This fall’s blockbuster at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, is an orgy of visual experiences, a spectacle comprising scores of works, many of them monumental and all of which could be described as either pretty or dirty or both — just as the show’s title warns…
Whiskery and restless, grooving and grotesque, the documentarian Les Blank’s long-suppressed film A Poem Is a Naked Person plays like your memories of some mad, stoned last-century summer. Commissioned by the boogie-woogie piano bluesman Leon Russell, who is more this roaming doc’s fitful center of gravity than its star, A…
Mia Wasikowska is proof of reincarnation. The Australian actress must be possessed by the spirit of Lillian Gish. At 22 — the same age that Gish starred in Birth of a Nation — Wasikowska became a bankable name, playing the lead in Tim Burton’s garish Alice in Wonderland. In the…
The people at CU-Boulder’s Fiske Planetarium are stoked, to put it mildly. On Monday, October 12, they learned that NASA had awarded them a cool $1,000,000 with which to make movies. “We are getting hammered with proposals already,” says Thor Metzinger, the planetarium’s video producer. The plan calls for the…
My best friend is a funeral director. We talk about death — a lot. Over the last decade of our friendship, I’ve watched as she expertly moves through social situations, carefully choosing to reveal (or not reveal) what, exactly, it is that she does for a living. For all of…
Stories about family life, the Internet and sex all take the stage this weekend in local productions, from Edge Theater’s Alan Ayckbourn comedy Woman in Mind, to a titillating installment from Denver’s dramatic reading staple, Stories on Stage. Here’s how to get all hot and bothered — or enjoy a fresh new…
Five years ago, the Denver Film Society moved into a new theater space at the Lowenstein Arts & Culture Complex on East Colfax. After settling in to the space’s nooks and crannies, the Sie FilmCenter is finally ready for its closeup, and hosting a fundraiser to celebrate its status as…
Paddy Johnson has been on the cutting edge of online criticism since she launched Art F City in 2008. Tonight, pop-up exhibition space Black Cube hosts this art critic for the Internet era at Redline, where she will discuss the history and evolution of GIF art — the animated-image format that was born…
Surely the biggest news for contemporary art in the twenty-first century is the ascendancy of Chinese contemporary art and its important place in the international mix. Amazingly, exhibition-goers in Denver have had a front-row seat for this rapid transformation in the art world’s hierarchy, and that’s partly due to the…
People have a lot of questions. Every other week or so, someone knocks on my door or slips a note through the window of the tiny house asking me to call because they have “so many questions.” I try to be friendly to the knockers, though often they are interrupting…
As I was trying to understand the cause for my scratchy irritability when I left Spirits to Enforce — particularly surprising since I’d liked playwright Mickle Maher’s There Is a Happiness That Morning Is, which Catamounts staged last year — I thought of Aldous Huxley’s essay “The Rest Is Silence,”…
#8: Laura Phelps Rogers Laura Phelps Rogers tells her stories in complex sculptural installations combining cast metals with found objects, mixed media, photography and performance. A member of the Pirate and Ice Cube co-ops, Rogers has also placed public artworks, such as her 2013 Nipple Quilt installation, in spots as…
Now playing at the Sie FilmCenter and Alamo Drafthouse is the meta-horror-comedy The Final Girls, a film that celebrates one of the greatest and most under-appreciated character types in modern cinema: the horror movie’s sole survivor. A cross between the meta-horror stylings of Scream and Cabin in the Woods and the…
It seemed like it was all coming together for Corin Chavez, an actor, comedian, writer, producer, teacher and master improviser who passed away on Friday, October 9, at the age of 23. Over the past few months, his closest friends had noticed that Chavez was really settling into himself —…
Aaron Sorkin opens up a new desktop icon with Steve Jobs, a briskly busy, talkative companion piece to The Social Network. Adapting Walter Isaacson’s biography of the Apple innovator — and covering much of the same ground as Alex Gibney’s documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine — Sorkin’s…
Steven Spielberg’s true-story Cold War procedural Bridge of Spies has a wintry chill. The colors are gray and green, the skin tones pale as frozen fish, and the film stock fuzzed and snowy. Our protagonist, James Donovan (Tom Hanks), spends half the movie waylaid by a cold and takes his…
Denver filmgoers, grab your boards for some cool waters headed our way as the 38th Denver Film Festival, produced by the Denver Film Society, has announced the first wave of programming for the event, this November 4 – 15. The festival has never announced this much programming ahead of its…
The Crypt, Denver’s beloved adult store and sex shop, has closed its doors. On September 30, both of the locations on Broadway were shuttered; they’d been seized by the City of Denver because of “unpaid taxes.” Along with a notice from the city regarding the tax seizure, the door of…
Forty years ago, the big crime news in this wide-lapel cowtown had nothing to do with six-year-old pageant queens, high-school shooters or feuding gangbangers. The obsession of the moment was the 1975 murder of businessman Hal Levine, and the prosecution of Michael Borelli, a supposedly mobbed-up former New York police…
If books inspire us to flex our intellectual muscles, looking back on who we are and how we got that way, this is the week to dive into self-exploration. The calendar includes appearances by authors of every stripe, from cartoonists and poets to contemporary novelists. Here are just three of…
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. The Mobile Museum of American Artifacts is Laurelin Kruse’s touring museum of…
This may be National Moment of Frustration Day, but there are many moments of free fun ahead this week. Take in a horror movie, let out plenty of laughs, and then find out how conservation can be entertaining at a major festival. Check the online Westword calendar for more activities, and drop us…
