“When Beeswax came out in 2009, I felt like there was a sense in the world of, ‘Well, that’s another one of the same from him,'” writer-director Andrew Bujalski says by telephone. “That frustrated me. I wanted to shake everybody by the collar and say, ‘No, can’t you see that…
Mink Stole got wrapped up in acting when she met avant garde director John Waters in the mid-’60s. But this wasn’t just a convenient accident: the East Coaster had a real knack for the B-movie style. Working hard as part of Waters’s devoted crew — dubbed The Dreamlanders — Stole…
The Crown Plaza Hotel Downtown was the site of the fourth Retox Pool Party hosted by Collective 360 on July 14. Westword photographer, Jim Wills was there to capture all the party-goers as they lounged by the pool. Keep reading to see some of the scene, and for more photos…
When William Friedkin’s Cruising was released in 1979, it was met with protests. The movie, starring Al Pacino, follows an undercover cop as he delves into the gay S&M scene looking for a serial killer, and the gay community protested the negative portrayal. Forty minutes of the film were famously…
Want to take a trip to a mystical island that is ruled by the Moon? You only have to go as far the Pepsi Center parking lot for this adventure, because the latest Cirque Du Soleil traveling show, Amaluna, opens there tonight. Celebrating its one-year anniversary — which is young…
Welcome to a new column called Geek Speak, in which we take on an aspect of geek culture each week. On this day 27 years ago, moviegoers got their first look at one of cinema’s rare perfect films when Aliens hit almost 1,500 theaters. Audiences loved it. Critics loved it…
Colfax Avenue was once a neon jungle. The longest street in America had an electric vibe that could only come from the bright, smoky glow of true neon. It was more than just signage — it was art. But times have changed. Neon is expensive to maintain and a new…
The Denver Biennial of the Americas is being presented this week in its second rendition — the first having been mounted in the summer of 2010. So, yes, it’s a year late. The curatorial team for the main art event, Draft Urbanism, is headed by Carson Chan, a Berlin-based curator…
Catalyst. The beautiful grounds of the Denver Botanic Gardens are the ideal place to mount an outdoor sculpture show, and over the past few years, there has been one such presentation after another. This year, the theme is contemporary sculptors in Colorado. The pieces are picturesquely sited throughout in clearings…
Closer. Dan is an obituary writer at a newspaper, and he encounters Alice, a part-time stripper, when she steps in front of a cab and gets knocked down. He escorts her to the hospital. There Larry, a dermatologist, looks her over briefly. Some time later, Dan — now happily married…
So far the funniest, headiest, most playfully eccentric American indie of the year, Andrew Bujalski’s perceptive avant-garde comedy Computer Chess — set circa 1980 with an Anytown, America’s worth of terrible moustaches and embarrassing pants — teases out unanswered existential and behavioral questions about mankind’s curious obsession with artificial intelligence…
Something like half the running time of the engaging new don’t-go-in-the-basement thriller The Conjuring is devoted to showing us characters proceeding slowly into the basement, or into the maws of basement-like places we know they shouldn’t go, often with just matches or a flashlight to guide them. Twice, deliciously, they’re…
In his anxious parable I’m So Excited!, Pedro Almodóvar imagines a plane malfunction as a pretext not for thrills, as in most films, but for a metaphorical farce: The jet is Spain, and what we should fear for is not just the passengers’ lives, but the country’s. Defective landing gear…
The plight of Edward Snowden — still holed up at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport on Monday — illustrates the Kafkaesque nature of national borders. He is in a transit area, which represents neutral territory. He’s not in Russia, so Vladimir Putin has no obligation either to consider granting him asylum or…
Near the beginning of Curtains, Jessica Cranshaw, the untalented and unpleasant star of Robbin’ Hood — a musical within the musical — collapses during a rehearsal, clearly the victim of foul play. A young cop is called in to solve the murder, and the mystery unfolds in a manner familiar…
There’s a gorgeous moment in Yoruba Richen’s documentary The New Black, currently playing the film festival circuit, in which two young black lesbian activists canvass an inner-city black neighborhood to drum up support for the gay-marriage initiative that was on the ballot in Maryland’s 2012 statewide election. The women approach…
The world is full of lackluster movies. But the world is not full of Helen Mirren in a Marlene Dietrich fedora, or Helen Mirren in full-tilt evening-wear disposing of a bothersome corpse in a marble bathroom, or Helen Mirren firing a massive rifle-type thingie while sprawled on a picnic blanket…
Less funny than her worst SNL sketch, Girl Most Likely strands Kristen Wiig in a dreadful, disingenuous city-vs.-suburbs comedy that mercilessly mocks New Jersey before turning around and celebrating its provincial trashiness over the hoity-toity snootiness of Manhattan. Fired from her job and dumped by her boyfriend, once-promising playwright Imogene…
In actual life, bureaucratic systems are the only workable state-citizen interface we’ve developed that can handle the sheer bulk of smelly, cranky humanity. In comedies, filmmakers often render the infinite and otherworldly in the mundane, human terms of bureaucracy, with all the waiting rooms, Muzak, and impossible regulatory complexities that…
Teenagers aren’t usually asked for their opinions, but the Giving Voice program runs on the idea that teens have a lot of important thoughts to share. This summer, the program paired disabled teens with local graphic designers to create a series of posters for social change that will be on…
When Adam Lerner, MCA Denver’s director and Chief Animator in the Department of Fabrications, took on the task of curating Denver Night, the culminating blowout party for the Biennial of the Americas in Civic Center Park, he hoped to sculpt an event that both met the challenge of an international…
The normally placid waters of Longmont’s Union Reservoir will be churned up today by all manner of oddities. You might see sharks or even a UFO skimming across the surface. Don’t worry, though: It’s not some kind of sci-fi movie come to life, just the 34th annual Kinetic Sculpture Race…
