In a cinematic universe where the rules for viability are changing almost daily, the film festival is becoming an endangered species. Less than 25 percent of them make it past the sixth year. But next week, Boulder International Film Festival will celebrate its eleventh season, which runs from March 5…
There are two kinds of humanist movie. One kind shows human beings struggling against the most unspeakable horrors, sorrows or injustices and still, somehow, emerging with their essential goodness intact. The second, thornier type gives us people doing terrible things to one another — screaming, cheating and generally making life…
“It’s stuff like this,” Jay Walla says, holding up his cell phone. According to Walla, who has run Roach Gallery/Roach Photos for the last 33 years, the digital age of photography and the accessibility of things like camera phones have propelled the steady decline of his family business. This Friday,…
Winter got you down? There’s no better escape from reality than a big song-and-dance musical that will keep you humming well after the last bows. Here are three new musicals to keep your weekend sunny, despite of all that new snow on the ground. Big Fish: The Musical Aurora Fox…
If Grace Kelly had been raised by coyotes, she might have stalked the screen like Focus’s Margot Robbie, a va-va-voom blonde with bite. Robbie is too beautiful to play normal, too sly to play nice. Miscast as a shy saint in Craig Zobel’s upcoming Sundance hit Z for Zachariah, she…
Is it possible to like a movie yet feel revulsion toward its script? David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars is clearly intended as a sharp satire of Hollywood ambition, vanity, avarice and emptiness, and in places it’s smart and astringently funny. Yet it seems to be fighting its own bone…
RedLine, the brainchild of artist and philanthropist Laura Merage, is both a major exhibition venue, with its handsome and spacious galleries, and one of the top studio complexes in town. The studios are occupied by artists serving either as “resources,” meaning their rent is completely subsidized, or “residents,” who pay…
Ten years ago, Wellington, New Zealand, was less welcoming of vampires. When Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, two unknown comedians, walked the streets in velvet frocks and ruffles for a 2005 sketch, dudes would drive by and scream homophobic slurs. Says Clement, “We were constantly abused.” Over the next decade,…
Martin McDonagh’s plays have inevitably been compared with those of his literary forebears. In the early twentieth century, John Millington Synge wrote of the bitterness and loneliness of rural Irish life, exacerbated by drunkenness and the grim, hypocritical strictures of the Irish Catholic Church. Synge didn’t shy away from the…
Hot Tin Roof: The Cat That Wore a Fedora, by Colorado-based developer Glass Bottom Games, was released for PC, Mac and Linux last Friday after a successful Kickstarter campaign kicked off more than a year and a half of development. It sounds nuts on paper — a platformer inspired by…
Museum collections are full of mysteries, and Megan Friedel, the curator of photography at History Colorado, 1200 Broadway, uncovered a head-scratcher when she decided to host a lecture (coming up on Thursday, February 26) about a collection of photos taken by twin brothers Herman and Herbert Hall in the early…
Where we come from defines us more than we even realize: That’s the idea implicit in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s somber, sturdily elegant drama Leviathan, in which a mechanic who has lived on the same parcel of land all his life — as his father and grandfather did before him — resists…
Last week I saw a primary-care physician for the first time (thanks, Obamacare!) since I was in college and was covered by my parents’ insurance. As a 34-year-old person who has never been to the hospital, doesn’t take any prescription medication and makes under $15,000 a year, insurance was not really…
The weekend’s impending Snowpocalypse, however overblown it may have been, still made our usual Saturday tiny house date unworkable as far as getting any physical work done outside. (In fact, I was so skeptical of the “Snowpocalypse 2015” hype that I left the house in slippers as opposed to boots,…
#36: Zach Reini Like many of Denver’s young artists, Zach Reini isn’t confined to a single discipline or medium — the former RedLine resident and 2012 graduate of Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design also swings with Denver’s DIY underground and is making things happen at Leisure, a new studio…
Connoisseurs of bad film know that The Room deserves a special place within the canon of so-bad-it’s-good cinema. By now the infamous film’s journey from director/writer/star Tommy Wiseau’s fever dream to the big screen has been well-documented, but nothing captures the story quite like producer and co-star Greg Sestero’s The…
Shocker of all shockers: the Fifty Shades of Grey movie sucked so hard it left a gaping hole where my soul used to be. Not that I didn’t anticipate maximum suckage since the book was also terrible, but I suppose I held out a vestige of hope that maybe the…
Nostalgic mixed-drink enthusiasts found shelter from the storm — and lots of festive balloons — on Saturday night at the Fire and Ice Prom, a Prom Dress Exchange fundraiser hosted by the Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails in the swanky surroundings of Syntax Physic Opera. Here’s a…
Bohemia Burlesque costumer, hairdresser, makeup artist and performance artist Chelsa Joy believes in opulent accessorizing. We spotted the multi-disciplined creative near 14th and Champa streets during one of the warm winter days this month, and chatted with her about her personal style, where she shops and what inspires her look…
This summer, Denver will have the opportunity to tune into the television industry when a new festival, SeriesFest, makes its season-one debut here. But the organizers have a bigger goal: to turn Denver into an off-site destination for TV movers and shakers, in the same way that the Sundance Film…
Colorado might be on the cutting edge for adult-use marijuana laws, but if you chat with Phyllis Ripple, you’ll quickly realize that when it comes to hemp, this state — and the entire country, in fact — are far behind the times. Ripple runs ecoFiber Custom Rugs out of Boulder,…
Traveling around the United States and South America as a kid has made Nick Hemstreet a little restless as an adult. He’s constantly trying to move forward, whether it’s learning new painting techniques or taking a journey to a different country. He has been tattooing for almost five years and…
