Cannes: Young & Beautiful is a portrait of a French call girl

François Ozon’s Young & Beautiful, a portrait of a seventeen-year-old French call girl, is something else again. This is another story about a family in crisis: Isabelle (played by Marine Vacth, a stunning-looking if ultimately inert actress) is a student who still lives at home with her mother, stepfather, and…

Another Four-Letter Word

Did you hear the one about Colleen, the online-date-a-holic whose most recent courting fiasco involved the Itcher and his unfortunately boisterous “Hey, Match.com lady!” greeting, which instantly turned heads at P.F. Chang’s? These sorts of urban-dating legends — fraught with disaster and innate satire, and too juicy to make up…

White Light/White Heat

Comedian Ron White is a cultural anomaly. He’s a tough cigar-and-scotch man’s man who supports the troops, but also a dope-smoking marriage-equality advocate who believes that everyone’s a little gay. He’s toured with Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy on the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, yet he’s never self-censoring…

Acting Up

RedLine resident artist Justin Beard laments the lack of performance art in Denver. “Back in 2000, when I first moved here, it seemed like there was a lot going on, with things like Mr. Pacman and Little Fyodor. I was blown away by it, but then it sort of faded…

Karaoke as Metaphor

Community theater puts on hokey “interactive show” about “being in a karaoke bar.” That’s exactly what Sean Mahoney and Michael Emmitt of the new Horse & Cart production company did not have in mind for The Singing Room, an original script they’ll reveal to the public tonight in the basement…

The Wheel Thing

Putting improvisation on two wheels and setting it to music is the concept behind Sweat, the latest production at Off-Center@The Jones. Actress Meridith C. Grundei is the brains behind the long-form improv show, which is based on a similar bicycle-mounted, on-the-spot production she put together in Chicago several years ago…

A Marathon of Events

Elephants are slow, lumbering animals, right? Actually, they’ve been clocked at 25 mph — nearly as fast as the fastest human. During the eighth annual Kaiser Permanente Colfax Marathon, however, the elephants will be mere spectators as thousands of runners stream through the Denver Zoo. The marathon begins today with…

Garden of Eatin’

Denver Urban Gardens outgrew its office a long time ago; much like a root ball squeezing its way out of a clay pot, DUG was confined and finding it more and more difficult to get things done in a packed space where desk-sharing is the norm. But that will change…

Rock-It Man

For the past eight years, Curious Theatre has been honoring local icons who’ve been key players in shaping Denver’s cultural landscape with short plays about their lives. This year, it’s focusing on music-business luminary and AEG Live Rocky Mountains president/CEO Chuck Morris, the man responsible for bringing such national acts…

Clothes Encounters

The lazy days of summer are almost here, and to usher in the season, Larimer Square boutiques are joining forces to show hot looks to update your wardrobe. Young professionals from groups like the Central City Opera, the Denver Center Theatre Marquee Club and the Reel Social Club will model…

Denver is Hot

Denver’s made the national news a lot over the past year, whether for last summer’s wildfires, the Aurora theater shootings or the legalization of marijuana. Inspired by these events and looking for a way to process them through art, the Damsels Dance Company created Denver on Fire: A Social Commentary…

Flick Pick: Kiss of the Damned

A trashy vampire flick in art-film drag, Kiss of the Damned satisfies on neither level. Drawing on a host of Euro-horror influences, including but far from limited to a synth score reminiscent of Dario Argento’s Goblin-performed soundtracks, Xan Cassavetes’s pastiche follows lonely bloodsucker Djuna (Josephine de la Baume) as she…

Scrambled Eggheads

Mixing contemporary art, politics, mysticism and food through a conversational mash-up, MCA Denver’s Huevos Revueltos lecture series starts tonight with “Nuevos Huevos,” a look at contemporary art in Mexico led by Eduardo Sarabia, the Guadalajara-based artist whose exhibition, Tainted, is on display at the museum through June 9. “It’s a…

Bombs Away

“The Cold War is very often believed to be kind of a good war because it was never fought,” explains Rocky Flats Cold War Museum executive director Conny Bogaard. “But the price that we paid for that time of building nuclear weapons on a mass scale is all the anxieties…