Ed, Downloaded. Michael Mitnick’s Ed, Downloaded, which was commissioned by the Denver Center Theatre Company, had a reading at last year’s New Play Summit and is currently receiving its world premiere. It tells the story of a young man with a terminal illness who is engaged to an intellectual Englishwoman,…
The most talked-about piece of public art at Denver International Airport kicked up plenty of discussion even before it was installed on February 11, 2008. DIA was still years from opening when the city’s blue-ribbon arts panel gave a $300,000 commission to Luis Jiménez to create “Mustang,” a 32-foot-high fiberglass…
When “Mustang” was erected on a patch of dirt outside Denver International Airport in February 2008, you could almost hear the residents of Colorado exclaiming in unison, “What is that thing?” Just what was this massive, bright-blue, anatomically in-your-face horse sculpture with demon red eyes doing in sunny, charming Denver?…
Public art is defined as artwork that has been commissioned by a government agency — but there are plenty of paintings, sculptures and other pieces that are displayed in public places, even if they have been paid for by private entities. The following is a list of ten controversies surrounding…
From its first moments, the wish-fulfillment political-campaign comedy Knife Fight serves as an accidental demonstration of the value of staying on message. After introducing us to Rob Lowe as ace political fixer Paul and Jamie Chung as an assistant made queasy by the pragmatic cynicism her job demands, the film…
Please, for his own good, somebody clap Dustin Hoffman into a chastity belt. Based on what Al Pacino suffers in Stand Up Guys and the identical humiliations visited upon Robert De Niro in Little Fockers, it seems that Hollywood will not be satisfied until it has speared a hypodermic into…
There’s scant dialogue but plenty of eloquent storytelling in the five animated short films up for a 2013 Oscar. Save for a five-minute Simpsons segment (“Maggie Simpson in ‘The Longest Daycare'”), this year’s nominees are a mute and expressionistic bunch. With evocative elegance, they convey both plot and emotion through…
Bold, impassioned, ecstatically beautiful, Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color — a lyric reverie on loss, love, and various invasions of the body — was in a class by itself at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. Well, let’s say it was a class shared by a more conventional but no less heady…
“It’s hard to get these things started,” says Walter Hill, dean of the American action movie, speaking to me from Los Angeles. “Action films are, by their very nature, more expensive than what are sometimes called, in the independent world, ‘relationship films.’ But I despise these categories. I’ve never made…
Sometimes the small, unpretentious shows provide the happiest evenings of theater. Motherhood Out Loud is a compendium of short pieces by several well-known playwrights — including Michele Lowe, Lisa Loomer and Theresa Rebeck, all of whom have had work shown at the Denver Center — compiled by Susan Rose and…
Early in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, there’s a longish scene of almost pure exposition as Prospero, a powerful scholar and magician, explains to his daughter Miranda why they are stranded on an enchanted island. Prospero had been the Duke of Milan until his brother stole his dukedom and sent them both…
Colorado’s most unusual pieces of public art are also, in large part, its best-loved ones – a strange but striking amalgamation of horses and chairs and horses on chairs and other things that aren’t horses or chairs spread all across the Front Range. As you read through our list (and…
From improvised Shakespeare productions to shows based on Craigslist missed-connections, Denver is teeming with dramatic troupes that perform within very specific formats. Duo Third Curd wanted to get in on the action — hence the idea for its new gig at the Deer Pile. “There’s a lot of other great…
When fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert set about to produce a runway show called Le Grand Divertissement à Versailles in 1973, her mission was simply to bring American and French fashion designers together with socialites and philanthropists in a grand gesture to raise money to help restore the Palace of Versailles…
Like fellow ’90s upstarts South Park and Mr. Show, the films of Kevin Smith (Clerks, Chasing Amy) were dismissed in their time as witless dick-and-fart-joke spectacles with all the depth of a spring-break lap dance. Yet Smith and his superhero-sex-organ-obsessed cronies have aged well over the decades, maintaining a loyal…
Denver’s fourth annual Neal Cassady Birthday Bash didn’t quite cross paths with the Colorado premiere of the major motion picture On the Road as originally hoped (the local opening is now scheduled for March), but the bash, celebrating the 87th anniversary of Neal Cassady’s birth, is still very much on…
The last time RJD2 took to the small, technology-overwhelmed stage of the Bluebird almost exactly a year ago, the DJ/producer was barely recognizable behind a Daft Punk-style robot mask and the sound effects box strapped to his waist like an oversized graphing calculator. Like Girl Talk, the campier, glitchier producer…
Cherry Manilow, a jammer for the Doom’s Daisies, and Pippi Skullknockings, who skates for the Red Ridin’ Hoods, are roller-derby rivals — not to mention rivals in the running for best nom de derby — and they’ll both step to the line tonight when the Rocky Mountain Rollergirls league opens…
Patrick Mueller of Control Group Productions isn’t exaggerating when he calls the movement and performance group’s new work, Salon Romantik, Opus 2, a “sprawl.” Not quite dance or simply performance art, the work encompasses a collaborative carnival of scenes and pieces and sequences that demand audience participation on various delightful…
The story we all know about Kurt Sonnenfeld, who called Denver police one night eleven years ago as his wife Nancy lay dying of a gunshot wound to the head, starts in the aftermath of 9/11, when he worked as a videographer at Ground Zero. Sonnenfeld, who cried 9/11 government…
“The whole comic-book realm is primarily riddled with testosterone and dudes,” says Pablo Kjolseth, director of the International Film Series at the University of Colorado in Boulder. But there is one heroine who’s held her own — with her lasso of truth — since 1941. And Wonder Women! The Untold…
Based on a best-selling French graphic novel by Joann Sfar, the animated film The Rabbi’s Cat tells the story of a cat who eats his owner’s parrot and is suddenly able to speak. Set in Algeria in the 1930s — where Arab, French and Jewish cultures intersect — the film…
