Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. Why? Because it’s thick with sludge. Moving briskly through a stranger-than-fiction, serpentine narrative that is still unfolding, Joe Berlinger’s remarkable documentary Crude recounts an infuriating litany of South American exploitation, back-room glad-handing and bureaucratic dead ends that has, among other collateral…
Directed by Spike Jonze from a 400-word children’s picture book first published in 1963, Where the Wild Things Are may be the toughest adaptation since Tim Burton fashioned Mars Attacks! from a series of bubble-gum cards. Tougher, actually: Burton was working with ephemeral, anonymous trash; Jonze is elaborating on a…
The Yiddish shtetl shtick that opens Joel and Ethan Coen’s new movie — a Jewish peasant stumbles on an old Hasid who may or may not be a dybbuk — is pretty clumsy, but at least it tips its hat to the great existential comedy that A Serious Man might…
A Raisin in the Sun was written over fifty years ago, but it remains vivid and relevant today. Though the final act is weakened by a sequence of preachy, 1950s-style dramatic speeches, in which each character in turn bares his or her soul, in every other respect these people are…
Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. Why? Because it’s thick with sludge. Moving briskly through a stranger-than-fiction, serpentine narrative that is still unfolding, Joe Berlinger’s remarkable documentary Crude recounts an infuriating litany of South American exploitation, back-room glad-handing and bureaucratic dead ends that has, among other collateral…
Probably best known for her Jane Austen mystery series, local author Stephanie Barron (who also publishes under the pen name Francine Matthews, though her birth name is Francine Stephanie Barron) is back in the literary limelight with the critically lauded English period novel The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia…
How many reasons do you need to attend the Monday Night Football Locker Room Bash — the inaugural event benefiting the National Sports Center for the Disabled (NSCD) that invites super fans to watch tonight’s Broncos away game from inside the visiting team locker room? Let’s see: You’re inside the…
When Michael Chabon won the 2008 Locus and Hugo Awards — two of science fiction’s highest honors — for his novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, it caused quite a few raised eyebrows. Sci-fi, after all, can be an insular scene, and the Pulitzer-winning Chabon has been a darling of the…
The Tibetan Book of the Dead is an ancient text designed to provide guidance for the next life. “You whisper it into the ear of an unconscious or dying person; it’s an instruction of what to do,” explains Wendell Beavers, chair of Naropa’s performing arts department. “So in the Tibetan…
Gustafer Yellowgold is a friendly, flame-like creature who came from the sun and lives in a cottage in the Minnesota woods with his pet eel, Slim, a dragon named Asparagus (who loves corn on the cob) and a tuxedo-wearing pterodactyl. Morgan Taylor is an illustrator and songwriter who lives in…
The world grows stranger every day — not that that’s a shock to fans of The Twilight Zone. The seminal television drama not only injected existential angst into the age of Leave It to Beaver, but it cast a long shadow over popular culture that hasn’t faded. This year marks…
R. Craig Miller came to the Denver Art Museum in 1990 to establish the Architecture, Design and Graphics Department, and he hit the ground running by putting together a world-class collection of thousands of artifacts, including significant architectural models, important pieces of furniture and notable works on paper. Then in…
Not long ago, husband-and-wife Lakewood artists Haze and Jana Diedrich made a pilgrimage to Santa Fe, where they began to appreciate those small objects of Hispanic-Catholic devotion called retablos. These paintings and works on tin, wood or even paper depict Christ, the saints and other religious figures in an unmistakable…
When you first think of Genghis Khan, you invariably picture a fierce-looking barbarian Mongol in a flashy helmet with awesome facial hair of the Fu Manchu persuasion. And then you figure he was the kind of guy who’d nonchalantly lop off your head if you crossed him. You wouldn’t be…
Don’t even try to understand how Thaddeus Phillips puts together a performance. He plucks seemingly random things from the air and somehow creates relationships from a whirling mass of stuff, and his newest work, Microworld(s) Part #1, is no different. Somehow mad scientist Nikola Tesla, the Nagakin Capsule Tower in…
From its notorious gunfights and shady ladies to its gold-mining glory days to the “Face on the Barroom Floor,” Central City has more than its share of legends for being such a small town. And their ghosts are said to still linger in the present-day gambling haven. A psychic who…
Some people have skeletons in the closet, but we pretty much all have home movies packed away on a shelf — although modern technology has actually changed the way we store them. That’s why Home Movie Day came about in the first place. Devised in 2003 by archivists at the…
You know, you just can’t walk out on the street these days without bumping into a zombie or two. With half the city getting zombie makeup tips from professionals or suiting up in Thriller costumes for a future flash dance on the 16th Street Mall (and what local bar of…
Halloween is sneaking up on us, but don’t let that scare you too much. Instead, enjoy the dark side every Tuesday night from now through November 17 during the International FrightFest Film Series at the Denver Central Library, where films from Sweden, Germany, Spain and South Korea will show you…
The Larimer Sidewalk Arts Festival is a work in progress — the hosts learned a little something last year about seasonal scheduling — and it’s still growing, which is a good thing. So what can attendees expect? Lots of fantastic art created by young people; artists between the ages of…
With the air turning crisp and the leaves changing colors, fall is a great time to run. So why not a marathon? The starting gun will signal the fourth annual Denver Marathon on Sunday, October 18, but related events go on all weekend long: On Friday and Saturday, the public…
The cult-classic sketch-comedy show The State introduced the peculiar comic stylings of Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter to the world. They followed that with projects such as the movie Wet Hot American Summer and Stella, an ambitious take on the sitcom genre. Their latest project is Michael and Michael…
