At some fast-approaching point in pop-culture evolution, we’re due to hit Total Outsider Saturation, wherein everybody is an outsider and therefore there is no longer an outside. In the fleeting meantime, we have scintillating reminders of the struggle, like X-2: X-Men United, the latest bid from comic-book land to increase…
If you have never heard of Lizzie McGuire, you are not a female child between the ages of six and fourteen, nor are you a parent with a female child between those ages. For the uninitiated, then, Lizzie is the eponymous heroine of the three-year-old, wildly popular Disney Channel TV…
Hooray for the altruists and art lovers at Madstone Theaters. Recognizing that distribution can be a nightmare for young and/or unknown indie filmmakers, the art-house chain is showing six promising new films, through May and June, that have played the festival circuit but haven’t yet attracted distributors. In Denver, Madstone’s…
Concerned about Denver’s homeless youth? You could stand on the 16th Street Mall and hand out cash to loitering teens. But doesn’t spending your afternoon enjoying art and fashion in a sumptuous tea room sound like tons more fun? The second annual Save Our Children She She High Tea, Fashion…
Thursday, May 1 One of reggae’s rising stars, Kingston-born Yami Bolo emerged as a vocal phenom when still in his teens. He’s gone on to follow in the footsteps of the genre’s greatest, blending rhythm, politics and spirituality into a mesmerizing musical mix. Career high points include the Miya-Yami Project,…
Brody is a total monster. When we brought him home just over a year ago, he was an adorable, cuddly, thirty-pound ball of furry love. Now he’s a hulking, 125-pound yellow Lab who firmly believes that he is king of the world. Shoes, underwear and furniture are his three favorite…
FRI 5/2 Junk, beautiful junk: For some creative types, junk is the very stuff of creation. There’s no end to the wonderful contraptions you can assemble from someone else’s cast-off junk — you can sculpt it, build with it, sew it together or grind it into pulp and make paper…
SAT 5/3 Boulder Reservoir is still nippy, but that won’t discourage the dozens of wild and wacky teams signed up to participate in today’s 24th annual KBCO/Bud Light Kinetic Sculpture Challenge.The morning’s schedule is overflowing: Load up on carbs for $3 at the 7 a.m. pancake breakfast, a benefit for…
Douglas Love, the aptly named guiding light of Walden Family Playhouse, couldn’t be happier with the way things are going at the new children’s theater at Colorado Mills. Available tickets are disappearing like magic as Walden’s second full production, Merlin’s Apprentice, draws to a close this week. “We’re becoming the…
THURS 5/1 This week, Denver debuts the first festival ever held in this country devoted to British movies — or so say the organizers of the British Film Festival. “Apparently, there has never been a British film festival in the whole of the United States, which is quite amazing to…
SUN 5/4 Give peace a chance. With the conflict in Iraq almost over, The Nightingale & The Rose Performing Arts Company wants to promote peace. They’ll do it artistically, too, with Middle Eastern Cultural Awareness Week, which starts today at the Dairy Center for the Arts in Boulder.”With everything going…
They were loud once, deafeningly so–and dumbingly so, if such a thing is possible. They wore skins of leather stuffed with cucumbers of foil, towered over dwarves who danced around a Stonehenge made of pebbles, sang about women who fit like flesh tuxedos and explored the majesty of rock and…
Spring is the traditional season opener for yardwork, since it’s the best time for planting trees, shrubs, flowers, vegetables and, of course, grass. But not this year, at least not in Denver. The drought and that unbelievable March blizzard has left most landscape enthusiasts not planting — not yet –…
The Orwellian times that we live in have piqued the interest of the Colorado art collective iMiNiMi, which is made up of Roger Rapp, Kent Smith, Rick Visser and the artist known as Bug. For the exhibit Panopticon 21: You Are Being Watched, now at the Cordell Taylor gallery (2350…
I’m not much for American rural — slack-tongued accents, flat Coke, screen doors and heat, the heart-numbing sameness of daily life — and I tend to dislike dramas about dysfunctional families, especially when the dysfunction involves addiction or alcohol. I’ve yawned through I don’t know how many productions of Long…
Sure, we have one of the best jobs in the universe, but sometimes theater critics get tired. Tired of gut-wrenchingly deep performances and slick, practiced shallow ones. Of being blasted out of our seats by hyped-up sound systems, enduring pretentiously poetic prose, figuring out symbolism, trying to ignore a stilted…
The soundtrack of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s spare and beautiful new film, The Son (Le Fils) contains not a bar of music, not a tinkle of bell, not a whisper of breeze. Much of the film is set in the carpentry shop of a Belgium vocational school for troubled teenagers,…
You can’t be sure what to make of Identity for its first hour: Director James Mangold’s initial foray into the horror genre plays so much like a joke, it’s almost impossible to tell whether he’s making you laugh on purpose or because he is director James Mangold, maker of the…
Among Hollywood’s emerging directorial talents, Paul Thomas Anderson merits special notice for the boldness of his subject matter and the energy of his style. He is, after all, the fellow who vividly proposed, in Boogie Nights, that a houseful of variously drugged and deranged L.A. pornographers could be more devoted…
I just want to say this is a fucked-up life In this crazy world it’s so hard to do right I wonder why it’s not hard to do wrong In this crazy world I wish I was gone… — from “Crazy World,” by Eddie Chavez Eddie Chavez, who enjoys “sports,…
Thursday, April 24 After 25 years on the air, Boulder community radio station KGNU has the blues, but you can hold the Prozac: The proletarian, commercial-free independent is actually feeling upbeat about its third annual Women’s Blues Revue benefit. Featuring rootsy music by a trio of regional favorites — the…
When asked if he considers any subject to be off limits, comedian David Cross replies, with as much mock seriousness as he can muster, “I will not talk about Fox News. That’s sacrosanct.” Not ten minutes later, however, Cross blithely breaks this pledge, describing the cable service as “garbage. It’s…
