Billy Elliot the Musical. The story of Billy Elliot is deeply appealing: During the 1980s, as Maggie Thatcher wars with the powerful coal-mining union as part of her campaign to destroy British labor, an eleven-year-old miner’s son stumbles into a ballet class and discovers an unlikely love of dance. Naturally,…
After chambermaid Hélène (Sandrine Bonnaire) glimpses an American couple (Jennifer Beals and Dominic Gould) playing chess in the upscale Corsican resort where she works, she becomes obsessed with the game and what it represents to her. The couple’s casually sexy interplay and wealth are in stark contrast to the hand-to-mouth…
Most sequels are born of good box office rather than good ideas – if you build it and they come, you simply must build another one – but it’s hard to imagine a more calculating, creatively bankrupt piece of real estate than The Hangover Part II. Trade out Las Vegas…
A U.N. premiere! A Vanessa Redgrave cameo! Zionist hoodlums! Distributors the Weinstein Company and director Julian Schnabel overcome their well-documented aversion to media attention to address the Israel-Palestine question, pleading peace, compromise and the creation of a self-governing Palestinian state. While Jewish advocacy groups swarm to Schnabel’s bait, it bears…
The best thing about British playwright Alexi Kaye Campbell’s The Pride, which is receiving its local premiere at Paragon Theatre, is the central conceit. The action plays out in alternating scenes that take the same three people — well, essentially and symbolically the same, since they don’t ever age —…
This coming Sunday, several very fast cars will drive around in a circle 200 times for a total distance of 500 miles, an annual tradition that has now been going on for exactly a century. Yes, it’s the 100th anniversary of the Indianapolis 500, one of the premier events in…
The general rule for Twitter Tuesday is that we cannot highlight the account of someone/something unless it is public. Meaning, just because we are friends with a person and can read his or her or its tweets doesn’t mean we can share them with everybody. Basically, we’re just holding out…
Denver PrideFest has announced the theme of this year’s festival: “These Colors Don’t Run: Honoring our LGBT Servicemembers and Veterans.” Organizers were inspired by Congress’s vote to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which would allow openly gay men and women to serve in the military. “We wanted to celebrate what…
Poetry is all about words well chosen; success in gardening starts with the right seeds. Placement, or syntax, means everything to both: While the poet needs to know exactly when to let the sun shine directly on a word and when to hide it in shadow, the gardener must likewise…
For all those who give pom-pom critters for birthdays, feel an urge to stick googly eyes on everything or just occasionally get a twitch to fold some origami, we bring you “Gettin’ Crafty,” where we feature a craft you can easily make with minimal supplies and limited finances. For friends…
It’s a bit of a dry week over here in new release world, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a few notable things worthy of your time and money. In fact, provided you’re intrigued by such things as racing around in cars, the comic book hearings of 1954 or Transformers,…
The 32nd annual Mountainfilm in Telluride festival kicks off tomorrow night with free outdoor screenings at the Base Camp Outdoor Theater in Telluride Town Park; the full festival runs through the three-day weekend. While the festival has come to embrace documentaries about the environment, global politics, and personal responsibility (see…
Apparently at a loss for other ways to deal with the scourge of homosexuality, the state of Tennessee resorted to the old Voldemort tactic of not speaking its name last week by banning discussion of it from classrooms — luckily, gay activist George Takei has volunteered his own name in…
While the Fray might have been getting all the attention this weekend because they were the opening act for U2’s “Bono Single-handedly Stops Judgment Day” concert at Invesco Field, another hometown band done good, DeVotchKa, has also been making waves. That’s because DeVotchka frontman Nick Urata was recently featured in…
The Edge, a musician with the popular band U2, is a man known for the wearing of hats — and while the hat he is primarily known for is his trademark black beanie, we have it on good authority that he also wears other types of hats. Or at least…
So, in utterly stupid American news, Tennessee passed a bill late last week effectively banning teachers from speaking about homosexuality in elementary and middle school classrooms. Because, yes, homophobes, not talking about something is definitely the only reasonable avenue for making it go away. But for parties on both sides…
Denver painter Karen Bozik first learned of the 100 Days Project, an annual collaborative online project for which a network of people working in interdisciplinary art create a work per day for 100 days and share the process through blog pages, from Sabin Aell, whose Hinterland gallery is currently showing…
Alex Cox, who wrote and directed cult favorites like Repo Man and Sid & Nancy, is joining CU-Boulder’s film studies faculty this fall and will teach screenwriting and film production, as the Daily Camera reported. Cox, who grew up England, studied film at UCLA, then lived in Mexico and Spain…
Despite the predictions of doomsayer Harold Camping, the Lord apparently did not see fit to visit destruction upon the earth Saturday, which passed somewhat unremarkably except that it was a particularly beautiful day. (Personally, I went to an apocalypse barbecue and ate enough meat to create a small apocalypse some…
These days, U2 is less a rock band than some sort of weirdly beatific entity, to the extent that when the band comes to town, it even inspires good works. Case in point: the “Take off your Boots” ticket giveaway on Friday, where concert ticket retailer StubHub gave away some…
Oprah is returning to her home planet this week. Or she’s leaving daytime television. Or something like that. Everybody loves Oprah. Even if they’ve never seen her television program, they know Oprah is “truth.” She’s solid, she’s the bridge between different cultures and the essence of what it means to…
