Shallow Pop

Mr. 3000 has low aspirations, which suits it well. It’s about a 47-year-old baseball player trying to get three meager hits and the team for which he plays trying to climb out of fifth place and into third by the season’s rapidly approaching end. Not much to root for, is…

Flick Pick

It’s a good bet that some of the locals are horrified, or terrified, but here you have it: the Pikes Peak Lavender Film Festival, whose stated mission is “bringing quality international lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender films to Colorado Springs.” That this weekend’s event is the fifth annual Lavender says…

Kids Picture Homelessness

Home/Life: 121 kids from 11 cities photograph their world is the harvest of a global photography project. In 2002, homeless children in cities around the world — including Nairobi, Moscow, Jakarta, New Delhi, Johannesburg, Paris and New York — were dispatched to their cities’ streets armed with digital cameras and…

This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks

Thursday, September 16 No doubt about it: These ladies make lovely music together. The members of the Colorado Springs-based da Vinci Quartet have the chops to play wherever they like, but they choose to serve as artists-in-residence both in the Springs and here in Denver at the Lamont School of…

Super Fly

Dancers have been trying to take flight since dance was created; they spring up, they sail through the air, they dive, they vault, they flip, they swing from trapezes. But alas, dancers have never actually flown, right? That’s what you think. Brooklyn-based choreographer Elizabeth Streb, a fifty-something spike-haired maverick with…

Guy Walks Into a Bar…

MON, 9/20 “Whether it’s good or bad, it’s always entertaining,” notes Lion’s Lair bartender Dermot Carroll about the bar’s Monday open-mike comedy nights. Dermot has been serving drinks at the Lair, at 2022 East Colfax Avenue, since the first open-mike event, and he’ll serve them again tonight for the Lion’s…

Cache In

MON, 9/20 The lure of geocaching is not merely that of finding a stack of moldy CDs. Rather, the challenge is to discover hidden stuff using a Global Positioning System, better known as “GPS.” “It’s a high-techie scavenger hunt,” says Evergreen’s Mike Dyer, who recently penned the how-to book Essential…

We Like Ike

SAT, 9/18 That Ike LaRue has such a vivid imagination. In Ike’s private world, a mild time out is a hundred-year jail sentence; the neighbor’s pet cats are really notorious, cop-evading canary burglars, and…did we mention that Ike’s a pooch? Dog or not, he’s a roguish character far too delicious…

The Taming of the Busker

FRI, 9/17 Strolling the Pearl Street Mall in the early 1980s, it wasn’t uncommon to come across groups of jugglers performing mind-boggling feats. Those were the golden years of busking, before outside influences intruded, when it was juggling for juggling’s sake, pure and true. But diamonds in the rough can…

Artbeat

Stoppage, now in the main space at Pirate: a contemporary art oasis (3659 Navajo Street, 303-458-6058) is the latest in a long-running series of installation exhibits by Pirate member Richard Colvin and his partner, Katherine Temple. The piece is unexpectedly spare, considering the pair’s typical everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach. Suspended from the…

Now Showing

digital.movement.04. Tracy Weil, owner of the weilworks gallery has a passion for computer-aided art. That’s why he organized digital.movement.04: Installations in video, sound & digital animation, the first in a planned series of annuals that will feature art that employs digital technologies in its creation. Weil began by putting out…

Black and White Divide

At the beginning of Three Ways Home, currently being produced by the Shadow Theatre Company, Sharon, a white career woman, has volunteered at a social-services agency. She’s assigned to visit Dawn, an African-American welfare recipient suspected of abusing her four children. Sharon’s opening monologues are wittily incisive as she introduces…

Making a List

Dalton Trumbo was a member of the Hollywood Ten, a group of writers whose careers were ruined during the McCarthy era because they stood up to the House Un-American Activities Committee. After his bluntly hilarious non-cooperative session with the committee — re-enacted in Trumbo: Red, White & Blacklisted — Trumbo…

Encore

Cabaret. Cabaret is grim and distressing, and there’s not a hint of redemption anywhere in it. Quite the contrary. But this is a bloody good production, the kind of production that could attract all kinds of people who might never think of setting foot in a conventional dinner theater. Anyone,…

America’s Spinning

In this hour of enmity and bitterness, we Americans appear to be totally fed up with each other. Post-9/11 and mid-Iraq, the national political debate has been reduced to a nasty civil war that ruins friendships, stops casual dinner chats cold and, if I don’t miss my guess, gladdens the…

Crooked as They Come

The most crucial piece of equipment in Hollywood is obviously not the movie camera. It’s not the casting couch. Not even the Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud or the personal trainer. It’s the Xerox machine — which was preceded by carbon paper. That’s why, over the years, we have had three Mrs…

Future Shock

The future is almost here. At least it is according to screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce (Pandaemonium) and director Michael Winterbottom (24 Hour Party People), two cinematic visionaries whose combined vision in Code 46 sparks tremendous intrigue — and unrest. At once a weirdly familiar sci-fi trip, a bleak romance, a…

Flick Pick

The first of the University of Colorado Film Studies program’s Goldfarb and Grillo Awards — students will win $12,000 this academic year — will be presented this week at the fall Student Awards Showcase. The prizes, in the words of the presenters, “are designed to encourage excellence in filmmaking and…

City Haul

“We come back to Denver in triumph,” says Maggie Renzi, the producer of Silver City, John Sayles’s new movie that premieres here on September 10. “We pulled off something pretty miraculous. We started to shoot a movie last September, and we’re coming back with it in September.” Not only that,…

This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks

Thursday, September 9 Remember the torch-lighting ceremonies of the Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, in 1998? Then you no doubt saw and heard the city’s thundering Matsukawa Kyougaku Taiko Drummers, a hometown ensemble dedicated to preserving an art that’s been around for hundreds of years. And although some say the…

Giving Back

I know that September 11 belongs to the entire country, that everyone in some way has a connection to the events: a brother, an aunt, a friend who was there, who saw it, who died in it. But I still somehow feel very personal about it — possessive, in fact…

Pharaoh Weather

FRI, 9/10 Kids love to journey back to that colorful age when mummies, animal gods and pyramids were part of a kingdom along the Nile — and for many, the appeal of those ancient times doesn’t fade away with adulthood. With today’s arrival of The Quest for Immortality: Treasures of…