British indie filmmaker Sally Potter, a former dancer, lyricist, and performance artist, clearly has a taste for adventure. In 1992 that led her to Orlando, a screen adaptation of the experimental Virginia Woolf novel about an Elizabethan nobleman who hangs around for 400 years, eventually morphing into a hip 20th-century…
If for no other reason, Happy Endings deserves its soft spot in our collective hearts for rescuing Tom Arnold from the why-are-they-now? scrap heap. The former Mr. Roseanne Barr plays Frank, a widower who falls for and sleeps with his son’s conniving would-be girlfriend Jude, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal. And…
Me and You and Everyone We Know, the new film from writer/director/performance artist Miranda July, walked off with prizes at both the Sundance and Cannes film festivals. An audience and critical favorite, it follows an ensemble cast of characters, each of whom is longing to connect with another human being…
Before its release in 1933, the bluenoses over at the Hays Office had their way with the Barbara Stanwyck vehicle Baby Face, clipping more than five minutes of what was then thought to be steamy carnality from the original print. Happily (for most of us, anyway), the censored scenes remained…
If you know a better way to spend the weekend than creating a four-day mini-utopia in the Colorado mountains near Paonia, we’d like to hear about it. Starting Thursday, July 14, dreamers will converge in the remote spot as part of Dreamtime to share music, dancing, interactive sculptures, fire performances,…
Thursday, July 14 Rather than feeling sorry for himself this summer, exiled Tour de France veteran Tyler Hamilton of Boulder is forging right ahead while appealing his two-year ban from the bicycling event, a sentence handed him for alleged blood doping. Instead, Hamilton’s racing all over the world, working with…
Since the beginning of modern time, Denver has played catch-up with other cities. At some point, “cow town” became an unacceptable tag. This was before “fish city” was even a seedling of a thought in the minds of the visionaries, and long before Landry’s Restaurant Inc. reopened the shuttered Colorado’s…
FRI, 7/15 Tonight at the stroke of midnight, the wait will be over. Two years of agony and despair will end as millions of wannabe wizards and witches speed-read to find out the answer to the burning question: Who is the Half-Blood Prince? Local booksellers are keeping the anticipation level…
SAT, 7/16 I briefly enjoyed a stint as the editor of über society magazine Hamptons, covering all the glamour and glitterati of that moneyed paradise. I always felt gleefully wicked and subversive about the fact that I, a small-town girl from Fruita, had become an arbiter of taste for this…
SAT, 7/16 Responding to the death of John Lennon, punk sage Tesco Vee of the Meatmen sang his unabashed ode to the Beatles, “One Down, Three to Go.” By way of worship, the world has also seen such Fab Four interpretations as William Shatner’s “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,”…
Ah, the thea-tah! Comedies, dramas, musicals, dance, clowns, cabaret. New York, London, Paris, Milan… Colorado Springs? Yes, Colorado Springs. The city known for theological theatrics gets a shot of culture with the debut of the Colorado Festival of World Theatre. The CFWT was birthed in 2003, when transplanted thespian Suzy…
You can’t miss one of downtown’s newest public sculptures: It’s blue, it’s gigantic and it’s a bear. “I See What You Mean,” created by well-known Denver artist Lawrence Argent, is part of the multi-million-dollar art program associated with the expansion of the Colorado Convention Center. The enormous sculpture was installed…
Whether he likes it or not, Lawrence Argent is going to be associated with the color blue because that’s the color of his gigantic bear, which was only recently installed downtown at the Colorado Convention Center (see review,). Another Denver artist who’s known for his taste for blue is Bryan…
Chihuly. Michael De Marsche, president of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, has orchestrated the extravaganza Chihuly, a sprawling survey of the career of glass master Dale Chihuly. Working near Seattle, Chihuly is among the best-known glass artists of all time, right up there with Louis Comfort Tiffany and Paolo…
This was the most fun I’ve had at the Arvada Center — in fact, the most fun I’ve had at the theater for a while. This venue generally attracts a pretty staid crowd, many of them middle-aged and older, and it was clear that some people were offended by The…
The Elephant Man. The Elephant Man is based on the life of Joseph Merrick, who was born in Victorian London and suffered from a hideously deforming disease that resulted in overgrowths of bone and hanging excrescences of putrid flesh. Abandoned by his father and stepmother, Merrick became the primary attraction…
Movies based on comic books have become dime-a-dozen events — appropriate given that the cover price of these titles was 10 cents when they debuted decades ago. It wasn’t so long ago Warner Bros. teased the release of Richard Donner’s Superman by insisting, “You’ll believe a man can fly”; now,…
About two-thirds of the way through A League of Ordinary Gentlemen, Chris Browne’s weirdly engaging documentary about professional bowling, the bad boy of the game, Pete Weber, looks straight into the camera and assures us: “I’m not an asshole.” Whether to believe Weber is an open question, given what we’ve…
Eros is not a single film but three, each roughly a half hour, joined in a common goal. The first segment was made by Wong Kar Wai (In the Mood for Love) and the second by Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, Erin Brockovich). The final piece, by any measure the climax, was…
If you’re short on reasons to be grateful these days, look no further than March of the Penguins, the astonishing, if imperfect, nature documentary from first-time director Luc Jacquet. Hard times may have befallen you, but at least you are not a penguin, an animal destined to repeat a devastating…
The popular Boulder Outdoor Cinema series got under way last month and continues through August 27. And a pair of immensely popular recent movies will be on view this week as BOC patrons loll before the screen on assorted couches, bean bags and yoga mats. On Friday, July 8, it’s…
Jay Eggleston didn’t know he was getting career guidance in 1985 when he saw pictures in magazines showing daring young guys performing tricks on BMX bikes. He just knew he wanted to do what they were doing, so he asked his dad to build him a then-novel quarter pipe in…
