Talking Shop

Martinis and lemonade. It puts me in the mindset of cool, comfortable, sophisticated Lilly Pulitzer shifts or a summer breeze lifting the lace curtains, stories above the street, in someone’s ritzy loft. That’s the atmosphere mother-daughter team Patricia and Cassie Brown created when they opened their new Highland home-decor boutique,…

Service!

SAT, 5/21 While some sports tend to go overboard in the area of self-promotion, tennis, as a whole, has typically shown restraint. But backers are stepping out of the shadows with the fourth annual USA Tennis Rock & Rally, which bounces today from 9 to 11:30 a.m. on the south…

Pop-Up Video

SUN, 5/22 Last summer’s hi-dive-sponsored video scavenger hunt may have had a more lasting effect than organizers initially intended. The event brought together local filmmaking aficionados in a one-day quest to document a laundry list of strange things around town — including, but not limited to, filming themselves stealing something…

Gender Follies

SAT, 5/21 Madeline and Sylvia, two New York senior citizens enjoying the challenges of continuing education, are on a field trip with their junior college’s Women’s Studies class. They walk into Las Hermanas, a feminist-lesbian health-food restaurant. “Oh, Mad, look at this floral watercolor. It’s so vibrant,” says Sylvia. “I…

Formal Ware

It was two years ago that I first became aware of an unexpected curve in the art road. Despite all expectations, digital media was on the wane, and painting was waxing. The thought gave me a good laugh, because it was such an outrageous idea. Fast-forward to the present, and…

Artbeat

The spare, monochrome paintings in Angela Larson’s Seeking Harmony, at Spark Gallery (900 Santa Fe Drive, 720-889-2200), may look like neo-minimalist compositions, but they’re not. In fact, these pieces have nothing to do with minimalism or any other art theory, but rather are based on the I Ching. Larson says…

Now Showing

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…

Coming of Age

Kimberly Akimbo, currently being staged at Nomad Theatre, begins with an elderly woman seated on a bench, huddled in her jacket against a surprising April snowstorm. (The first mention of the unseasonable weather got a big laugh on the snowy 30th of April in Boulder.) A younger man comes by…

Let Us Bray

Opening nights are a strange phenomenon, paper houses filled with critics and theater people. The latter are warmly supportive of their friends in the play, and many of them express their support by responding so passionately — empathetic gasps, howls of slightly drunken laughter — that the rest of us…

Critic’s Notebook

Over the past few years, some of the most reliably interesting theater performances in this area have taken place on the small, square stage above the galleries at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, under the aegis of artistic director Brandi Mathis. Mathis, who worked at the museum for five…

Encore

The Crimson Thread. The first scene of this play is well-acted and somewhat promising, though it does have a bit of that golden-sunlight, Hallmark-card feeling about it. The year is 1869. Two sisters, Eilis and Bridget, are talking on the porch of a stone cottage in a small, poor Irish…

What Ever Happened to Lady Jane?

Jane Fonda comes from a good Hollywood family and used to be a pretty fair actress herself. Klute, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Coming Home were three of the better films of their time. So after getting a look at herself in her first movie in fifteen years, La…

Going Mental

If you’re expecting Mindhunters to be a psychological thriller and you buy a ticket for the movie, you will almost indubitably feel cheated. But break down the film’s title to its most literal sense — hunting for a mind, presumably because those involved were out of theirs — and you’ll…

Will to Win

Kicking & Screaming might be the most predictable movie of the year, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Think about it: How many times have you gone to a movie and gotten far less than you were expecting? Here that’s not a concern: You may not get more than…

Club Life

It won’t ruin anyone’s experience of 3-Iron, the new film by Korean writer/director Kim Ki-duk, to reveal that it closes with a single epigraph: “It’s hard to tell that the world we live in is either reality or a dream.” Presumably, the correct translation would replace “that” with “whether”; even…

Flick Pick

The Starz FilmCenter’s wide-ranging Global Lens 2005 series, which continues through May, features new films from such exotic climes as Uruguay, China, Turkey, Algeria, Bosnia, Mali and, if the rumors are true, North Dakota and Nebraska. This week, the two features on view will be Lili’s Apron, a comic parable…

Comic Timing

As an ever-evolving lexicon, the Oxford English Dictionary regularly adds words and phrases that have found their way into heavy rotation in the current vernacular. Recent additions to the OED include “supersize,” “e-learning” and “spyware.” When the next round of updates rolls around, I would not be surprised to find…

This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks

Thursday, May 12 Tie, tux and…high-tops? That’s the ticket at the annual Sneakers Ball gala, a benefit for the Attention Homes emergency youth shelter. This year’s theme, “Kitschy Loungewear With Swanky Sneakers,” will have lounge lizards slinking out of the woodwork at the Boulder Theater, 2032 14th Street in Boulder,…

Triumph of the Swill

When a prestigious convention comes to Denver, public officials usually fall all over themselves to welcome the group — particularly when media outlets from across the country are covering the event. But while there will be plenty of falling all over when the Modern Drunkard Convention pours into Denver this…

Fur Real

THURS, 5/12 Meet Murray, a teacup Chihuahua with a tiny, quivering nose, bat ears and deep, mooning eyes that could launch a thousand Keene portraits in a single wink. He greets you with his sliver of a tail tucked daintily between matchstick legs and tender pussywillow paws, looking jaunty, if…

Speed Thrills

WED, 5/18 Okay, I admit it: I love car-heist and race-car movies. That’s my chick flick. Gone in 60 Seconds? Angelina Jolie and Nicolas Cage — c’mon, what’s not to love? The Fast and the Furious? Fast cars, fast music — again, what’s not to love? Well, yes, the scripts,…

The Simple Life

FRI, 5/13 “My characters are really, really simply drawn,” Todd Goldman says of his art. “Simply drawn” is putting it mildly; Goldman’s bright, basic cartoon style makes Keith Haring look like Caravaggio. But there’s no denying the power of that simplicity: Over the past few years, Goldman has turned his…