The Chicago-based filmmaker Steve James rose to prominence in 1994 with Hoop Dreams, a gritty, uncomfortably intimate portrait of two inner-city kids who try to escape poverty and deprivation through basketball. Shot over four years, it was at once a stirring indictment of the social-services bureaucracy, a tribute to family…
The Boulder Public Library has been running a Stanley Kubrick retrospective since early May as part of its popular free summer movie series, and it’s difficult to imagine a more welcome return to the big screen than Kubrick’s gorgeous vision of eighteenth-century Europe, Barry Lyndon (1975). Adapted from William Makepeace…
“I am a woman, and I am beautiful, and I am black,” says Panther, a spoken-word artist. “We are all sisters, and we are all beautiful, and everyone else needs to know that now.” Panther joins forces with poets Bianca Mikahn and Lady Speech in Black Woman Love, a hip-hop…
Thursday, July 3 Who’s warming up Red Rocks for the Dead? John Popper and the rest of Blues Traveler, of course, continuing what’s become their annual tradition of spending the Fourth under the stars at Colorado’s most awesome natural amphitheater. Gates open today and tomorrow at 4 p.m. for shows…
It’s appropriate, says Judy Anderson, that the PlatteForum arts and education project stands at the base of the Millennium Bridge. According to the artist and executive director, the nine-month-old initiative is all about connections. “It’s a working collaboration with the community,” Anderson explains. “Arts. Education. Youth. Everything we do is…
Here’s the thing about Sunday brunch at Pierre’s Supper Club: From the outside, the place, at 2157 Downing Street, looks closed. Sure, this fifty-year-old Denver institution can still pack ’em in on Friday and Saturday nights, but on Sunday afternoons — when you would think a supper club should be…
FRI, 7/4 Ron Cavill, an investment advisor from Genesee, wants to make some noise on the Fourth of July. So he’ll hop on his purple 1500cc Kawasaki Vulcan Nomad and join hundreds of friends and fellow motorheads as they roll into the second annual Liberty Ride n’ Rod. Participants, who…
TUES, 7/8 Where’s the last place your mother wanted to catch you hanging out on a summer evening? No contest: It was the pool hall, where boys became men (and girls became sharks) while racking them up in the back-room murk. The game of billiards comes with twenty tons of…
FRI, 7/4 Tai Beldock of Denver’s Erico Motorsports wants the U.S. to give equal time to European motorcycles. The Cherry Creek Arts Festival, she says, eschews the Harley’s stylish overseas cousins with its all-Harley “Art on Two Wheels” display. So her faction decided to put on its own show, Moto…
SUN, 7/6 Do you remember your first Grateful Dead concert? The one you went to before Jerry got really tired and grizzled? Maybe you’re having a hard time remembering after the concoction of mind erasers you took that day, but it wouldn’t have been a real Dead concert otherwise, right?…
On the morning of Thursday, June 12, Mayor Wellington Webb and First Lady Wilma Webb, among a host of political and art world luminaries, dedicated the most expensive sculpture ever erected in Denver, “The Dancers,” by international art star Jonathan Borofsky. The public was invited to the event, and I…
The commercial strip that lines Tennyson Street in northwest Denver has changed a lot over the last few years. Whereas once it was a collection of thrift shops and laundromats, it is now home to loft buildings, coffee shops and specialty stores. In the last category are Metro Frame Works…
I really wanted to be a lot more amused by The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (abridged) than I was. Some of the bits were clever, and the three appealing actors — Keith Hershman, C.J. Hosier and Eric Mather — worked so damn hard. Sadly, the audience was tiny on…
Arthur Kopit’s Road to Nirvana is essentially a one-joke play. Fortunately, the joke is so savage, and it’s taken to such outrageous and unthinkable lengths, that the result is a startling and original evening of theater. It doesn’t hurt that the dialogue is always inventive and sometimes downright lunatic, or…
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and it’s all PETA’s fault. Oh, we humored those wacky vegan extremists when they threw paint at rich bitches in hideously overpriced fur coats. We laughed when they’d come on conservative talk-radio shows every Thanksgiving to get mocked for comparing…
Once in a while, a film comes along that is as sound, smart, sweet and significant as can be, and Whale Rider is such a film. Fault the project on various counts if you like (I’ll try), but ultimately the tale is beyond reproach, a bane to cynics and a…
As the Columbia Pictures logo looms large on the screen until its torch becomes the focal point, we find ourselves in what appears to be a tent full of sweaty medieval warriors forging axes. We have to wonder: Did they already make another Scorpion King movie and not tell us?…
Norma Desmond would love it. This summer, the Chautauqua Silent Film Series will once more bring to Boulder a broad array of classics from Hollywood’s silent era, along with a touch of vintage Fritz Lang, complete with live musical accompaniment. If some rude blabbermouth in the row behind you disturbs…
“I’ve never thought of my own show as raunchy,” hard-edged comic Sandra Bernhard says by phone from her office in L.A. “I’ve always thought of it as pretty reflective of our times. There’s always sexuality and stuff that I think is relevant. And I still have deep concerns about our…
Thursday, June 26 There’s nothing in the world quite like shmoozing and boozing lakeside at sunset. It’s a stolen pleasure offered annually at Sunset in the Park, a unique outdoor fundraiser for the ALS Association. The benefit, which features a cocktail buffet and auction, is especially poignant in 2003, which…
In 1998, a group of Colorado College students got together to put on a play called Quixote, a retelling of Cervantes’s famous tale, with chalkboard and erasers. They later toured it to fringe festivals in Philadelphia and in Canada. After graduating, they created a piece based on James Thurber’s short…
SAT, 6/28 Pink and white cherry blossoms no longer line the banks of Cherry Creek, but that doesn’t stop Denver’s Japanese-American community from celebrating its culture each June at the annual Sakura Matsuri, otherwise known as the Cherry Blossom Festival. Now in its 31st year, Denver’s Cherry Blossom Festival takes…
