The Colorado Ballet is going for grandeur and maybe a little Hollywood flash this season with Swan Lake, the opening production of the 2011-2012 season. Most apparent is the promotional material for the ballet, which seems to pay homage to posters for Black Swan, the film that earned Natalie Portman…
There’s a ton of really interesting stuff coming up this week, and even though book releases are taking the week off in preparation for a bombshell of awesome content next week, we still have some amazing movies, games and comics to check out. Of those, the sequel to the fantastic…
It starts with photographs. They’re set in a storybook West — mostly in the back country of Colorado and Wyoming, but Mount Rushmore pops up as well. They’re populated by little girls in pigtails whose noses are scrunched either because of the sun hitting their eyes, or their little brothers…
There’s a big “for lease” sign on the side of 44 South Broadway, and once the building is leased — in a day, in a week, in a month — the Denver Book Fair will inevitably close. But in the meantime, it remains a browser’s delight. On a visit to…
Boulder author H. Elizabeth Owen just published a book about Princess Diana surviving her paparazzi-induced car wreck and escaping to Egypt, where she became intertwined with another long-lost queen. So let’s get this out of the way right now: Does Owen actually believe Princess Diana is alive in Egypt? “No,…
We thought the insults would be flying over Jenny An’s Sarah Palin vs. Lady Gaga: Battle of the attention-grabbing sideshows, which pits Lady Gaga against Sarah Palin — or, as Mediatrends calls her, “Lady Blah Blah.” So far, though, that competition has been a lovefest compared to the snit over…
In the past few years, the Loveland Museum and Gallery (503 Lincoln Avenue, Loveland, 1-970-962-2410, www.ci.loveland.co.us) has stepped up its game by presenting the work of famous artists, and this fall the beat goes on with Chuck Close: A Couple of Ways of Doing Something. The New York-based Close is…
Bayer & Chisman. From the 1940s to the 1970s, Aspen’s Herbert Bayer was one of the premier artists in Colorado, and from the ’80s to the first decade of the 21st century, Denver’s Dale Chisman played a similar role. But beyond that, their work has little in common, with Bayer…
My Hideous Progeny. When Mary Shelley — poet, essayist, novelist and, most famously, the creator of Frankenstein — lost one of the four babies she conceived with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (only one child ultimately survived), he placed her in a tub of ice water to stop the hemorrhaging that…
Isabelle Huppert’s cerebral, prickly, glacial screen presence — which she has calibrated throughout her career to portray gorgeously complex women — is never less than magnetic. That’s why Special Treatment is so disheartening. The film, starring Huppert, quickly telegraphs that its ideas are too shallow for a talent as deep…
Sure to be drowned out by the drum circles at Occupy Wall Street, writer-director J.C. Chandor’s lifeless Margin Call depicts roughly 36 hours at an unnamed Manhattan investment firm at the dawn of the 2008 financial freakout. Chandor’s debut feature audaciously asks us to empathize with obscenely overpaid risk analysts…
Standing outside his small-town Ohio home, his wife and child busy preparing breakfast inside, Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon) looks up at the ominous, slate-gray sky in the first scene of Take Shelter. The clouds open, raining down oily, piss-colored droplets. It’s end-of-days weather, a phenomenon that only Curtis seems to…
Immigrants and those who support them often talk about the richness and vitality that newcomers bring to this country, from the original settlers to the slaves dragged here in chains to the lonely and much-reviled Chinese men who built the railroads (Chinese women being legally excluded at the time). They…
Although rare, there were once American musicals that talked about politics and even acknowledged that poor people existed. Bertolt Brecht was their father. Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock, written in 1937, was a fable about workers and corporate greed so outspoken that the House Un-American Activities Committee tried to…
Two times a year, the Xeric Foundation gives out grants to comic-book creators so that they have the financial means to publish their work. One of this round’s recipients was local cartoonist Sam Spina, who last month used the grant money to publish Fight, the story of a champion who…
Improv theater is risky, especially when it calls for pulling an unsuspecting audience member onto the stage for the entirety of the show. Case in point, the Garner Galleria’s production of Blind Date, in which the show’s creator and only star, Rebecca Northan, hand-picks a fellow from the crowd to…
You can start planning now: The schedule for the 34th annual Starz Denver Film Festival, which runs November 2 through 13 at various venues throughout town, is now available online at the user-friendly Denver Film Society website. DFS member early ticketing opens Wednesday, October 19; the rest of the hoi…
If the world had a nickel for every time the world was supposed to end, let’s just say the world would have a whole boatload of nickels — but as not-at-all-unusual as it may be for the various pseudo-prophets and charlatans of history to predict the endtimes, it is somewhat…
The season of winter stoke is upon us: Wolf Creek, Arapahoe Basin, and Loveland Ski Area were all open over the weekend and, this being the 21st century, we found some sweet video coverage — including wild remote-control helicopter footage from A-Basin — for you to wistfully watch on this…
The Colorado Symphony Orchestra has made a lot of changes over the past few weeks, including hacking almost half of its performances in October and November. In September, more than twenty members of the CSO’s board of trustees resigned; Jerome Kern and his wife, Mary Rossick Kern, have been brought…
Once, when I was about eight years old, I rode my bike down a large hill made out of snow. That ended in one of the first serious injuries I ever sustained — a bruised rib — but it’s also a good example of why I’ve always loved roller-coasters: I…
When I heard about the family in Massachusetts that called 911 because they couldn’t find their way out of a corn maze, I couldn’t help but feel a bit smug. The corn maze on which the family met their doomed fate is seven acres — and the corn maze that…
