It is, to those of us born and raised in Texas, the Greatest Story Ever Told and Retold; who can forget the Alamo when it’s on every Texas history-class final exam? At 5 a.m. on March 6, 1836, some 189 Texan soldiers and volunteers were slaughtered while trying to protect…
Israeli writer-director Nir Bergman’s Broken Wings never shows an automatic weapon, a military roadblock or a horrific explosion on a city street. Rather than deal with the volatile politics of the Middle East, this quiet, soul-wrenching film examines the unresolved traumas of one middle-class family trying to cope with the…
Among the film world’s brilliant jokers and devoted anarchists, Luis Buñuel has no equal — never will. And in the great, daunting body of the Spanish director’s work, which spans five decades, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) must rank somewhere between the sublime and the miraculous. Always at home…
Rod Stewart, if you’re reading this: Please give up. He first appeared as a street-walking urchin with a heart full of R&B, then evolved into a suave, rooster-coiffed crooner of ballads and standards — and still, Stewart just will not fade away. Rod the Mod started out as, believe it…
Thursday, April 8 The English department at the University of Colorado at Denver lends some local presence to National Poetry Month by hosting the Denver Poetry Festival. The series, scheduled throughout the month of April, features free poetry readings by both award-winning and up-and-coming poets. The meter starts running tonight…
For Chip Walton and his Curious Theatre Company, staging a play like Inventing Van Gogh became an act of invention in itself. The time-traveling play, by former Coloradan Stephen Dietz, tells of a modern painter hired to forge Van Gogh’s final masterpiece. To take on such a work is not…
TUES, 4/13 While sexual assault is no laughing matter, supporters of Denver’s Rape Assistance and Awareness Program will share a jovial evening while raising money at tonight’s Give A Wit comedy benefit. “Our issue is so heavy — we were looking for a way to lighten things up,” says RAAP…
THURS, 4/8 If you think your four-legged friend has the makings of a champion, check out Rally Obedience, a canine competition that’s quickly gaining in popularity. “It’s a new sport that is a cross between standard obedience and agility,” says Chrissy Linzy, owner of Educanines, which offers Rally Obedience classes…
MON, 4/12 Siona Benjamin’s background is beyond exotic, a story no journalist could resist repeating. A Sephardic Jew who grew up in the Bollywood district of Bombay, India, she hails from a milieu that has been defined by a swirl of multiculturalism, including Western and Eastern philosophies and Jewish, Catholic,…
THURS, 4/8 According to Boulder dancer Ellie Sciarra, women tap dancers deserve an opportunity to strut their stuff under the bright lights of center stage. “The tap world is very male-dominated,” she says. “While we all know who Gene Kelly and Gregory Hines were, women tap dancers were traditionally just…
Putting together a coherent art show is difficult, and so many of the shows I see — even some of the good ones — don’t exactly make sense. Imagine, then, how rare it is to find not one, but three shows that all make sense. And not only that, but…
The Sandy Carson Gallery (760 Santa Fe Drive, 303-573-8585) is the flagship art venue of the Santa Fe arts district, which makes it one of the top spots in town. High-quality exhibitions are the reason why — and the current offering, 3 Search and Converge in the Creative, is just…
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…
The massacre at Columbine High School has been so intensively covered in the media — minutely dissected when it first occurred, rehashed with every newly uncovered fragment of information and on every yearly anniversary — that it’s hard to figure out what remains to be said about it. So it’s…
It was too loud. That was, I’m afraid, my prevailing impression of Hairspray. It was so loud that periodically I stuck my fingers in my ears. So loud that when a performer began one of those songs that starts low and intense, I found myself cowering in anticipation of the…
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…
Full disclosure: I like precisely one and a half Kevin Smith movies. There’s the one everyone else hates, the John Hughes homage Mallrats, and the first hour of the one everyone else loves, Chasing Amy, which dries up around the time Ben Affleck dumps Jason Lee for Joey Lauren Adams…
The Golden Age of the Comic Book Movie has turned the color of tarnished copper. But there’s no going back, not when comic shops have become movie studios’ research-and-development labs. There’s no moving forward, either; the comic-book movie has become a cinematic smudge once more, each blurring into the next…
Okay, say you feel like leaping from a highway overpass onto the roof of a fast-moving truck, then bouncing onto the top of the van that follows and then crashing headfirst onto the pavement. In Hong Kong, there are plenty of movie directors happy to let you try it. Just…
In the ’60s and ’70s, underground cartoonist R. Crumb captured the anxieties and neuroses of an entire time and spawned a major cult with his “Keep on Truckin'” panels, his X-rated scoundrel Fritz the Cat and the unbridled lunacy he brought to Zap Comix. But it took the inspired documentarian…
Schizophrenic musical cult figure and street artist Wesley Willis, all 300-plus pounds of him, had a photographic memory and a penchant for immortalizing celebrities he admired in idiosyncratic song. He always greeted people with a signature head-butt (for fans, it was a badge of honor to receive one) and topped…
Thursday, April 1 Two modern masters of comic illusion will tighten their skeptical — and scientifically proven — noose around another crop circle of dubious movements when the second season of Showtime’s original series Penn & Teller: Bullshit! debuts tonight with a snide exposé of that so-called animals’ best friend,…
