Central City Opera’s Madama Butterfly is beautifully sung, if a little over-directed. First performed in 1904, Puccini’s opera tells the story of an American officer, B.F. Pinkerton, who is stationed in Japan and enters into an exploitative union with a teenage geisha. Such fake marriages, which the groom could leave…
The Elephant Man. The Elephant Man is based on the life of Joseph Merrick, who was born in Victorian London and suffered from a hideously deforming disease that resulted in overgrowths of bone and hanging excrescences of putrid flesh. Abandoned by his father and stepmother, Merrick became the primary attraction…
It should come as no surprise that the hero and heroine of the new Michael Bay action extravaganza are clones. Exact copies of other people. You don’t get to be a Hollywood hit-meister like Bay — 200 Zillion Tickets Sold! — without indulging in formulas, and the characters that Star…
The questing hero of Hans Petter Moland’s The Beautiful Country is a slender, big-eyed young man named Binh (California-educated Damien Nguyen), who has little going for him but his obsession. Ostracized in his homeland because he’s the offspring of a Vietnamese mother and an American G.I. father — bui doi,…
MTV Films made a wise purchase in picking up Hustle & Flow at Sundance: The soundtrack is killer. Rapping over music composed by Three 6 Mafia and Al Kapone, star Terrence Howard has the skills. The rest of the songs heard on screen — most of which fall into the…
Going to the theater this summer has been like stepping into a time machine where your fondest childhood memories are retooled by cynics and sadists. Bewitched, Herbie: Fully Loaded, last week’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and now Bad News Bears are meant to be gobbled like comfort food by…
When rocker-turned-director Rob Zombie’s House of 1,000 Corpses was released in 2003, after years of bouncing around between studios afraid to put their name on a movie about a cartoonishly murderous family, it was anticipated as a hardcore gorefest. Instead, it was a plotless mess, with decent violence but nothing…
For those who like to keep their minds (and their Brunswicks) in the gutter, a screening of The Big Lebowski and a few lines of play at a downtown bowling alley should be just the thing this week. The 1998 movie by Ethan and Joel Coen (of Fargo fame) is,…
“Biennial” means every two years — so a biennial convention of dental hygienists would probably be a squeaky clean but dull replay of their last gathering, complete with the same flossing diagrams. But the Museum of Contemporary Art’s rapid-fire 2005 Film Biennial, unspooling this weekend at the Starz FilmCenter in…
Thursday, July 21 Local mainstream fashionistas will stylishly strut out of the woodwork to land in the Ballpark neighborhood tonight for Undercover, a chic evening featuring new designs by Frisco native Gabriel Conroy. The event runs from 7 to 9 p.m. at + Gallery, 2350 Lawrence Street. Conroy’s couture this…
While living in a small Spanish town, my friends and I regularly attended a weekly pub quiz at the local Irish bar. On any given Monday, thirty to fifty people of various nationalities would be there, tackling trivia that definitely skewed toward the operators’ native Emerald Isle. Every contest had…
THURS, 7/21 The urban landscape is inundated with hard-strapped creative kids whose dreams might just be a little harder to reach were it not for ArtLab, a branch of Denver’s Arts Street economic-development program that offers paid training opportunities to at-risk youth artists at the collaborating PlatteForum Gallery. It seems…
SUN, 7/24 George Washington and his peers couldn’t watch drag races, so they probably did the next best thing: revved up the equine engines known as quarter horses and let ’em rip over a quarter-mile track. And while the fancy thoroughbreds that run the longer distances of the Triple Crown…
FRI, 7/22 The ascendancy of hip-hop as a cultural phenomenon has brought a kindred form of expression to the masses: the spoken word. Landmark proto-rap records by the likes of the Last Poets and Melvin Van Peebles more than thirty years ago paved the way for artists such as Michael…
SAT, 7/23 Jazz percussionist and spiritual traveler Jimmy Hopps — aka Jimmi EsSpirit, the Spirit Man — has a mile-long musician’s resume and the chops to back it up: A boyhood friend of Motown’s Marvin Gaye and young piano prodigy who switched to drums later on, he boasts such career…
In 2001, Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art launched what became the first in a series of biennial exhibits. It was such a good idea, it’s a wonder the Denver Art Museum didn’t think of it first. Having a regular exhibition devoted to local art is compelling because it’s about living…
Though most of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center (30 West Dale Street, Colorado Springs, 1-719-634-5581) is taken over by the mammoth Dale Chihuly retrospective, there is another attraction installed in the side gallery just west of the lobby. ATHLETE/WARRIOR is made up of elegant, beautifully printed black-and-white photos of…
Chihuly. Michael De Marsche, president of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, has orchestrated the extravaganza Chihuly, a sprawling survey of the career of glass master Dale Chihuly. Working near Seattle, Chihuly is among the best-known glass artists of all time, right up there with Louis Comfort Tiffany and Paolo…
My friend Julia, 24 years old, tall and striking and a one-time ballet dancer, was wearing rhinestone-encrusted stiletto heels for the occasion. When she rose to her feet, put her hands to her hips and did “The Time Warp,” I knew the Avenue Theater’s Rocky Horror Show was a success…
The Elephant Man. The Elephant Man is based on the life of Joseph Merrick, who was born in Victorian London and suffered from a hideously deforming disease that resulted in overgrowths of bone and hanging excrescences of putrid flesh. Abandoned by his father and stepmother, Merrick became the primary attraction…
Roald Dahl’s inner child was evidently a contrary lad — precocious, dark-minded, contemptuous of adult supervision and fueled by a sense of justice that often proceeded via cruel whim. In Dahl’s twisty children’s stories, villains throw kids out of windows, beautiful women turn out to be hideous witches in disguise…
Since George Romero’s long-awaited Land of the Dead turned out to be a letdown, we’ll have to find our zombie-movie solace elsewhere. Thankfully, Romero’s been making movies for so long that not only has he inspired others to follow in his footsteps, but those others have begotten others still. Sam…
