Denver filmmaker Mike Olafson, enamored of the simpler sounds of ’50s and ’60s rock, set out in 2006 to make a short film about the local retro/rockabilly scene. “But then everybody said, ‘You should talk to this person, or you should talk to that person,'” he says, “and it just…
Stephen Brackett’s intuition was unbelievably strong — when it came to Jamie Laurie, anyway. On his first day at Bradley Elementary, the wide-eyed fourth-grader took one look at the fifth-grader across the schoolyard and whispered to his father, “Hey, Dad, that guy’s going to be my friend.” “And then,” Brackett…
Marianne Faithfull is the best reason to see 2007’s Irina Palm, hands down. The premise of the movie, which opens today, sounds comic: The story revolves around Maggie (Faithfull), a middle-aged widow who gains local renown under her “stage name,” Irina Palm, for her skill at anony-mously wanking off men…
How a cultural series held together by a slender string of part-mythology — Oscar Wilde’s visit to Colorado to deliver a lecture on the aesthetics movement in 1862 — winds up pulling a Western film series out of its holster is open for debate, but once Fresh City Life’s Chris…
Tonight marks the closing of the ninth annual Black Is…Culturefeast, which featured enough film, literature, arts and cultural filling to stuff even the most discerning participant to the gills. As part of the closing ceremonies, the Pan African Arts Society (which hosts Black Is… each year) is presenting the Fade2Black…
Some folks drive hybrids for the environment, while others sleep in trees, canvass neighborhoods and annoy you on your walk to work. Many tie newspapers in bundles and separate cans from bottles, and some even have a stinky compost pile. However, the easiest and most relaxing method of saving the…
This is my first spring in a new home with a big yard, and I find the task at hand overwhelming. Please don’t ask me if my garden is xeric, native or alpine. I can hardly tell the difference between the weeds and the flowers. But that’s all going to…
Pharrell Williams is so in-demand as a producer that every time he tours with N.E.R.D., his most consistently weird project, he probably costs himself money. But in the days before the release of his latest gun-for-hire superstar collaboration, Madonna’s Hard Candy, he’s on the road again, for reasons that make…
The annual Governor’s Holocaust Remembrance Program, hosted each April by the local chapter of the Anti-Defamation League, always couches its somber yet necessary message in changing ways: One year, survivors might speak. Another year, people who’ve witnessed genocide in other contexts might relate their experiences. This year, the unique twist…
Once while visiting my aunt and uncle in Tucscon, Arizona, they took me on a trip to see Tombstone. That tiny town is still capitalizing on the fateful day when Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp finished (or started, depending on your view of history) a gunfight in the OK Corral…
Rock The Cradle, Denver’s new, hip baby store opened at 18 South Broadway on Saturday. Families milled about, remarking on the cute-yet-edgy designs while sampling tasty treats from the Shoppe. Owners Brian and Melissa Ball opened their store as an alternative to the treacly, pastel-laced baby stores and they’ve filled…
It’s coming up on us fast and furious: wedding season. We’ve all been to one, we’ve all seen them in movies and TV and seen those women (affectionately dubbed “bridezillas”) on reality shows who apparently have no grip on reality. But many of us do get married, and most of…
In April, Peter began a journey across the United States and Canada on a Vespa. But rather than just making the trip about riding across 49 states and 8 Canadian provinces, he decided to make the undertaking count. Peter is riding in a journey he has dubbed a “Vespadition” in…
Carla Kaiser-Kotric’s friends seem to agree that she is one of the nicest people in the world. They say if you are friends with Carla, you can expect a myspace message almost every day telling you how great a person you are (Even if you are, in fact, not a…
Jason Segel is responsible for two of the most cringe-inducing, hands-in-front-of-your-face moments in the recent history of television, both of which occurred during the sole season of NBC’s Freaks and Geeks, on which Segel played bright-eyed burnout Nick Andopolis. On the episode “I’m With the Band,” Nick imagined himself an…
If the great movie musicals of yesteryear put a song in your heart, Christophe Honoré’s Love Songs leaves you with a funny taste in your mouth. How else to describe Honoré’s orally fixated post-postmodern operetta, whose libretto includes lyrics like “Keep your saliva as an antidote/Let it trickle like sweet…
Morgan Spurlock, the daredevil documentarian who lived on Big Macs for a month and turned this exercise in “body art” into the 2004 hit Super Size Me, returns — this time expanding his horizons rather than his girth. Paraphrasing the title of a venerable computer game, Where in the World…
Jon Avnet’s cheesy new thriller, 88 Minutes, is 105 minutes long, and going in, I feared that 100 of them would be eaten up by Al Pacino chewing the furniture. Alas, it’s worse than that. Pacino plays a Seattle forensic psychiatrist in symbiotic thrall to the serial killer he helped…
If you don’t remember a game called The Typing of the Dead, you’re not alone. Released on the failed Sega Dreamcast system, this gory, hilariously titled arcade-style shooter was in many ways exactly like its popular counterpart, The House of the Dead. But instead of aiming a gun at the…
Shelita is a poised and successful book editor, a young black woman determined to bring the urgent voices of her history and her people to life. As Thomas Gibbons’s play Bee-luther-hatchee opens, she’s riding the wave of a major success: A memoir she’s published has become a phenomenon, achieving bestseller…
John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt is a short, brilliantly constructed, engrossing play that seems straightforward on the surface — but there’s a lot going on below. The action begins with a voice speaking in the dark. As the lights come up, we see that this voice belongs to Father Flynn, who’s…
The Baseball Show. Evil, malaprop-prone Vincent Vascombe, owner of the Beloit Bulldogs, is determined to hold on to his star player, Bill “The Bomber” Dawson. But Dawson — aided by his smart, competent fiancée, Helen — has plans for the majors, and there’s a talent scout hanging around. So Vascombe…
