That sound you hear is the stampeding feet of millions of pubescent and pre-pubescent girls, racing to movie theaters this weekend to catch sisters Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen in their first feature film since 1995’s It Takes Two. The Olsen twins began their acting careers at the age of nine…
Tony Scott’s True Romance (1993) puts a hip ’90s spin on the lovers-on-the-run formula perfected early on by Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once and, three decades later, by Bonnie and Clyde. Written by ace smart-aleck Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction), it stars Christian Slater as a movie-crazed geek named Clarence,…
According to Sandra Renteria, owner of Indigena Gallery, Denver is finally ready for Vodou art — readier, in fact, than she ever could have imagined. She first arrived in the Mile High City from Florida, where Haitian art is far more commonplace and, therefore, understood. But she once feared that…
“It’s like a live B movie,” Fanny Fitztightlee says of Ooh La La, a Denver-based burlesque outfit that she co-founded with fellow peeler Kitty Crimson. “But it’s faster-paced, and the story line is easier to follow. We do everything from fan dancing to fire breathing to pillow fights. We’re more…
Thursday, May 6 Make time for space: Across the nation, Colorado heavyweight Lockheed Martin will sponsor Space Day 2004, which was created to highlight the remarkable work of space-industry pioneers. “Blazing Galactic Trails,” the event at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, 2001 Colorado Boulevard, will feature astronaut Bruce…
SUN, 5/9 The lot at the corner of Tenth Avenue and Osage Street is about to blossom. But it won’t be an array of flowers that sprouts today. Instead, the west-side neighbors who wanted to fill the site with all the color and flavor of an international marketplace will get…
SAT, 5/8 Teach your pooch to soar through the air at today’s Colorado Disc Dogs Spring Training Seminar, a hands-on workshop that covers such topics as how to throw a Frisbee for your dog and the rules of the game for canines. “We start with the basics — the correct…
FRI, 5/7 Hot rods, tattoos, nudie flicks and cartoons — such are the sources of inspiration for lowbrow art, a movement on display at tonight’s opening reception for Cute, Cuddly and Curvaceous, the inaugural show at D.C. Gallery. The concept of “lowbrow” art originated in the surf and custom-car culture…
MON, 5/10 Local comedian Josh Blue turns his disability into a laughing matter. Blue, who says he “puts the cerebral in cerebral palsy,” uses humor to help audiences overcome preconceived ideas about the disabled. And while he has recently caught the eye of scouts for David Letterman and Ellen DeGeneres,…
There’s an important exhibit at the Denver Art Museum that’s being given the royal treatment, which makes sense, because it’s filled with regal pieces. The blockbuster is Painting a New World: Mexican Art and Life, 1521-1821, a mammoth endeavor that includes more than fifty paintings, many of them monumental in…
California-based photographer Rick Nahmias was researching famed TV journalist Edward R. Murrow when he came upon Harvest of Shame, Murrow’s 1960s documentary about the dreadful living conditions of farm workers. The film inspired Nahmias to revisit the topic, and the results are the dozens of wonderful photos that make up…
Evan. For the first show at Capsule on Santa Fe, director Lauri Lynnxe Murphy chose to feature the work of her old friend and fellow ILK co-op founder, Evan Colbert. Not all of the pieces in the wonderful solo are new; a few were done years ago, when Colbert had…
I’ve been a fan of Lanford Wilson’s work ever since I saw one of his early one-acts at the legendary Caffe Cino in New York in the mid-1960s. It might have been This Is the Rill Speaking, and I think it played in tandem with Sam Shepard’s Icarus’s Mother. I…
I’m absolutely mystified by the weakness of this script. Playwright Rebecca Gilman has won awards and been praised in all the right places. Although it had problems, I rather liked her Spinning Into Butter, which was produced at the Denver Center a couple of years ago. But Boy Gets Girl…
Bat Boy: The Musical. The character of Bat Boy is based on a recurring character in the Weekly World News — a two-foot-high boy, found in a cave in West Virginia, who endorsed Al Gore for president and later almost died after being sprayed by a pesticide truck. In the…
One thing few may mention about Mean Girls is that it could have been unrelentingly terrible. It isn’t — it’s actually pretty fabulous on its own terms — but consider: a rush-job comedy (hastily lensed a few months ago) constructed around a high-concept title with built-in ka-ching and endless potential…
Suicide made merry. Brotherly devotion tinged with carnal deceit. Personal tragedy transformed by malicious humor. These are some of the oil-and-water notions advanced by Lone Scherfig’s Wilbur (Wants to Kill Himself), a mood-switching meditation on love and death that goes out of its way to yank our chains. From the…
Ever evolving, always changing, the universe nonetheless sustains many constants. Hair metal never really goes away. British women inevitably become besotted grumps. And short men always turn into intolerable control freaks. Another “true generality” holds that males of all statures develop their innate behavioral characteristics within patriarchal cultures that, while…
Those seeking a spiritual counterpart to the yin of Lynne Ramsay’s masterfully moody Morvern Callar will find their yang in David Mackenzie’s exquisitely sorrowful Young Adam. Art-house aficionados may recall that in Ramsay’s recent film, a young male writer commits suicide, leaving his simple girlfriend to absorb his very being…
Pour a couple of Old-Fashioneds into the average golf historian, and it won’t be long until he gets misty-eyed over Robert Tyre Jones Jr. Jones not only ruled golf in the 1920s, the fellow will tell you; he also epitomized the gentlemanly ideal of the old Scottish game, transplanted to…
The strangest and most obsessive of Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers, Vertigo has fascinated assorted movie buffs, philosophers and psychiatric professionals since its release in 1958 — not least because this tangled tale about an acrophobic ex-detective on the trail of an old friend’s beautiful wife suggests that reinventing a living woman…
Sometimes folks tackle a project even though they know it’s gonna be bigger, tougher and meaner than they are. That’s how it was for local artist Michael O’Donnell and the Historic Oriental Theatre: One day he looked at the now-empty north Denver movie palace, a neighborhood treasure he’d grown up…
