Home on the Range

Winter changes everything. Although many of the simple pioneer pleasures offered at Four Mile Historic Park are available year-round, these activities take on a whole new sheen when frosted with beautiful snow and holiday sparkle. So Four Mile’s Pioneer Winter Camp, a four-day series of half-day programs for kids, might…

Ski School

Humans are always in such a rush; sometimes we don’t even look up while we dart from one place to another. And it seems that even with recreation, the objective is to cram in as much activity as possible. We boast about how many runs we got in during our…

New Year X 4

If one New Year’s countdown just isn’t enough, or texting far-away friends at midnight never makes it through drunk-dialing airwaves, or you’re just tired of bars that are more crowded than Times Square — try ringing in this New Year the multimedia way. Popping its cork for the first time…

Rock This Way

Guitarist/vocalist Daniel Sproul wasn’t even a zygote when Aerosmith released 1975’s Toys in the Attic, which he and his fellow twenty-somethings in Rose Hill Drive will perform in its entirety tonight and tomorrow night in Boulder. But he discovered the LP at a formative age. “I got into that when…

Et Tu, Titus?

Shakespeare scholars have been worrying away at Titus Andronicus forever because the play is so bloody bad (and we mean bloody). They’ve suggested that it’s not really the Bard’s work, or perhaps that it’s a parody. The characters are nuts and the plot is nonsensical, filled with mutilation and murder…

Mammoth Problems

The Colorado Mammoth — along with the entire National Lacrosse League — was sent to the penalty box on October 16 when the NLL and the players’ association fell short of a new collective-bargaining agreement. For considerably longer than the standard two- or five-minute penalty, the 2008 season seemed body-checked…

New Beginnings

It’s the age-old New Year’s resolution: “This year, I am finally going to get in shape.” Well, here’s an idea: Instead of waiting till Tuesday to start your health kick, head to Genesis Fitness, 1244 East Colfax Avenue, for Free Fitness Saturday, where you can participate in an intense workout…

Bruised by Fate

Life can change in an instant, and sometimes that change disrupts or even destroys the carefully wrought plans we’ve made for the future. In DarkBlueAlmostBlack — which ends its run tomorrow as part of Cinema Q’s film series at the Starz FilmCenter in the Tivoli — Jorge (Quim Gutiérrez) is…

Frock Out: The Video

Fresh City Life and The Fabric Lab are keeping the buzz around the Frock Out Independent Designers Challenge runway show alive with this video they posted recently to YouTube. Check it out, and if you missed the show, be sure to read Aubrey Shoe’s recap of the runway looks created…

Ho-Frickin’-Ho: Christmas Specials No One Should See

There’s a lot of Christmas TV. Enough that ABC Family can fill up 25 Days of it in the month of December, stack up specials one after the other in prime time, and never have to repeat a thing. That’s a lot of holiday spirit. It only stands to reason,…

It Just Needs a Little Love: A Charlie Brown Christmas

Okay, so what’s wrong with A Charlie Brown Christmas? The answer, it might surprise you, isn’t “nothing”. So let’s get this out of the way right off the top. The animation is somewhat clumsy. The voicework is pretty bad in spots. And—horror of horrors—it actually culminates in the recital of…

Project Runway: Sweet Merciful Crap

Just when it seemed like Project Runway could not possibly stage a more boring challenge, they go for something that positively screams “average.” Yes, yes, I do think that it was a great idea to make the designers create a new look for their plain-Jane models who had recently lost…

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Here’s the thing: Tim Burton pulled it off. Nearing the end of an uncommonly strong year for American movies, he’s taken a hallowed classic of the modern musical theater, hemmed in the narrative from well over two hours to well under, cast confessed non-singers in the principal roles, and somehow…

Charlie Wilson’s War

Hell of a thing, getting Mike Nichols to adapt the yer-kiddin’-me story of Charlie Wilson, the congressman from Lufkin, Texas, who damn near single-handedly helped the Afghans kick out the Russians in the 1980s. Seems about par for the course with this story, in which everybody knows somebody who can…

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story

As an actor, John C. Reilly is the opposite of Mr. Cellophane. He doesn’t disappear into a role; roles disappear onto him — the unlikely porn sidekick of Boogie Nights, the inadequately adequate family man of The Hours, the cutup cowboy of A Prairie Home Companion, all stamped and imprinted…

The Kite Runner

Kites fly high over the San Francisco Bay and Kabul (okay, China), but not much else soars in Marc Forster’s flaccid adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s vivid 2002 novel, which covers three decades of Afghanistan’s misery under serial totalitarian rule. Arriving on the heels of Atonement, The Kite Runner tells a…

The Savages

Simmering below the squeamish elder-care euphemism “uncharted territory” is a fearful awareness that when it comes to dealing with the growing army of senile parents, we have no idea what the hell we’re doing. Tamara Jenkins plumbs the depths of that terror in her new film, The Savages, and jacks…

Xmas Present & Past

Nothing says “holiday spirit” quite like stabbing a terrorist or hammering a goombah, as the hottest games this season invite us to do. But no matter how cutting-edge the stars of 2007 may be, they are also unmistakably familiar. This week, we stack the holiday hits of today against the…

Singular Sensation

Once (Fox)Easily the year’s most perfect pop album — damned good movie too, the finest “musical” of the past 20 years. The disc’s making-of refers to it as a “modern musical,” but Once is as old-fashioned as it gets: Guy (Glen Hansard) meets Girl (Markéta Irglová), they fall in love,…

Up and Coming

The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Volume Two — The War Years (Paramount) Alien Apocalypse (Anchor Bay) Balls of Fury (Universal) Black Moon Rising (Anchor Bay) Boy Eats Girl (Lionsgate) Braveheart: Special Collector’s Edition (Paramount) Bring It On: In It to Win It (Universal) Cinderella II: Dreams Come True Special…

Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol

Marley was dead.” Those are the first words of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, although he still pops up again a couple of times: Scrooge sees his old partner’s face in the door knocker, looking like “a bad lobster in a dark cellar,” and Marley’s ghost later appears festooned in…

Now Playing

La Cage Aux Folles. This is a big, splashy musical with lots of big, splashy song numbers. But unlike many such musicals, La Cage Aux Folles also has heart, humor and a good story to tell. In a time of intense mean-spiritedness and prejudice, it carries a message of tolerance…