Science fiction films come and go, but Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey, endures as an epic of the genre. From its mysterious black slab to its defiant computer, HAL 9000, the iconography of the piece has become part of our cinematic and cultural heritage; it continues to…
There’s something wonderfully odd and mysterious about the mind of the miniaturist; it takes a certain kind of person to spend so much time around small things, to appreciate the exacting elegance of a tiny table or an itty-bitty bed. Whether it’s a simple dollhouse or an extravagant diorama, creating…
Thursday, Novmeber 24 No one truly intends to end up looking like that borbous turkey gracing the Thanksgiving table, but, hey, fat happens. It’s only once a year, though, so pack it in: Pile on the buttery mashers and say yes to the extra piece of pumpkin pie, especially if…
Tamdin Wangdu was a student at CU in 2000, finishing work on a degree in business administration, when he heard the news that his father had died. But unlike most people caught in such a tragic circumstance, Wangdu couldn’t rush home to comfort his family. Ten years earlier, at the…
Christopher Kimball teaches America to cook. MON 11/28 Christopher Kimball’s Cook’s Illustrated magazine and the offshoot TV show, America’s Test Kitchen, answer the question “What if nerds cooked?” Kimball and his team of kitchen scientists thoroughly test appliances, make and remake recipes until they’re perfect, compare and contrast food brands…
Get hot for hot rods, lowriders and custom bikes. FRI 11/25 If little red Porsches are for emasculated middle-aged men and monster trucks are for tattooed mullet-heads in muscle shirts, what rides do cool guys roll in? The answer idles among the cars in the ninth annual Rocky Mountain Rod…
Iconic hippie Donovan is back in style. WED 11/30 One can only imagine how Donovan felt in 1990 when he heard that a hip noise band from Texas called the Butthole Surfers was releasing a semi-satirical version of his psychedelic classic “The Hurdy Gurdy Man.” But maybe he wasn’t all…
Born to Run: 30th Anniversary 3-Disc Set (Columbia Home Video) The centerpiece of this three-disc boxed set isn’t the classic 1975 album, but the two DVDs that come with it. On one, shot in London in 1975, Bruce and the band tear through most of Born to Run and its…
Putting together a sequel to a hit videogame is tricky business. Play it safe and give people more of the same, and it ends up feeling stale. But try to innovate too much, and you dilute what made the game great to begin with. Soul Calibur III somehow manages to…
The Beat That My Heart Skipped (Wellspring) The Ed Sullivan Show Rock & Roll Classics Boxed Set (Sofa Entertainment) Fantasy Island: The Complete First Season (Columbia/Tristar) Friends: The Complete Tenth Season (Warner Bros.) Friends: Collector’s Box (Warner Bros.) Greg Behrendt Is Uncool (WEA) Guided by Voices: The Electrifying Conclusion (Plexifilm)…
Andy Warhol was one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, which is really saying something, considering the cavalcade of talent that came down the pike between 1900 and 1999. Warhol’s contributions, both aesthetically and — even more so — conceptually, inspired and anticipated the current era in contemporary…
Though I’ve been there a zillion times, the majestic Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center never ceases to impress me. The 1936 building, by New Mexico’s John Gaw Meem, is done in cast concrete trimmed out in aluminum and shiny black aggregate and combines the attributes of traditional pueblo style with…
Colorado: Then & Now II. In the late 1990s, internationally known photographer John Fielder came up with the idea of re-photographing old shots done by William Henry Jackson. This idea led to an exhibit at the Colorado History Museum in 1999, with this current show being the long-anticipated sequel. The…
Party of 1 offers a very pleasant way to spend an evening. It’s a good play to go to with a date, or to attend in hopes of finding one. The show is a sequence of cabaret songs dedicated to the joys and pains of singlehood, slightly reminiscent of I…
Theatre 13 is a new Boulder company that occupies the small upstairs theater space at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art — previously a venue for all kinds of multi-disciplinary and experimental work. Orphans, Theatre 13’s second production, is a peculiar mix of amateurish and highly professional elements. It’s an…
Bug. At the beginning, Bug seems hyper-realistic. We’re shown a drink- and drug-addled woman, Agnes, living in a motel room, which we learn is on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. We have been here before. It is — among other things — Sam Shepard country. A quiet young man, Peter,…
The part with the dragon is really cool. Might as well cut to the chase, right? It’s not as though you need anybody to tell you the basic premise of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire; if you somehow missed the last three, this likely won’t be the one…
It seems like so much nitpicking, but why is the Johnny Cash biopic called Walk the Line when a far better name would have been Ring of Fire? Surely co-writer and director James Mangold would insist he chose the former because of its lyrics dealing with the temptations that crop…
A common criticism of Hollywood from the right side of the political spectrum is that it hasn’t made any movies that deal with the War on Terror, the way it did with World War II, for example. The truth is that it’s probably less an example of political bias than…
Richard Gere? That’s the first thought that came to mind upon learning that Mr. Salt-and-Pepper-Sexy-Buddhist-Wasp had been cast as Saul Naumann in Bee Season, the film version of Myla Goldberg’s best-selling novel. In the book, Saul is an oppressive and learned Jewish patriarch, a cantor and student of mysticism whose…
Years before those airplanes attacked a big monkey as he clung to the Empire State Building, filmmakers Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack traveled to exotic climes in their roles as documentarians. This week, Milestone Film & Video released new DVDs of two of their silent masterpieces, and anyone…
For most viewers, the Academy Awards mean two things: celebrity fashion and suspense over a handful of categories, like Best Actor or Best Actress. But in between the red-carpet arrivals and the announcement of the year’s best big-budget blockbuster, heaps of gold-plated little men must be distributed to more obscure…
