Stoners the world ’round will celebrate the highest of all holidays this Saturday — 4/20, in case you got so baked you’d forgotten — and the high-minded here in Colorado are in for a special treat. Not only is the stuff legal here, but we’re blessed with cultural institutions that…
In the rush to lead the pack, writer-director Ryan Perez, a UCLA grad and veteran of the Upright Citizens Brigade comedy theater, and who has been an in-house writer and director for Funny or Die since June 2008, had to cut corners. Perez wrote the script in 72 hours, bought…
Thanks to her otherworldly cuteness, wide-eyed “perma-kitten” Lil Bub is the Internet’s favorite celebri-kitty. Her bright-green eyes sparkle with perpetual wonder, and her little pink tongue sticks out beneath an upper lip that’s always smiling. She’s also polydactyl — meaning she has thumbs. When her human, Mike Bridavsky, needs cheering…
After working a packed auditorium into a frenzy at last September’s premiere of Lords of Salem at the Toronto International Film Festival, Rob Zombie anxiously took his seat and watched his audience watch his film, his first independently financed feature. It’s also the first film he’s made following a messy…
Picking up a mere seven years after the previous installment, Scary Movie V features no original cast members, no Wayans brothers producing (they bailed after No. 3) and a new director (first-timer Malcolm D. Lee). It’s still terrible. Why, you may ask, does one even bother to review Scary Movie…
Georgia O’Keeffe. Georgia O’Keeffe has been done to death — on greeting cards, calendars and posters. That’s why it’s easy to forget that in the first half of the twentieth century, she was one of America’s most significant early modernists. And with her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, she crusaded for the…
A big winner at last year’s SXSW, Adam Leon’s Gimme the Loot, about a couple of graffiti bombers aiming to gain fame by tagging the Mets’ Home Run Apple, runs on nothing but biodiesel personality. Malcolm (Ty Hickson) and Sofia (Tashiana Washington) are mates only in spraying, and they work…
The good news: Here’s a lavish, serious science-fiction picture, one that on occasion transcends big-budget hitmaking convention to glance against grandeur. Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion, based on his own graphic novel, is one of those futuristic puzzlers whose dramatic energies are most invested not in the characters or their fates, exactly,…
It’s time, apparently, for the aging ghosts of ’60s radicalism to once again take stock of their sins and compromises. In The Big Chill and Running on Empty, during the Reagan ’80s, the then-middle-aged revolutionaries’ to-do list involved holding down careers and worrying about their kids; now the noble fist-wavers…
“Can you speak up a little, man? I dove off a boat yesterday, and I now have an immense amount of water in my ear!” Brady Corbet, 24, is on the phone from the Republic of Panama, where he’s filming a new movie opposite Benicio del Toro and Josh Hutcherson…
Half a year later, now on Blu-ray and DVD, Django Unchained is still kicking up shit, this time via cross-media trickle-down. TV’s LL Cool J, not long before declaring Confederate flag apparel A-OK with him, dared to express in “Accidental Racist” one hard-edged complaint about the life of a black…
Last week, America received two embarrassing reminders of its doting but asexual love for the Nonthreatening Black Man (NTBM). First, professional cowboy-hat-wearer Brad Paisley and Kangol connoisseur LL Cool J unintentionally trolled the entire Internet with “Accidental Racist,” a country song that argues that access to necklaces today totally makes…
Rampaging through the otherwise arid desertscape of contemporary Italian cinema, Matteo Garrone doesn’t want for ambition; he may be the premier chronicler of Berlusconi-era Italian culture, and its most muscular satirist. (That is, when Italian society isn’t busy outpacing satire altogether.) Reality, his followup to 2008’s Gomorrah, begins with a…
At any prior point in TV history, Rectify, a six-part drama on the Sundance channel, would be a shake-up-the-medium astonishment: A sober, even stately investigation into a curious kind of afterlife, that of a death-row inmate given freedom twenty years after his conviction. For all the finely crafted mysteries of…
Denver’s animation scene gets a turn in the limelight when the Denver Animated Pixelshow comes to the Bug Theatre Thursday night. More than two hours of locally made animated shorts will be screened, with most of the filmmakers on hand to talk about their work and answer questions. And you’re…
The highly anticipated Mile High Social, Denver’s new reality show, is set to debut at 8 p.m. Friday with a watch party at Ghost Plate & Tap. The socially aware show’s first 7.5-minute episode (aptly titled “The Casting Call”) will feature a performance from The Epilogues and focus on the…
When filmmaker Alex Cox finished shooting Repo Man in 1983, the first thing he did with the left-over money was option the film rights to the science fiction novel Bill, the Galactic Hero. Now both projects are back in the spotlight. The Criterion Collection recently released a Blu-Ray edition of…
A common sentiment recurs throughout the abundance of eulogies and obituaries penned by film critics in the wake of his death late last week: Roger Ebert was an inspiration. It’s easy enough to be encouraged by another’s success—to regard an esteemed older colleague with a combination of admiration and envy—but…
Georgia O’Keeffe. Georgia O’Keeffe has been done to death — on greeting cards, calendars and posters. That’s why it’s easy to forget that in the first half of the twentieth century, she was one of America’s most significant early modernists. And with her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, she crusaded for the…
To the Wonder, Terrence Malick’s second movie in two years, is ridiculous, pretentious as hell, and in places laugh-out-loud funny. “Newborn. I open my eyes. I melt. Into the eternal night…” With dialogue like that, in voiceover and in French, who needs satire? But for all the absurdity, there’s also…
A likable hagiography as nuanced as a plaque at the Baseball Hall of Fame, Brian Helgeland’s Jackie Robinson bio 42 finds a politic solution to the challenge Quentin Tarantino faced last year with Django Unchained: how to craft a crowd-pleasing multiplex period piece whose villain is, essentially, “all white people.”…
Here’s what the five interviewees in Rodney Ascher’s Room 237 have come up with about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining: One believes that it’s an allegory about the genocide of Native Americans, another that it’s about the Holocaust. Yet another that it’s Kubrick’s coded confession to faking the moon landing. Ascher’s…
