Triple Espresso is like the first few minutes of a dinner-theater production. You know, the part where the emcee comes out and congratulates the people in the audience who are celebrating birthdays or anniversaries, jokes with a pretty girl, gets impudent with an older couple and asks how many people…
Alarms & Excursions. Alarms & Excursions is minor Michael Frayn, a series of comic finger pieces, but it can’t help bearing the master’s stamp. A group of eight playlets examines the role of technology in our lives and its impact on human communication. In the first, a friendly dinner is…
In the mood to launch a thousand ships? Fine, but it’s gonna cost you. Feel like sacking the Temple of Apollo? Okay, but bring drachmas. Depending on who’s counting, the Warner Bros. pre-summer blockbuster Troy budgeted out at anywhere between $175 and $250 million, including the big wooden horse, assorted…
What becomes of Morgan Spurlock’s body after a month of eating and drinking nothing but McDonald’s assembly-line foodstuffs is not surprising. He bloats up, gaining nearly thirty pounds in thirty days. His sex drive peters out, among the myriad disappointments visited upon Spurlock’s vegan/chef girlfriend, who’s only too happy to…
If even one of the major networks had a successful sitcom in the vein of Friends but with an all-black cast, movies like Breakin’ All the Rules would have no reason to exist. Part of an ever-expanding subgenre that includes The Brothers, Two Can Play That Game and Deliver Us…
Tim Burton’s fantasy of alienation and acceptance, Edward Scissorhands (1990), is almost as haunting as it is romantic — a cunning mixture of charm and fright that shows us a soul in torment. The gentle title character, played by a young Johnny Depp, is the creation of a Frankenstein-like inventor…
Shakespeare said that all the world’s a stage. But in the modern era, it seems more apt to say that every life is a movie waiting to be made: Thanks to digital media, filmmaking is morphing from an unattainably expensive art form into a more democratic medium. “Storytelling is how…
Thursday, May 13 The Physically Handicapped Amateur Musical Actors League is easily one of Denver’s most talented troupes of troopers: Each year, its members hit the stage despite their myriad disabilities, dancing in wheelchairs and showing off their singing and acting skills in a fully produced popular musical (this summer’s…
Davy Rothbart, a 29-year-old hipster with one of those anemic, pencil-thin Honest Abe beards, is probably the nation’s most notable pick-up artist: He sees things on the ground, he picks them up. But unlike most of us, he’s created an entire cult around the random notes, lists, napkin doodles, snapshots…
THURS, 5/13 Who’s had the longest continuous run on Denver television? Russell Scott is first by a big, red nose. As Blinky the Clown, Scott hosted Blinky’s Fun Club, a proudly anachronistic Channel 2 kiddie program, for 33 years. Although Scott has been absent from the tube since 1998, when…
SAT, 5/15 Stamina is key at the Go Fast 24 Hours of BoulderSThe Run, during which more than 100 runners will race to complete as many 7.14-mile laps around the Boulder Reservoir as possible in 24 hours. “We’re hoping to attract a wide variety of people — those who are…
THURS, 5/13 Americans have no single governing persona, and that’s as it should be: The Land of the Free has no room for a goose-stepping, nationalistic identity. We’re mongrels. We believe in and are motivated by thousands of unique, different things, all sprouted from hundreds of intermingling and divergent cultures…
THURS, 5/13 Prepare to be uplifted both spiritually and mentally at this weekend’s encore performance of Mary Lou’s Mass by Cleo Parker Robinson Dance. The historical piece is based on Music for Peace, which was composed by African-American jazz artist Mary Lou Williams for Pope Paul VII in 1969. The…
It’s safe to say that no matter when you go to the Singer Gallery at the Mizel Center for Arts and Culture, there’s always something worth seeing. But to describe the current offering as being merely worthwhile would be a major understatement, because Jules Olitski: Half a Life’s Work: Selected…
Located across the street from the west side of the Denver Art Museum, next to the venerable Camera Obscura, is the city’s coziest little art shop, the Emil Nelson Gallery (1307 Bannock Street, 303-534-0996). Into the warren of small rooms that once made up the first floor of an old…
Full Frontal: Contemporary Asian Art From the Logan Collection. The normal stock in trade for the Denver Art Museum’s Asian-art curator, Ron Otsuka, is traditional styles, but he’s been drafted into doing contemporary duty by a gift that includes more than a score of pieces by Asian and Asian-American artists…
Michael Frayn has to be one of the cleverest writers alive. He’s responsible for the brain-teasing profundity of Copenhagen, a play that examines the race for the atom bomb during World War II in the context of a visit by Werner Heisenberg, then working for the Germans, to his mentor,…
Now that Buntport Theater has come of age and is attracting reliably positive reviews and large, enthusiastic audiences, the six company members have revived one of their earlier works, an evening of one-acts titled 2 in 1. The first piece, “This is My Significant Bother,” is a dramatization of nine…
Book of Days. Lanford Wilson’s Book of Days is a bitter exegesis of life in small-town America; the cast serves as narrator and chorus. At its heart is a murder. The play tells us that life in this country has been corrupted on every level and in almost every way…
We must keep the atmosphere electrified!” announces creepy Igor in reference to an abominable experiment in Van Helsing, but he could just as well be appraising the entirety of this enormous event movie. Breathless cutting, non-stop special effects and a pummeling soundtrack camouflage very silly plotting and mediocre-to-sappy dialogue –…
When a pleasant Italian comedy called Mediterraneo won the 1992 Academy Award for best foreign-language film, a lot of observant American movie-goers scratched their heads. Gabriele Salvatores’s fairy tale of Italian soldiers happily stranded on a gorgeous Greek island during World War II was an outright charmer, but it certainly…
Laws of Attraction is the kind of film you might mistake for “cute” or “charming” at first glance. Maybe you will open the paper and spot the ad with Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore canoodling and think to yourself how nice it would be to see James Bond defrosting indie…
