As the international splash of grand-opening shows fades at the new (and still sparkling) Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver, director/curator Cydney Payton is getting down to the business of going local by featuring Denver artist Jeff Starr as the venue’s first regional artist-in-residence in the Project Gallery, a hands-on space intended…
Twin brothers from different classes, one set enslaved to the other, are shipwrecked and separated. A chance reunion years later is the catalyst for a comedic romp in which mistaken identity leads to all sorts of hijinks — including a brush with incestuous seduction — where much of the humor…
The non-profit sector in this country is a $1.3 trillion industry, and the world’s seventh-largest economy. It encompasses more than 1.5 million organizations — everything from museums and hospitals to think tanks and church charities. So what happens to grassroots groups when they enter the world of 501(c)3s? The authors…
“It’s sort of a cliche: They don’t make independent films like they used to,” says local film curator extraordinaire Christopher May. Unfortunately, that cliche is true. That’s why May has helped organize the new Classic Arthouse Series every second and fourth Saturday of the month at Neighborhood Flix Cinema &…
Much like a preview trailer, Central City Opera’s OPERA Shorts! provides a fun little teaser of a full opera production. It’s sure to be a hit with opera lovers, but it’s also an easy and painless 45-minute introduction for those who aren’t as sure of their feelings for the challenging…
Are you the next Van Gogh, Robert Johnson, Karl Marx or Versace — but you’d like to cash in on your creative genius before your untimely demise? If so, make your way over to the Wellington E. Webb Municipal Office Building, 201 West Colfax Avenue, today for the third annual…
For director Amy Serrano, The Sugar Babies: The Plight of the Children of Agricultural Workers in the Sugar Industry of the Dominican Republic, which is at the center of two events today, was a film that demanded to be made. Upon learning that thousands of Haitians are smuggled into the…
Military Intelligence and You!, which opens tonight, would have seemed smarter had it been shorter. Writer-director Dale Kutzera uses stock footage and old movie clips populated by Ronald Reagan, William Holden and more to construct a faux-instructional film ostensibly intended for World War II-era soldiers — although the often-hilarious narration…
Every time I amble through the Denver Art Museum, I have the sudden urge to reach out and fondle one of the many masterpieces adorning its angular walls. If you’re like me, and you’re not Thomas Crown or an insane burglar from Zurich, then you should consider dropping in on…
Brazilian performance artist Augusto Boal believes that standard theater divides people into a few who do and the many who watch. To Boal, this represents a model of the overall ruling structure in which monologue leads to oppression. In response, he wrote a book and set up a program called…
“Brilliant” is a term that gets thrown around far too casually and liberally, but when used to describe If This Thing Should Spill, it’s indisputably applicable. Over the course of thirteen tracks, Born in the Flood presents an overwhelmingly convincing case for why it’s one of Denver’s most vital bands…
Although he shot thousands of documentary images of Soviet workers, students and wartime battlefields during his long career (and later served as photo editor of the U.S.S.R.’s Life-like picture tabloid Ogonyak), Communist-era photojournalist Semyon Fridlyand remains little known in the West. Until now, that is: The University of Denver, which…
Remember when Chris Rock was asked to host the 77th annual Academy Awards back in 2005? What was the Academy thinking? I mean, after his roles as Nat X, Onski, Buster Jenkins and Young Pop — not to mention his impersonations of celebrities Flavor Flav, Idi Amin Dada, M.C. Hammer,…
Contrived Ending. This play is local author Josh Hartwell’s homage to the movies and, in particular, to the old-fashioned art house. All the action takes place on a beautifully detailed and realistic facsimile of a cinema lobby, and the play actually sounds and feels like a lot of movies — Reality…
The best sports stories combine the classic elements of rooting for the underdog and the triumph of unflagging determination in the face of ceaseless adversity. Those aspects have rarely been displayed in a purer form than in the cases of the two disabled athletes who will share their inspiring true-life…
“It’s kind of like a live B-movie,” explains Michelle Scheffer (aka Fanny Fitztightlee). She’s talking about Ooh La La Presents…Decades: A Timeline of Tease, her show co-produced with Kitty Crimson that covers more than a century’s worth of sexiness. Starting with 1900, Scheffer says, they’ve coordinated two or three acts…
It’s one of the most dangerous spots in the world — the only place where God gets sauced with the devil, where Indians inhabit Old West towns forgotten by Hollywood and drug routes are passed from father to son. In the Sierra Madre Mountains, just twenty miles south of the…
I’ve felt a little jerked around by Project Runway this season. This mostly has to do with how they’ve treated dear Chris, whose fashion sense has not always wowed me, but I still just love the guy. I mean, have you caught a glimpse of his portfolio — the guy’s…
Every day Westword receptionist Steve Burge gives you the fashionable view from the front desk. Straight-to-Video Scream Queen (And one of my favorite people in the world), Laura “Bay” Bruner, was in town and looking fabulously low-key just recently. Of course, the price tag attached to “low-key” for a Hollywood…
Every day Westword receptionist Steve Burge gives you the fashionable view from the front desk. Remember college? That magical time when anything was possible? When you were sure you were going to rule the world? When you could wear your pajamas in public? Come to think of it, college was…
This past fall, The Band’s Visit made headlines after being disqualified as Israel’s foreign-language submission to the 2008 Academy Awards — an ironic fate, indeed, for a movie that takes language as its very subject. The official ruling of the Oscar referees was that too much of the film’s dialogue…
The extraordinary Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, more comfortably known as “that abortion movie that won this year’s Palme d’Or,” sheds its secrets slowly, a high-end realist drama quickening skillfully into a thriller. Though the frighteningly late-term abortion at its center hints at larger sins in…
