Had Israeli director Eytan Fox’s new film, about a passionate affair between two men on opposite sides of the Israeli-Arab conflict, been released in the early 1970s (when I was the same age as its twenty-something hipsters and living in Tel Aviv), the movie would have attracted a smattering of…
Billiards is one of the few sports that’s as taxing on a computer screen as it is in real life. It’s played in pubs, after all, and its legendary star was named “Fats.” Unfortunately, most virtual billiards games are behind the 8-ball in terms of quality, with poor physics and…
Caligula: Imperial Edition(Penthouse) (Spoiler alert: Fisting!) One day back in the swingin’ ’70s, somebody mentioned how “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and then Bob Guccione, Gore Vidal, Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren and Peter O’Toole said, “Let’s make a big-budget movie about that, with come shots.” And Caligula was born. Actually, Penthouse…
Our top DVD picks scheduled for release this week The Audrey Hepburn DVD Collection (Paramount) Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Collector’s Edition (Sony) Christmas Television Favorites (Warner Bros.) The Comedians of Comedy: Live at the Troubadour (Image) Criminal Minds: The Second Season (Paramount) Day Night Day Night (IFC) Entourage: Season Three, Part…
Rachel Corrie has been a lightning rod for controversy since her death in Gaza at the age of 23, when she was run over by an Israeli soldier while attempting to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home. But Rachel Corrie was more than just a symbol; she was a…
From everything I’ve heard about her, Wendy Wasserstein — who succumbed to cancer last year at the age of 55 — seems to have been one of the nicest people imaginable: funny, warm and kind. Still, her plays have always tended to leave me cold. So perhaps it’s a step…
Anna in the Tropics. The setting is a small, Cuban-run cigar factory in Ybor City, Florida, at the turn of the last century. In those days, such factories employed lectors to read aloud to the workers. The lector in Nilo Cruz’s Anna in the Tropics has chosen Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. As he reads,…
For its first big extravaganza of the fall, the Denver Art Museum will unveil Artisans & Kings: Selected Treasures From the Louvre on October 5 in the Frederic C. Hamilton Building. Bringing the show to Denver was a smart move, as it’s guaranteed to have broad popular appeal. You don’t…
The Space Gallery (765 Santa Fe Drive, 720-904-1088, www.spacegallery.org) is one of only a handful of spots in the Santa Fe Arts District that can be counted on to have exhibits worth seeing. For its first effort of the fall, Space director Michael Burnett has paired two interesting abstract solo…
Clyfford Still Unveiled. A master and pioneer of mid-twentieth-century abstract expressionism, painter Clyfford Still was something of an eccentric in the artist-as-egomaniac stripe. His anti-social behavior led to a situation where 94 percent of his artworks remained together after he died — a staggeringly complete chronicle of his oeuvre that…
If you only recognize Michael Ian Black as the talking head on VH1 or the guy hawking Sierra Mist between first downs, than you have truly been missing out. And you’re an idiot. Because although those appearances are certainly smirk-inducing, Black is a bona fide alternative-comedy superhero, dishing out some…
For a real taste of where Denver is today, you can’t beat First Friday. To whet your artistic appetite for tonight’s festivities, get a taste of Denver’s past when Myron Vallier, author of Historic Photos of Denver, leads a photographic journey through the city’s history from 12:15 to 1 p.m…
Remixes, sampling and mash-ups have become part of the standard lexicon of music, and now they’re making their way to visual media. Artist Tony Romano takes photographs, drawings, found objects and more, scans them all into a computer and then layers, distorts and filters them in Photoshop. The results are…
Thank goodness for eBay. During a visit to the site, violinist Josie Quick found a copy of 1966’s Violin Summit, a long-out-of-print recording that teamed string pros Stephane Grappelli, Svend Asmussen, Jean-Luc Ponty and Stuff Smith — and she was so taken by the results that she decided to create…
Fortune’s son, anthropologist and entree are just some of the words you could use to describe Michael C. Rockefeller. No matter what you call him, his determination to bring the wood carvings of the Asmat tribes of southwestern New Guinea to the attention of the Western world is the stuff…
“All the work we do is geared toward helping native peoples gain more control over their resources,” explains Jeanne Rubin, organizer of the Indigenous Film & Arts Festival. “And stories are a resource. These people should be in control of their stories and how their histories are told, because when…
Generations of University of Colorado at Boulder art students have called the old Sibell-Wolle art building home since it opened its doors in the 1930s, but now the place is toast, scheduled for demolition later this fall to make way for a state-of-the-art replacement projected to open in 2010. Hence…
Traditional Kathak dancer master Pandit Chitresh Das and Emmy-winning tap-dancer Jason Samuels Smith met backstage at the 2004 American Dance Festival, and it was a match made in heaven: The former child prodigies shared a similar approach to dance, a passion for exploring the possibilities of rhythmic improvisation, and a…
There are plenty of movements out there inviting lapsed, laissez-faire and staunchly secular Jews back into the fold, but perhaps one of the most engagingly persuasive is Storahtelling, the brainchild of Amichai Lau-Lavie, the descendent of a long line of rabbis dating back to the eleventh century and a man…
Julie Pech, author of The Chocolate Therapist, has a thousand and one reasons why you should eat dark chocolate every day: It releases endorphins, it can lower your blood pressure, it’s rich with antioxidants. And, obviously, it tastes fantastic. The Denver resident has been extolling the virtues of chocolate for…
Yarrr! Colorado’s pirate reenactors, as it turns out, don’t just put on their eye patches and peg legs for the Renaissance Festival. The Colorado Rogues’ 115 members will don their ruffled blouses any chance they get. “You’ve heard of Civil War reenactors? We’re reenacting what it’s like to live and…
News flash: “Writing itself, but poetry in particular, doesn’t pay the bills,” says James Belflower, a local poet and organizer of Potlatch Poetry, a website dedicated to the free exchange of poetry and other literary ephemera. “So part of Potlatch is trying to avoid having older items just disappear or…
