Rumba, which begins its run on Friday, May 22, following a Wednesday-evening preview, is a loopy slab of filmic absurdism that has more in common with the work of Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco than with the movies of Keenan Ivory Wayans and Judd Apatow. Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon…
Both warning and advertisement, the Terminator films are technophobic teases, selling tickets by promising this decade’s model of killing machine: the classic V8 1984 Schwarzenegger; the bullet-streamlined, liquid-metal ’91 Robert Patrick of T2: Judgment Day; Kristanna Loken’s 2003 T-X (with burgundy pleather upholstery). Terminator Salvation, a departure in many ways,…
Imagine having reached the highest level of skill in your field through hours of grueling work that began when you were four years old. Now imagine knowing that you’ll never get a permanent job, but will, if you’re lucky, be hired periodically — that is, if your potential boss likes…
Olivia, a fifteen-year-old girl living unhappily with her father, Aaron, and stepmother (who’s never seen on stage and appears to be either vicious or neurotic to the point of pathology), finds herself throwing up uncontrollably for reasons we’ll learn only later in the play. In a fever pitch of loneliness…
Anyone who’s followed the theatrical footprints of Brian Freeland, founder of the LIDA Project and Countdown to Zero troupes (and one of Westword’s most recent crop of Masterminds), will immediately know – and not know – what to expect of his next production. A grassroots agenda, subversive politics and truth-seeking…
Do you believe in ghosts? Maybe, like me, you find the idea fascinating, but there’s that whole science thing and the need for evidence bringing you down. If so, you might want to join author and paranormal researcher J. Allan Danelek’s Spirit Photography class at Colorado Free University today. The…
What started as a simple pre-kayak-season sale eight years ago has since become a massive river festival that marks the official start of paddle weather. “Paddlefest is a lot different than most river festivals in which you go and watch people compete,” says Earl Richmond, general manager of Colorado Kayak…
If you could put together the perfect boy band, what would the elements be? You’d need a leader (Matthew); a sweet, sensitive singer (Mark); and since no boy band would be complete without a little taste of gangster, an edgy dude (Luke). A little bit of Latin lover (Juan) should…
Imagine the same story, relived in four similar yet incredibly different cultural situations. That’s more or less what happens in The X, a five-act character study by Phil Klingsmith, a Gunnison playwright and professor emeritus at Western State College. The ingenious play follows four couples — one Anglo, one interracial,…
The Wildlife Experience Museum proved it knows how to keep up with the Joneses this year, with the May opening of Globeology, a new 30,000-square-foot permanent interactive exhibit that provides a virtual trip around the natural world. Along the way, visitors will encounter lifelike animatronic wildlife from eight unique and…
In A Tale of Two Cities, woe came to all those whom the villainess, Madame Defarge, encoded into her ubiquitous knitting, which never left her side. Click, click. Creepy. But there is something internal about the act of knitting that can, in better times, be put to positive use in…
Can it be summer already? I don’t know about anyone else, but for me this winter was both brutal and interminable, and spring has been too wet and cold to offer much relief. Maybe it’s just the combination of expensive heating oil and living in a poorly insulated house, but…
Sita Sings the Blues, an animated full-length feature, made its Denver debut at the Starz Denver International Film Festival last year, “and it was just one of the runaway hits,” remembers programming director Keith Garcia. “It’s just one of those movies that gets you; it’s highly original from beginning to…
I remember lower downtown before it was LoDo, dressed in red brick and laced together by crumbling viaducts that rose up between building faces to leave the sidewalks in looming shadow. Back then (and then wasn’t really so long ago — perhaps twenty years past), those now teeming streets were…
The Denver Botanic Gardens is living in the past this summer, beginning with the installation of dinosaurs, or at least a bevy of life-sized sculptures of same, which are strewn about the gardens in scary proximity to the pathways. And while Jurassic Gardens: Evolution and Extinction is clearly just there…
One of my favorite books of 2005 was the epic bestseller The Hummingbird’s Daughter, by Luis Alberto Urrea, a poet-turned-documentarian-turned-novelist whose first, amazing work of fiction boiled for twenty years before spilling onto the page, inspired by the true-life story of his great aunt, a curandera named Teresa. It turned…
Despite the plethora of film festivals open to the public in the metro area and beyond, there’s no festival quite like Telluride’s annual Mountainfilm extravaganza. “We’re about a lot more than mountaineering and climbing,” notes executive director Peter Kenworthy. “It started out in that world, and getting into the cultures…
Death Vessel is the brainchild of Brooklyn-based experimental folk artist Joel Thibodeau, the likes of whom we’ve heard from before. With a penchant for hushed electronic atmospherics serving as a backdrop to well-written, largely minimalist guitar melodies and earnest vocals, Thibodeau possesses a soprano singing voice that lends his introspective…
There’s a very handsome set of three interconnected shows at Space Gallery (765 Santa Fe Drive, 720-904-1088, www.spacegallery.com) that make up what is essentially a single group show, even if each of the artists involved is given solo status. All three work in variations of pure abstraction, where there is…
Curiouser. Singer Gallery director Simon Zalkind is one of the top curators in town, and one of the secrets to his success is presenting artists whose efforts are worthwhile but who for some reason rarely exhibit their work. That’s what’s happening now with the unusual show Curiouser: A Dozen Years…
52 Pick-Up. The central conceit of this love story involves a pack of cards that two actors scatter, then pick up, one by one, announcing what the card is and reading its caption, which is always something evocative and elliptical, like “What happened?” or “Cities.” That statement cues a brief…
The late Pauline Kael named her 1968 collection of film reviews Kiss Kiss Bang Bang in celebration of movies at their most visceral – the ones in which sex and violence and speed combine in ways that produce sheer sensation. Thirty years later, Run Lola Run, screening at midnight on…
