Facebook gets e-mail: maybe not such a good idea

Facebook announced yesterday that it will be introducing Google Buzz Facebook Messages, which will totally change everything we know about communication! Unless, you know, it doesn’t. Ostensibly, it’s a streamlined, multi-platform, hyper-organized e-mail client. And maybe, in a year, we’ll all be using Facebook on our smartphones as the sole…

Denver’s art districts are mostly growing concerns

Walking along Santa Fe Drive the other day, I gazed at the van Straaten Gallery and thought about a shift that has taken place recently on the street. As usual, the gallery was closed, though a few spotlights were on so you could tell there was art on display inside…

Now Showing

archiTECHtonica. This is one of several shows put together by CU Art Museum director and curator Lisa Tamiris Becker to herald the opening of the institution’s new building. It’s paired with a show made up of related objects from the permanent collection. Becker invited an international cast of artists who…

Now Playing

Astronomical Sunset. Jim is a man destroyed by guilt because a social-networking site he created led to…actually, it’s not quite clear what, but it had to do with a teenage boy posting compromising photographs of his girlfriend, and the boy is now in prison. The plot doesn’t make a whole…

The kids are all grown up in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

A teenage witch stands trembling behind her unsuspecting mother and father, wand raised. Obliviate, she whispers, and her parents’ eyes go glassy, their memories erased. On the mantel, the girl’s image disappears from the family’s photos. Blinking back tears, she walks into the street, the link between herself and her…

Gemma Arterton turns a town upside down in Tamara Drewe

Comely, independent, willful young lass returns to collect family inheritance in rural England, drives the local men wild, makes several misalliances, and inadvertently precipitates a catastrophe before nature finally takes its course. Adapted from Posy Simmonds’s excellent graphic novel, Tamara Drewe knowingly updates Thomas Hardy’s gloomy pastoral Far From the…

Sadly, Band of Toughs’ Finders Keepers is not a keeper

The Band of Toughs — formerly the Aluminous Collective, which distinguished itself with an excellent production of Charles Mee’s Big Love last year — is back with a second offering: Finders Keepers Losers Weepers. The difference in quality is startling. Finders Keepers, which hitches together ensemble-developed material with an eighteenth-century…

Santa’s rollin’ in ice this year at the Cherry Creek Mall

Gone is the snow globe-themed display of the past several years at the Cherry Creek Mall. Replacing it is a 30-foot-tall, 22-foot-wide structure made to look like it was made out of ice, complete with constantly falling snow, a technicolor light show and a throne that feels cold to the…

Over the Weekend: Keeping the American dream alive at the Rodeo

Living in Denver — especially if you live in Capitol Hill, as I do — it can be easy to forget that, despite our fancy skyscrapers and hoity-toity public art, we still living in the wild American West, if a slightly more urbane one in within the blue insulation of…

“Don’t touch my junk:” John Tyner fights the law and the law wins

The Bill of Rights guarantees many protections: Protection of free speech, protection from self-incrimination, protection from undue government imposition in private affairs. Perhaps it was that last one that got misinterpreted by a California man who told a Transportation Security Administration officer in San Diego not to touch his “junk,”…

Tomorrow: “Zuni Fetishes,” the last free lecture of From the Earth

Vern Nieto knows his way around some Zuni fetishes — and no, you pervert, it’s not at all what you think. In the Zuni tradition, a “fetish” is a spiritually significant art object, a small, intricate charm carved from precious or semi-precious stone to reflect an animal of symbolic import;…

This Weekend: The holiday shopping season means business

Holiday shopping doesn’t have to be a drag. You just have to know where to look. There are two big reasons why we’re already thinking about it seriously this year: First, this gift-getting season could go down in the books as the earliest commercial shopping blitz in history. The door-busters,…