About a year ago, buzz started building among horror fans about a French slasher movie titled Haute Tension, about two girls who go to a country house and get terrorized by a maniac in workman’s coveralls. It had been well received in Europe, and horror geeks with websites here occasionally…
Jonathan Swift’s observation that satire is “a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own” almost certainly applies to moviemakers who ape the work of their peers with comic intent, as evidenced by a well-chosen selection of films on view in Boulder this week. Under…
For me, silent films usually conjure images of mustache-twirling evil-doers, jazz-age slapstick or, more chillingly, D.W. Griffith’s groundbreaking yet racist opus, The Birth of a Nation. Griffith wasn’t the only director of the silent era who saw both the aesthetic potential and propagandist power of moving pictures. In 1929, Russian…
Thursday, June 9 The Greeks had a succinct way of explaining the seasons: It was all the fault of a pomegranate seed ingested by Persephone after she was abducted and taken to the underworld by Hell’s top dog, Hades. Her highfalutin’ mom, Demeter, goddess of the harvest, mourned so loudly…
Gregory “Griz” Robinson calls himself “the starving artist of the motorcycle business.” The Pueblo native and longtime motorcycle racer and enthusiast owns the fastest fuel drag bike in Colorado. (It’s so fast, in fact, that he won at Sturgis last year with it.) When he’s not competing, the blue-collar Harley-Davidson…
SAT, 6/11 Denver’s Baker Neighborhood is one of those nostalgic-home neighborhoods that people from other places never seem to understand. “Wait — it’s a neighborhood right in the heart of the city, with actual houses and everything, not skyscrapers?” they ask. Exactly. The eclectic area is a hodgepodge of quaint…
SAT, 6/11 You don’t need a reason to bike in the buff, but it helps — especially if a lot of other people are doing it with you. That’s the idea behind the World Naked Bicycle Ride, a global exercise in critical mass and mass nudity taking place today in…
SAT, 6/11 Iraqi intellectual and artistic life essentially ceased to exist under the relentless grip of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime. If you weren’t willing to paint glowing images of the despot, you simply weren’t allowed to be an artist in Iraq, and many people fled the country as a result…
WED, 6/15 In one of his bits, comedian Tony Rock discusses the need for a black president. Not a Colin Powell-type black president, Rock explains, but somebody with an edge, somebody just out of prison. “We need a president named Keef,” Rock concludes. “K-E-E-F. President Keef’s entourage would include the…
Entering the first of the galleries off the main entrance of Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art, viewers are surrounded by white-on-white color-field paintings by German-born Udo Nger, one of three artists in WHITE OUT: Lighting Into Beauty. As I looked around at the dazzling lack of color, it occurred to…
Rule Gallery (111 Broadway, 303-777-9473) is currently putting on a pair of back-to-back solos, both of which are made up of sophisticated abstract paintings. In the front is Udo Nger: Light as a Material; in the back is Maggie Michael: (T)rain. The Nöger paintings are more modest examples of what…
Alden Mason, Kimberlee Sullivan, and Lorey Hobbs. The changing of the seasons from spring to summer is what inspired William Biety, director of the Sandy Carson Gallery, to put together three solos, each comprising nature-based abstractions. Alden Mason marks the debut of the Washington artist, who is represented in this…
Little Tina Denmark was born with talent. No one knows where it came from — her mother is a perky, cookie-baking,’ 50s-style housewife, her father always away on unspecified business — but dancing and singing are in her blood. So when Tina loses the lead in the school musical, Pippi…
Impulse Theater. Basements and comedy go together like beer and nuts or toddlers and sandboxes. The basement of the Wynkoop Brewery where Impulse Theater performs is crowded, loud and energetic. Impulse does no prepared skits, nothing but pure improv — which means that what you see changes every night, and…
There was no reason to expect much from Cinderella Man, Ron Howard’s biography of boxer James Braddock, who in the summer of 1935 became the most unlikely heavyweight champion in the history of boxing. After all, it’s a true tale whose outcome has been pre-determined; surely there could be no…
Ten is a magical age, when kids are old enough to make articulate statements about their experience and young enough to express their feelings without shame. In a couple of years, excitement will go the way of the sack lunch and become uncool, and acceptable poses will shrink to a…
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is a flawed movie born of a flawed novel, but let this be clear: Girls will eat it up with a spoon. It features three young stars, indulges in rampant romantic fantasy, drips with teary-eyed sentimentality, and pays a heap-load of lip service to…
Lords of Dogtown is an odd, disorienting commodity — a fictional version of a documentary (Dogtown and Z-Boys) about the birth of skateboarding in 1970s Venice, California, that was written by the man who directed said doc, in which he was a central figure. Stacy Peralta, whose Dogtown and Z-Boys…
Ten new films from the Pacific Rim will be on view this week in the eighth edition of the Aurora Asian Film Festival. The four-day event is sponsored by the Denver Film Society, the Aurora Asian/Pacific Community Partnership and the City of Aurora. Festival highlights: Electric Shadows (China), director Xiao…
At first glance, the concept for the Art + Math = X conference doesn’t add up. How could those two disparate disciplines be blended? After all, in high school, the free-spirited culture kids and the logical mathletes never seemed to get along. But there doesn’t have to be a divide…
Thursday, June 2 The City of Aurora proves just how far east it really stretches when the eighth annual Aurora Asian Film Festival gets under way tonight at 7 p.m. at the Aurora Fox Arts Center (9900 East Colfax Avenue) with Electric Shadows, a Chinese drama set during the Cultural…
Summer is the time for swing sets. While growing up, most of us engaged in the bulk of our swinging during school hours, sprinting out of the cafeteria at recess in a mad dash to one of several highly coveted spots. But things really got serious when schools officially locked…
