I guess basements and comedy go together like beer and nuts or toddlers and sandboxes. The cellar of the Wynkoop Brewing Co., where Impulse Theater performs, is crowded, loud and energetic. Impulse does no prepared skits, nothing but pure improv — which means that what you see changes every night,…
Some people think of critics as the artistic equivalent of meat inspectors; they see our job as going from place to place stamping performances as prime, choice, select or — heaven forbid — cutter. We’re the arbiters of taste who will tell them what to miss and what’s worth attending…
Alarms & Excursions. Alarms & Excursions is minor Michael Frayn, but it can’t help bearing the master’s stamp. A group of eight playlets examines the role of technology in our lives and its impact on human communication. In the first, a friendly dinner is interrupted by a series of sounds:…
Movie-goers familiar with the tides of recent Brazilian history will probably get more from Hector Babenco’s new prison movie, Carandiru, than the rest of us, because the filmmaker tells us so little about the society beyond the walls that helped shape the violent yet carefully ordered world within them. On…
As much of the civilized world now knows, the latest Harry Potter director is Alfonso Cuarón, best known for the explicit teen-sexual-awakening movie Y Tu Mam´ También. So it may come as little surprise that his Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban begins with the teenage wizard-in-training hiding under…
Ah, the peculiar genius that is Guy Maddin. Who else but the morose Canadian director, born and raised in one of the coldest cities in the world, would marry silent film, 1930s movie musicals, Prohibition, family melodrama, monster-movie gore and a critique of capitalist zeal in a surreal montage about…
Now in its seventh incarnation, the Aurora Asian Film Festival is a showcase for the burgeoning cinematic talents of China, Japan, Thailand, Cambodia, Taiwan and Bhutan. This year’s four-day festival will feature more than a dozen new films from Asia and the Pacific Rim, beginning Thursday, June 3, with a…
“A miserable yellow melancholy stream” was how Mark Twain described the South Platte River. Fortunately, the Greenway Foundation — established thirty years ago to transform the Platte from a dumping ground into an urban amenity — chose the riverway less traveled by when it first floated a boat past Confluence…
Thursday, June 3 It’s just the start of a whole spool of fiber-art exhibits about to unwind along the Front Range this month in conjunction with the upcoming Handweavers Guild of America conference in Denver, but it’s an auspicious beginning. The Metro State Center for the Visual Arts, 1734 Wazee…
We love our cars — that’s a fact. They’re our homes away from home, the canned personification of whatever freedoms we have left to enjoy in these uptight times. But automobiles also reflect popular culture in a seasonal blueprint of design, color schemes and technology that rewrites itself annually. Cars…
FRI, 6/4 The relationship between people and their gardens is an ancient one, primeval as a redwood, humanity’s link to its own natural beginnings. And not only do we love gardens for their beauty, but also for the creativity they inspire. That’s how it is for Boulder artist Cha Cha…
THURS, 6/3 Beginning today, weekend warriors can jump on the adventure-race bandwagon at the Teva Mountain Games in Vail, the largest extreme-sports festival in the country. “This is the crown jewel of the outdoor industry,” says Joel Heath, president of Untraditional Marketing, organizers of the event. “There is just so…
FRI, 6/4 Local event engineer Ben Popken might possibly be mad. “For many months, I have been obsessed with the idea of a cardboard party. In my mind, I see a topographical landscape built from cardboard, with cardboard furniture, a cardboard stage and cardboard props. Inhabiting this land, of course,…
SAT, 6/5 Three years ago, a group of teens approached Douglas County Libraries community-relations specialist Aspen Butterfield with an interesting proposal. “They saw that the library had children’s performers coming through, and they wanted to know if they could play music there, too,” Butterfield explains. But before flocks of nebbish…
The story had been circulating for months: Fresh Art Gallery was closing for good, and the newish +Zeile/Judish would be moving into the sharp-looking spot at Ninth Avenue and Santa Fe Drive. And it was lots more than a rumor. Not only had the tale been spread around by Jeanie…
Walker Fine Art (300 West 11th Avenue, 303-355-8955) is currently presenting a three-artist group show with the meaningless and universally applicable title Contemplation. The exhibit brings together the work of Boulder sculptor Anne Shutan and Denver painters Eric Michael Corrigan and Angela Larson — or does it? All three artists…
Abstractions on Paper. The current show at the Emil Nelson Gallery, is a fascinating group endeavor put together by director Hugo Anderson. The exhibit combines historic and contemporary works in the forms of watercolors, prints, drawings and photos by more than two dozen artists. The mood is classic modernist with…
The program notes for Nat King Cole & Me include an interview with author and performer Gregory Porter. He describes his mother, who, he says, was dedicated to helping others. One Thanksgiving, she made a sumptuous meal of ham, turkey and sweet-potato pie, and took it to the mission for…
My reaction to a Harold Pinter play often follows a predictable pattern. For the first few minutes, the dialogue strikes me as ordinary, the contradictions and obscurities willful and self-conscious. I find myself questioning whether the playwright is really as brilliant as decades of reviews say he is. Yet by…
Alarms & Excursions. Alarms & Excursions is minor Michael Frayn, a series of comic finger pieces, but it can’t help bearing the master’s stamp. A group of eight playlets examines the role of technology in our lives and its impact on human communication. In the first, a friendly dinner is…
The first time through, you might dismiss Coffee and Cigarettes as a filmmaker’s recess — playtime before the serious business of making a real feature. Jim Jarmusch never intended this new movie — a collection of eleven shorts made over the last two decades — to be a movie at…
Sitting through Raising Helen is an exercise in frustration, because somewhere inside this big heap of Hollywood nothing is a something (someone, actually) worth saving and savoring. Her name is Joan Cusack, always a supporting player but never a star, no matter her grace and warmth and charm even in…
