The clock is ticking on 2013. In less than a week, we’ll be closing the door on yet another trip around the sun, and embracing the greatest of all arbitrary calendar events, the new year. That means it’s time for that greatest of arbitrary life events: resolutions! No new year…
Kathleen Hanna is not a name that may be well known to the mainstream masses — but as feminist, musician, activist, zine-maker and cofounder of the riot grrrl movement, she’s been a key figure in underground culture for decades. Regularly misrepresented — and often not acknowledged at all — in…
In honor of tonight’s event, Westword revisited the filmography of John Cusack and hand-picked his most definitively Cusackian roles. These movies are each thoroughly entertaining on their own merits, but together they illuminate the precise nature of Cusack’s appeal. Old-school Cusack fans may notice the conspicuous absence of his broader 80s comedies. Unlike the man himself, Cusack movies like Better Off Dead have aged very poorly. 1985’s The Sure Thing is a film that, like promise rings and the music of Rush, is strictly intended to entertain virgins. True fans can hardly begrudge this list however, as it covers every shade of Cusack, and includes a legitimate masterpiece, two beloved cult classics, a half-forgotten potboiler that deserves a critical reappraisal, and a movie that features what is arguably the best boyfriend of cinema history in its ranks.
While their Christian brethren gathered in churches and around the tree with family and friends on Christmas Eve, Denver’s young professional Jewish community came out to party at Heebonism 2013, which also served as the first big event to show off the newly renovated and renamed 1UP Colfax. Photographer Brandon…
Live music and film are strange bedfellows in the modern age, but it wasn’t always so. In the silent era, a live accompaniment was standard practice for all films. Local musician and filmmaker Paul Buscarello is resurrecting that long-gone experience with a performance of his new, original score for the…
Clark Richert. In the few years it’s been in business, Gildar Gallery has mostly showcased young and up-and-coming artists, but with Dimension and Symmetry: Clark Richert, the intimate space on Broadway has moved to Denver’s big time, as Richert is among the best-known artists in the state. The show comes…
In the twenty years since Reality Bites, his directorial debut, Ben Stiller has metastasized from sketch-comedy lunatic to Generation X darling to blockbuster king. Among the funnymen, most of whom have calcified into cliques (yawn, Anchorman 2), he’s the last of the triple-threat writer-director-stars, and the only one who would…
Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is the kind of movie directors make when they wield money, power, and a not inconsiderable degree of arrogance. Sprawling and extravagant, it revels in all manner of excess, including sexual debauchery, hearty abuse of liquor and quaaludes, even dwarf-tossing. Its antihero, the…
What becomes a legend most? Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom offers the biopic’s usual reply: legend itself. Bigger, louder, more expensive legend, brought to bear by the best talents and technologies of the day. The name of Nelson Mandela is already shorthand for the things Mandela director Justin Chadwick shows…
When Peter Guralnick released Last Train to Memphis, the first half of his superb two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, some people must have wondered, “Who needs two books to tell the story of Elvis?” They may as well have grumbled, “Two whole books about America?” Some lives, some careers, push…
When he was thirteen, Marilyn Manson — then just Christian schoolkid Brian Warner of Canton, Ohio — would hide out in the basement while his grandfather masturbated to bestiality porn. Then he’d go upstairs and cheer himself up reading Mad magazine. The self-dubbed God of Fuck is famous for his…
“Kurt was the only person who stuck up for me,” says musician Kathleen Hanna in The Punk Singer, a new documentary about her life and art. The Kurt in question is Kurt Cobain, a friend of the artist and an advocate for both feminism and Hanna’s work — which often…
For most of the year, These Things Matter podcast hosts Taylor Gonda and Kevin O’Brien stick to a tried-and-true script: They interview a guest on his or her obsession and crack wise in a studio, then package it up for online consumption by listeners who sometimes find themselves yelling at…
Some films are made to be watched, others need to be experienced — and then there are those movies that just need to be ridiculed and ripped apart. Close out the year with a gem from that last category, at Mile High Sci-Fi: White House Down. As Channing Tatum and…
You’ve seen one Nutcracker, you’ve seen them all? Not quite, says the Colorado Ballet’s Sanya Andersen-Vie, who promises that theirs is not only the most classic, crowd-pleasing rendition around, but it’s also one of the few in the area to feature a live orchestra performing Tchaikovsky’s familiar and signature tunes…
Live music and film are strange bedfellows in the modern age, but it wasn’t always that way. In the silent era, a live accompaniment was standard practice for all films. Today, local musician and filmmaker Paul Buscarello will resurrect that long-gone experience with a performance of his new, original score…
Everyone wants to know what the future will bring — and every year, Isis Books and Gifts hosts a Psychic Fair before the start of the new year so that you can plan accordingly. “There’s so much that’s going to be changing and transforming in 2014,” notes owner Karen Harrison,…
There’s a reason that Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol has never gone out of print. “It was published in 1843, and it’s interesting how the issues in the play, even the point of view that Scrooge has, can feel so remarkably present-day,” says Bruce K. Sevy, who is directing the…
You want to rest up before New Year’s Eve, but you’re too full of anticipation to endure boredom. So what better way to fill that awkward gap than with a witty Christmas flick that you don’t have to feel guilty about? After a string of top-shelf comedy films, the Boulder…
Flappers and fellas will be putting on the glitz tonight to celebrate the Roaring Twenties at the Thin Man’s Great Gatsby Ball. Every year, the bar converts itself into a whole new world for one night, pumping in live music, ambient lighting and vibrant decor to fit a chosen theme…
Wrapped in silver cellophane and flooded with Mylar balloons, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art will take a step back in time to host NYE at the Factory: A Spectacle in Pop, Silver & Polaroid, an Andy Warhol-inspired New Year’s Eve party. The shindig is a spin on the legendary…
French food is all about rich flavors, explains City, O’ City’s new executive chef, Kurt Eichenberger. Since in traditional French cooking those flavors involve a lot of butter and meat, Eichenberger had to get creative to whip up intense tastes for the vegetarian restaurant’s special Paris-inspired New Year’s Eve. “To…
