It seems as if, for every ten issue-oriented documentaries that essentially function as long-form magazine articles with images attached, we get perhaps one doc that exemplifies the methods of “direct cinema” — the observational mode of documentary filmmaking that allows audiences to observe from a detached remove. That mode is…
Talk about a reefer of five feet long Not too fat and not too strong You get high, but not for long If you’re a viper. Or — as sung by Leonard E. Barrett, on a luxuriously long exhale in Ain’t Misbehavin’ — a vipah. This number, performed with languid,…
“The public really doesn’t listen when they’re being told straightforward facts,” says the Amazing Randi. The magician, escape artist and tiny lion of principled skepticism, now north of eighty, leans forward in a black chair, all knees and elbows and Old Testament beard. If it weren’t for that sharp’s suit…
To the idle viewer, the small acts of resistance on display in Timbuktu might seem ready-made for Upworthy, little liberal lessons just waiting to be parceled out to anyone who “won’t believe what happens next.” Yet that type of self-righteous sentimentality — and its opposing straw man, knee-jerk cynicism —…
There’s no empowerment message embedded in Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella, no “Girls can do anything!” cheerleader vibe. That’s why it’s wonderful. This is a straight, no-chaser fairy story, a picture to be downed with pleasure. It worries little about sending the wrong message and instead trusts us to decode its politics,…
Spring has sprung at Denver International Airport, where “Denver Lily,” by local artist Ted Davis, is blooming in the center of the Jeppesen Terminal — on the very spot where the misfiring “Mountain Mirage” once stood, and some Audi tent igloos were installed until five days ago. The flower, made…
My relationship to carpentry is complicated. My dad was a master carpenter. He built everything from custom, hand-carved gun stocks to a beautiful easel for my 24th birthday. I grew up with him building dune buggies, sewing fringed buckskin suits with antler buttons from deer he killed himself, and putting custom…
First Aspen Grove snagged the area’s first Alamo Drafthouse. Now it’s getting the Tattered Cover, which will be packing up its Highlands Ranch store and moving to the outdoor shopping center off Santa Fe Drive in Littleton next month. “While we are grateful to have served the Highlands Ranch community…
Book it! This week’s literary events include looks at both the best and worst of the natural world, as well as another book filled with beautiful photographs showing how micro-loans can change the lives of the poorest of the poor. The Wilderness Act at 50: A Celebration of Colorado Wilderness…
You can find art all over town — not just on gallery walls. In this series, we’ll be looking at some of the local artists who serve up their work in coffeehouses and other non-gallery businesses around town. Thane Benson studied illustration at Syracuse University before computers ruled the world…
Those who’ve only seen Denver comedian and Westword cover boy Ben Roy his brief television appearances are missing the singular experience of watching him perform live, when they can hear his jokes in their windy entirety. But between moonlighting as the frontman for local music-scene champions Spells and winging his way across…
We all lost an hour of sleep on Sunday, and it’s going to take a while to get used all the extra sunshine in our days. But you should be able to adjust quickly to all the free fun available this week, when you can welcome the Month of Photography,…
If you’ve ever dreamed of starring in a real-life heist film, Puzzah’s newest challenge is for you. The LoDo-based venue’s latest “puzzle room” — an hour-long interactive game that mashes up a live escape room with electromechanical puzzles — puts players in the shoes of a team of thieves tasked…
It’s an ironic truth that directors fascinated by robots tend to make inhuman movies. From Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner to last year’s Transcendence, these stories that ponder the gap between man and machine often reveal filmmakers unsure of where they fit in — they get so involved in the question…
Photographs are our journal of life, manipulated through a myriad of personal lenses and rendered by technology and technique. They capture moments and unfold fantastical vignettes, retell history, bring us to tears and leave us breathless with beauty. That’s why we have a Month of Photography — to celebrate artists…
Improv is a particularly entertaining segment of Denver’s booming comedy scene, one in which actors working without a script play off the audience to create characters, jokes and even songs. Last year a new improv troupe joined the funny fray: Queerbots, which has a particular and fresh slant behind its mayhem…
MasterMind, Fashion Denver founder and entrepreneur Brandi Shigley is now adding international philanthropist to her resume. Shigley and the four other members of Team Clean Water Philippines will leave Denver for the Philippines on March 22, with a goal of installing fifty clean water filters — and the team needs…
Jeff Popp and Casey Lorenzen founded their backpack brand Mile High Mountaineering — now known simply as MHM — in 2009, and have since grown it into a full line of innovative and award-winning backcountry packs for hiking, backpacking, skiing and snowboarding. Last year they launched a successful Kickstarter campaign…
Life is short. For instance, even if you live to be ninety years old, that’s only 4,680 weekends. And until you’re a teenager, most of them are wasted on cartoons, sugary cereal and picking boogers. So, now that you’re older, don’t forget to live it up any chance you get…
In Boulder, it seems that climbing culture has always been around – the need to wear stretchy pants, to make impossible ascents, to perform crazy feats of gravity-defying derring-do. There, climbing is a kind of hypercompetitive Zen performance art. It’s fitting then that a new, epic climbing-history documentary, Valley Uprising,…
The Phamaly Theatre Company has been going strong in Denver for more than two decades, producing shows like Fiddler on the Roof, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and this season’s The Fantasticks, which just wrapped up a run at the Arvada Center. Now the company has a chance to take its…
Editor’s note: Indie Design Blogger Jeanne Connolly loves to see how creative people put their houses together. In this series, she’ll be sharing some of her favorite homes, by taking us inside the unique private spaces of metro Denver and beyond. Betsy Wareing Steele creates dioramas that are to die…
