The 27th Starz Denver International Film Festival will get a soulful kickoff at 7 p.m. Thursday, October 14, with an opening-night showing of Ray, Taylor Hackford’s startlingly candid biopic about music legend Ray Charles. Starring a perfectly cast Jamie Foxx as the blind, Georgia-born singer who became a star worldwide,…
FRI, 10/15 “I once danced on that table right over there,” said the executive vice president, pointing with a well-manicured finger at a metal table near the far wall of the Wazee Supper Club. “I once spent the night under that table,” her companion replied. No surprise. Over the years,…
THURS, 10/14 Photographer Subhanker Banerjee’s two-year, 4,000-mile odyssey across Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge began in 2001 and yielded 200 photographs. The Indian-born naturalist undertook the journey on foot as well as by kayak, raft and snowmobile in his quest to capture vivid scenes of creatures living in the refuge…
TUES, 10/19 Lollapalooza died a quick and quiet death this summer, a victim of sluggish ticket sales and growing apathy toward the whole idea of large-scale rockfests. But ironically, there’s still a thriving market for weird Lollapalooza mutations, like Pepsi-palooza and Hallelujah-palooza, not to mention a personal favorite, Pancake-palooza. Well,…
THURS, 10/14 When John Patrick Shanley’s play Dirty Story debuted in New York in 2003, the playwright chose to forgo the standard playbill biography. Rather than mention Shanley’s Oscar for the Moonstruck screenplay or numerous other accolades, the profile read, “John resides on Earth, in America, a country where the…
Among the first chapters in the history of Western art is the one devoted to Egypt, with much of the subsequent story tracing its origins to the objects and buildings produced in the Nile Valley more than 3,000 years ago. This was long before — millennia before, as it happens…
Photographs by David Alexander Björkman make up the interesting exhibit The Maya Ballgame, now on display at the Museo de las Américas (861 Santa Fe Drive, 303-571-4401) for the “Month of Photography.” The Björkman shots, printed in black and white, are divided into two groups: those in the north gallery…
Ansel Adams Edwin Land and Persistence of Myth and Tragedy. At the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, two legendary figures from the history of photography have been brought together in Ansel Adams Edwin Land: Art, Science, and Invention: Photographs From the Polaroid Collection. In the ’60s, Adams was invited by…
When Sue Leiser trudges across the stage and thumps onto a chair, she’s there. Really there. Solid. Present. Her face in a little moue of anger and disgust as she contemplates the malfunctioning of her bowels. The minute you see her enter in The Tale of the Allergist¹s Wife at…
Going to the Country Dinner Playhouse always feels like stepping back in time and into another America, the kind of place my in-laws would have recognized. They grew up on Colorado farmland, fell in love while they were in high school, even attended the kind of picnic dramatized in Oklahoma!,…
84, Charing Cross Road. A fascination with the life of old books provides a lot of the charm of this play, which is based on the correspondence between New York writer Helene Hanff and Frank Doel, a London bookseller. An anglophile and lover of literature, Hanff longed to see England…
Rare is the film that caters to fans of rabbits, motorcycles, Gordon Lightfoot and fellatio, but now, thanks entirely to Vincent Gallo, we’ve got that demographic nailed. With The Brown Bunny, the cinematic enfant terrible who gave us the awful pleasures of Buffalo ’66 returns, but don’t expect a retread…
There are at least three movies contained within the covers of H.G. Bissinger’s best-selling 1990 non-fiction book Friday Night Lights. One is concerned with the socioeconomic life of a small West Texas town built on the wobbly foundations of oil and racism and the out-of-whack worship of a high school…
Forget the presidential debates and the carnage in Fallujah. If you want to see real bloodletting, fall by the Esquire Saturday night to catch The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. This is the gruesome cult favorite in which five young innocents who have wandered into the wrong part of rural Texas…
The gloves are off, and the Capitol Steps are ready for an evening of equal-opportunity offending. The musical political-satire troupe will right-hook George W., left-jab John Kerry and sucker-punch everybody in between when it takes the stage at the University of Denver this Friday. But first, a note from our…
Thursday, October 7 Though she was French through and through, many agree that Nadia Boulanger almost single-handedly formed the cornerstone of contemporary American music. When she died 25 years ago, the composer, groundbreaking conductor and antiseptically precise teacher whom Virgil Thomson once called “a one-woman graduate school” left behind a…
Out here in the high country, the harmonica has always been regarded as a solitary instrument. Its pocketable size is perfect for jail-cell solos, prairie ballads or just the lonesome walking blues. But porch-sitters who think the harp is only for lonely outsiders or portly Blues Travelin’ frontmen have obviously…
FRI, 10/8 From Harry Potter to Sabrina, the practice of witchcraft has been ripped off, exploited and corrupted over the past few years. Hmm…kind of like the United States presidency. The Mercury Motley Players will help set straight both injustices tonight during its presentation of The Allied Witches’ Presidential Election…
SAT, 10/9 Anyone itching to launch a pumpkin 4,000 feet might still qualify for the Punkin Chunkin world championship in Delaware next month. But locally, the entry deadline for today’s sixth annual Jack-O-Launch in Aurora has passed, so most fans of pumpkin-projecting must merely watch. Still, the sight of pounds…
FRI, 10/8 I remember spending glorious afternoons at my grandmother’s house as a child, thumbing through yellowing issues of LIFE magazine. The stunning photographs spoke to me, took me to places that a poor, small-town girl could only dream about. LIFE was truly a window on the world. In 2002,…
SAT, 10/9 Centuries ago, minstrels roamed the countryside with lutes and mandolins, trilling ballads of romance, chivalry and the glories of ages past. Today the music of the masses has a little less hindsight. Consider: Legendary British songwriter Richard Thompson was one of dozens of rock dignitaries asked by Playboy…
You’d have to have been living under a rock for the past few weeks not to know that something’s up in Denver’s exhibition world. Everywhere you look, some gallery, museum or art center is hosting a show devoted to photography — photojournalism, fashion, pin-up, fine art, experimental, and lots of…
