Everyone knows that jalapeños are very hot and frozen lakes are very cold. Combine both with some wacky races, and you’ve got this Saturday’s Fire and Ice Winter Festival at the Aurora Reservoir. The highlight of the day will be the Polar Plunge Pentathlon, a series of goofy outdoor competitions…
We all have skeletons in our closets, but Bobby Bridger’s is particularly fascinating: The great-grandnephew of renowned mountain man Jim Bridger, Bobby was so drawn in by the rustic romance of his ancestor’s Old West milieu that he eventually dedicated his life to remembering it. He does so largely in…
It’s all but official: Young Denver artist Emmett Culligan can now be considered one of the top contemporary sculptors in Colorado. And the proof is in the spectacular Emmett Culligan: Sculpture, currently on display at Judish Fine Arts. The show, which opened a couple of weeks ago, has generated a…
It’s hard to believe today — what with underwear-clad models dancing in Kmart commercials and Joe Millionaire running around in a skimpy Speedo — that twenty years ago, the idea of a man as a sex object was considered outrageous and clearly in bad taste. Then, in the 1980s, along…
The school auditorium where Su Teatro has staged Roosters is an unprepossessing environment; it resembles a large black box. The sound is flat, and naked bulbs light the stage. But director Phil Luna has made ingenious use of the space, placing the audience on three sides so that the performance…
Rawson Thurber has been so busy the past few days that by the time he finally returns a reporter’s phone call, he does so at 1:30 in the morning–and he doesn’t even realize the late, or early, hour till he hears the groggy croak on the other end. He’s sorry…
The first feature film by 34-year-old Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, Intacto, is a complex meditation on luck, fate and the torments of memory. It has some opaque moments, and once in a while it gives off a whiff of film-school pretension. But the young Spaniard looks like a force…
Virtually no one in this country foresaw the American disaster in Vietnam, but the late British writer Graham Greene glimpsed it with astonishing clarity a decade before the first U.S. “advisor” set foot on Vietnamese soil. Greene’s 1955 novel The Quiet American has now been made into a disturbing and…
In the 1970s, director Werner Herzog helped energize West Germany’s film renaissance with a brilliant variety of personal visions — a condemnation of the Spanish conquistadors and imperialism in general (Aguirre, the Wrath of God); a semi-obscene parody of everyday life enacted by dwarfs (Even Dwarfs Started Small); and a…
Conductor Marin Alsop and the Colorado Symphony Orchestra will gather some of contemporary music’s biggest guns this weekend for American Mavericks, a modern-music festival that will feature composers John Adams, John Corigliano and Christopher Rouse in the flesh. But some untraditional CSO listeners may show up on Friday night for…
Back in 1982, in Jackson, Mississippi, four girlfriends decided to spice up a St. Patrick’s Day parade by donning extravagant thrift-store costumes — complete with wild wigs, sequined ball gowns and inflated bosoms — and dancing along to “The Book of Love.” The act was a success, and the Sweet…
On the classic television series, the loyal Lassie rescued her owner Timmy from a multitude of sticky situations. In real life, studies have shown that animals – specifically dogs and horses – can be used to provide therapeutic help, as well. The Hoofs ‘n’ Paws Development Center, a new nonprofit…
According to novelist Ron Hansen, what the world needs now is a little screwball comedy. That’s just what he’s delivered, too: Hansen’s new sliver of a book, Isn’t It Romantic? An Entertainment, is intended as a sweet tribute to screwball auteur Preston Sturges, but it’s also pure Hansen. The tome…
Buildings and history go hand in hand, but these days they seem to fall hand in hand, as well: One man’s castle is another man’s future condo; if it ain’t modern, out it goes. Before you begin any painful pondering over what might happen to today’s equivalents of the Acropolis,…
Last October, Sue Vertue found herself in a Los Angeles soundstage watching the filming of a pilot for a would-be NBC sitcom. The storyline of this particular episode dealt, more or less, with the horrific (and, of course, capital-H hilarious!) fallout that comes when a man’s girlfriend finds his porn…
I think it was triggered back in the 1990s, as people looked ahead to the new millennium. When the 21st century dawned, everyone everywhere and in every field of human endeavor seemed to look to the past to chart the course of the future. This retrospective mood constituted a major…
Roach Photos has been in its distinctive old building on Broadway and Ninth Avenue, just south of downtown, since the mid-1970s, but its long and proud history goes back way before that. The business, which specializes in the production of photomurals, was launched in 1936 by the late commercial photographer…
The year is 1940. A young couple meets on a train traveling east from California. That is, the man sits down next to the clearly reluctant woman, talks to her, jiggles his leg, eats noisily. He tells her he’d intended to be a pilot but has been discharged from the…
For years, writers Jane and Michael Stern have been eating their way across the country, frequenting places with names like Mamie’s, Al’s and the Busy Bee. They’ve described food and given recipes, but most of all, they’ve documented the way small-town eateries take their place at the heart of their…
You can bet your portfolio — what’s left of it — that the makers of The Bank, an Australian techno thriller about a zillion-dollar stock-market scam, are counting on the vast ill will created by the Enron scandal, the WorldCom mess and the lesser offspring of corporate malfeasance to build…
First off, make no mistake: Biker Boyz is not, and has no intentions of being, The Fast and the Furious on two wheels, which will be considered a serious shame by the twelve- to eighteen-year-old demographic hoping to chug a little more Diesel fuel before the official sequel’s release this…
On the eve of a controversial war in Iraq, Stanley Kubrick’s superior black comedy, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Friday through Thursday at the Madstone Theaters at Tamarac Square) serves as both caution and comic relief. Since its release in 1964, this…
