, including Fata Morgana, Every Man for Himself and God Against All and his chilling update on F.W. Murnau, Nosferatu, the Vampyre. But Herzog’s most memorable (and most characteristic)…
Hanging in my office is a black-and-white-plaid suit jacket with big pearl buttons. It’s the sort of jacket a suburban matron might wear to an opera matinee — or a newspaper editor might wear to court. That was the first and last time I’d worn the jacket until this past…
Thursday, June 5 CU-Boulder’s International Film Series kicks off its summer session in classic style, by presenting a film connoisseur’s dream come true: Japanese director Akira Kurosawa and actor Toshiro Mifune, an artistic match for the ages, will be in the spotlight on Thursday nights through mid-August, beginning tonight with…
The last time around, in the fall of 2000, the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver’s Colorado Biennial was in different hands, while current MCA curator Cydney Payton was wrapping up her tenure at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Payton was never shy at BMoCA (she had her own ideas of…
SAT, 6/7 Calling all citizens: The Capitol Hill United Neighborhoods People’s Fair is back in full force. Let’s check the numbers: Two hundred fifty thousand fair-goers are expected to peruse 350 juried arts-and-crafts exhibitors while eating 3,000 turkey legs from 38 food vendors, using 130 porta-potties and listening to 75…
First Fan Fair feeds frenzy SAT, 6/7 Nobody knows for sure how many die-hard Broncos fans are going to show up at Invesco Field at 11 this morning and tomorrow morning for the team’s inaugural Denver Broncos Fan Fair. What is certain is that every current player and coach, as…
SAT, 6/7 Where did you go to read when the summer turned hot, you had nowhere to go, your friends were all away on road trips to Yellowstone or spending their afternoons at some swanky pool, and your back bike tire caught a thorn in a vacant lot and went…
FRI, 6/6 One week, one blank, date-stamped canvas and an urban landscape with distinct boundaries: Those were the limitations given to artists who participated in Paint Our Town: Old, New, Now!, a contest and exhibit opening today at the Art Students League of Denver, 200 Grant Street. Based on the…
TUES, 6/10 When you go to the movies, do your eyes get more of a workout than your brain? Luckily, Alexandre Philippe has a cure for what ails you. Philippe, a Lighthouse Foundation and University of Denver screenwriting instructor, is currently presenting a four-movie series called “The Deconstruction of Film”…
You’ve been warned: This is a column about politics wherein a popular-culture critic (dunno what that is either, but says so on my tax returns) interviews a former rock journalist-turned-publicist-turned-band-manager-turned-record-label-executive about how the Democratic Party alienated everyone under the age of death. You may take this with a grain of…
For a while back in the ’80s and early ’90s, it looked like formalism — essentially non-objective abstraction — was on the ropes. Then about five years ago, it rose, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of neo-expressionism, on the one hand, and annoyingly personal conceptualism on the other, re-establishing itself as…
Surplus, at Studio Aiello (3563 Walnut Street, 303-297-8166), is the big-tent title connecting three unrelated solos — but just for good measure, each also has its own title. The show starts with Clare Cornell’s Dress Formal, which combines photo-based pieces and sculptures. The sculptures from Cornell’s “Lingual Discharge” series are…
Some aspects of dictatorship — at least of certain kinds of dictatorship — are irresistibly funny. This has to do with what happens when a man possessed of a colossal ego finds himself in a position where that ego goes completely unchecked. Many dictatorships of both the right and the…
avid Auburn’s Pulitzer-winning play, Proof, has been much discussed and debated, both in the United States and in London, where Gwyneth Paltrow starred in it last year. As Proof opens, we learn that the protagonist, Catherine, interrupted her own life and education when her father, Robert, a mathematical genius, succumbed…
Preston Sturges, probably the wittiest writer and most nimble director of Hollywood’s Golden Age of Comedy, gave us such Depression-era classics as Sullivan’s Travels, The Great McGinty and The Lady Eve. Less well-known but just as uproarious, in its way, 1947’s quirky The Sin of Harold Diddlebock stars an aging…
If grownups were meant to watch Walt Disney cartoons, God would have kept us all in the third grade for two or three decades. Still, somebody has to drive the SUV every time the Disney-folk decide to lure the little ones down to the multiplex, and as long as the…
The teenage poet in Karen Moncrieff’s Blue Car writes melancholy verse about autumn leaves falling off trees and fathers abandoning their daughters. Predictably, the girl’s floundering mother is too harried and too strapped for cash to pay much attention to her, and her troubled little sister is endlessly needy. In…
Ticket to The Matrix Reloaded: $8.50 Ticket to The Matrix Reloaded to understand the real meaning behind Trinity’s… (oops, can’t tell): $8.50 Your own personal Matrix: Priceless And free. While the rest of the shlubs in town are forking over to see a Dolby sound, flat-screen version of the matrix,…
Burn, baby, burn: Nothing will heat up your impending weekend quicker than a little recreational fire-breathing and poi (that’s Hawaiian fire-spinning, folks), brought to you by Denver’s local experts, the Lumina Performance Troupe. The safety-conscious group, which includes hot, hot, hot choreography, drumming, juggling, gymnastics, stilt-walking and more in its…
