Thursday, November 11 Activism propels many independent documentary films into being, simply on the strength of pure, politicized momentum. The flow starts at the top, with, for example, Michael Moore’s spew, and filters down into the world of film schools and dens of underground rabble-rousers, at which point the subject…
Ask corporate execs or kids on the street, and they’ll tell you: The music business is in sad shape, reeling from dismal sales and file-sharing controversies, not to mention a weak economy all around. The result? A lot of crap thrown at the consumer, with record labels cautiously emphasizing homogeneity…
The gift-giving season draws nigh, so sound the battle cry and dig in: Shop early and shop often! After all, frenzy can be fun, especially when you know where to shop. And this is one hot weekend to do it. For starters, the seventh annual Gifts for Yule, an eclectic…
On a list of the sexiest sports, bowling would probably rank pretty low. Lucky Strike Lanes, which recently opened at 500 East 16th Street in the Denver Pavilions, is hoping to change that by combining nightclub and gourmet-restaurant elements with ten pins and a heavy ball. “Bowling isn’t for bowlers…
FRI, 11/12 When Brandon Borchert plays Powerball, he is always a winner. Borchert is a Denver artist who has developed a master list of 53 numbered images matched to the digits printed on the white betting balls. When the lucky gaming globes of Powerball are drawn, the Dada-inspired painter heads…
THURS, 11/11 Three young composers, just out of music school and trying to make it in New York during the mid-’80s, took to meeting over breakfast every morning to discuss artistic life and, perhaps most of all, to complain. There was plenty for Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe and David Lang…
I’ve been pretty tough on Jerry Gilmore, chief curator and director of the art program at the Arvada Center, because he seemed to model his behavior on that of the proverbial bull in a china shop. Soon after he took over a few years ago, for example, longtime staff members…
The formal exhibition spaces at the Arvada Center (6901 Wadsworth Boulevard, 720-898-7200) are called the Lower Galleries and the Upper Galleries; they’re currently filled with impressive solos by Charles Parson and Emilio Lobato (see review, page 45). But there are more informal places at the center where art is exhibited…
Mes Petits Amis. As part of Denver’s “Month of Photography,” Capsule at Pod is presenting Mes Petits Amis (My Little Friends), a solo featuring experimental images by emerging artist Katie Taft. Though she’s only been exhibiting in the area for the last year or so, she’s really gotten around. Her…
Nagle Jackson is an intensely visual director. For the Denver Center Theatre Company’s The Misanthrope, he utilized the talents of set designer Vicki Smith, lighting designer Peter Maradudin and costumer Andrew V. Yelusich, and the production is flat-out gorgeous. The set is simple and elegant: white alternating with panels of…
No question, the Angel at the center of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America is a tricky creature — neither divine nor malevolent, sometimes comical, highly sexual. She’s not any old angel, either, but the angel of America, which accounts for the frequent stuttered iteration of the first-person pronoun: “I. I…
Angels in America: Part I: Millennium Approaches. Tony Kushner’s Angels in America is a complex, seven-hour masterwork about the lives of two couples and one quintessentially evil historical figure, and the inextricable way in which politics, history and private life intertwine. There’s also an angel, along with other supernatural and…
When shot with verve and skill, so that you can feel the heat and passion of the moment, a concert film is the next best thing to being there. That’s the way it is with Lightning in a Bottle, a Martin Scorsese-produced documentary that captures an extraordinary evening in February…
Writer-director Charles Shyer’s Alfie is less a remake of the 1966 film that made Michael Caine a star than it is a retooling that softens the horrific blows struck by the original; it’s sweeter, too, cotton candy spun from decades-old arsenic. The original, written by Bill Naughton (who also penned…
Since its initial publication in 1986, myriad filmmakers have attempted — in vain — to film the Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons comic book Watchmen, in which costumed superheroes have been outlawed and are being summarily exiled and executed by an unknown baddie. At the moment, Darren Aronofsky (Pi) is…
The talented documentarians Albert and David Maysles, both of whom studied psychology at college, were always at their best when addressing offbeat subjects: door-to-door Bible salesmen; a pair of eccentric Jackie Kennedy relatives living in a decrepit mansion on Long Island; the self-absorbed writer Truman Capote; the climate of violence…
Watching a movie in which you know someone or recognize a location often causes a case of fame by proxy. That feeling will hit Denverites in spades during the premiere of Colfax Ave, a new documentary that explores a grand stretch of U.S. 40, most notably in the environs of…
Thursday, November 4 Cinderella’s glass slipper resurfaces as a black boot in one offering, and in another, the tiny-footed fairy-tale heroine joins Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Goldilocks and other make-believe gals in a therapy group. The collection of seven short films that make up LunaFest 2004 are nothing if not…
A pair of local bibliophiles are invoking the “hortatory subjunctive” — a grammatical term for speech used to urge others to join in a specific action. This sermonic style typically opens with a preacher’s “Let us…” and ends with a skyscraper-high exclamation mark. Pushy, perhaps, but effective at driving home…
SAT, 11/6 When the Denver School of the Arts opened its new facility in 2003, administrators decided that what they had was too impressive to keep to themselves. They also recognized that the state-of-the-art campus offered a unique opportunity to connect with the community. “We realized that the DSA could…
SAT, 11/6 Yoga is all about how you breathe, says Kirtan chant leader Dave Stringer: “If you have no awareness of breath, you’re just exercising. If you’re using your breath, you’re practicing yoga.” And while Kirtan doesn’t involve the thoughtful stretching of limbs or the fine art of tying oneself…
SAT, 11/6 Photographer Robert Doisneau, who likened his art to a fisherman’s catch, loved Paris more than anyone possibly could, and he rarely left its confines to shoot his pictures. The tiny, split-second tableaux of splendid life are so perfectly indicative of time and place that they still transport us…
