In 1965, a southern Colorado community known as Drop City was born when a collective of artists from Boulder and Lawrence, Kansas, settled on a seven-acre plot just outside of Trinidad. With a desire to establish a non-ideological creative community whose physical structures — modeled on Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic-dome style…
MTV’s hit show Made held a private audition on the Auraria campus Monday. There were around seventy brave souls in the waiting area on the third floor of the Tivoli, outside one of the ballrooms, patiently waiting their turn to spill their hearts out in hopes of being made. We…
When River Phoenix died, in October 1993, he was three weeks from completing his performance in Dark Blood, an $8 million indie film that had already seen five weeks of shooting on location in southern Utah. In this lurid modern film noir, Phoenix was cast as “Boy,” a mysterious part-Hopi…
20th Century Modernists. For her first show, Thérèse O’Gorman — who moved from Santa Fe to become the exhibition director at David Cook Fine Art in LoDo — has put together 20th Century Modernists, which highlights abstraction done in the West. The show proper, in the street-level space, is dedicated…
Why is there evil in the world?” That question and its corollaries — Where does evil come from? Why can so many create and commit it with apparent immunity? — are at the core of the film Bless Me, Ultima, whose seven-year-old hero, Antonio, wrestles with riddles that have likely…
Depending on your perspective, Zooey Deschanel is either the cutest, funniest, most adorable little retro-kookster on earth, or she’s an irritating try-hard with zero comedy chops. The only thing the world seems able to universally agree on is that Deschanel has nice bangs. As such, her sitcom — New Girl,…
When you think of the Civil Rights Movement, you likely think of Martin Luther King Jr. — for good reason. The role he played was monumental — and because of that, monuments have been erected, pages in textbooks set aside and a national holiday named in his honor. So much…
With its bizarre onslaught of sentient drugs, invisible aliens and time-tripping insanity, Don Coscarelli’s John Dies at the End (opening tonight at the Sie FilmCenter) is like no film you’ve seen before. Adapted from David Wong’s debut novel of the same name, John puts the fate of reality — not…
The Boulder International Film Festival opens tonight with Muscle Shoals and continues through the weekend with three more days of independent cinema, symposiums and events featuring special guests from all over the world. It can be tricky to pick films from the festival’s extensive schedule, so we asked co-founders Kathy…
Love is weird. Most anyone over the age of, say, sixteen or so has at least one story of an ill-fated romance based on the old adage of “opposites attract.” Worse, it’s usually more “whatever will cause us the most confusion, chaos and, most likely, pain attracts.” That’s not to…
20th Century Modernists. For her first show, Thérèse O’Gorman — who moved from Santa Fe to become the exhibition director at David Cook Fine Art in LoDo — has put together 20th Century Modernists, which highlights abstraction done in the West. The show proper, in the street-level space, is dedicated…
Here’s a question you can spit back next time someone complains that our popular culture is top-to-bottom depraved: “Then why are our high-school witches, vampires and superheroes so passionate about their abstinence?” That glitter-pored Twilight hunk and Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man have won tween hearts and Hollywood billions by cavalierly refusing…
Life goes inexorably, chillingly, on. The Up series, Michael Apted’s famous calendrical march, presses on now into its eighth episode, with the same dozen or so Brits from across the class spectrum once again interviewed about their lives after the usual seven-year interval. Suddenly, all of these pitiable souls, subjected…
Does anyone care about John McClane anymore? That’s not the same as asking if you want to see A Good Day to Die Hard, the fifth in this series of films with increasingly outlandish action — and increasingly cumbersome titles. The most recent entry — the slick, ridiculous hit, Live…
Abbas Kiarostami is preoccupied with my tape recorder. He wonders if it’s too far away from where he’s sitting. He makes his translator switch from one side of him to another so that the recorder is between them. After a while, clearly still anxious about it, he picks it up…
Three local film festivals — the Boulder International Film Festival, the Festivus Film Festival and Women + Film — will light up Denver-area screens over the latter half of February and the early part of March, providing plenty of viewing opportunities for movie buffs. The mission of the Boulder International…
Internet assholes are always yelling about what Lena Dunham doesn’t wear on Girls, but let’s talk about something she does. Bros who think everything should be marketed to them never get tired of pointing out that Dunham’s Hannah Horvath seems to be topless more often than not, a point of…
If Sundance signals the annual launch of American indie cinema’s new product line, the 63-year-old Berlin Film Festival (February 7-17) offers the year’s first major look at what the rest of the world has to offer. In addition to the nineteen-film official competition — this year presided over by jury…
Stepping into its third year, the Women + Film Voices Festival is gearing up for another phenomenal run this March. As a precursor to the week of films written by, directed by, produced by and starring women, the Sie FilmCenter will host a special one-night only screening of The Invisible…
20th Century Modernists. For her first show, Thérèse O’Gorman — who moved from Santa Fe to become the exhibition director at David Cook Fine Art in LoDo — has put together 20th Century Modernists, which highlights abstraction done in the West. The show proper, in the street-level space, is dedicated…
If Side Effects, an immensely pleasurable thriller centering around psychotropic drugs, really is Steven Soderbergh’s final big-screen film, as the director claims it will be, then he has peaked in the Valley of the Dolls. Scripted by Scott Z. Burns, who also wrote the screenplay for Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011), Side…
Just a week or so after the Pentagon reversed its ban on allowing female soldiers into combat, here’s another breakthrough, of a sort: The funniest scenes in the confused and shaggy comedy Identity Thief are of Melissa McCarthy and Jason Bateman beating the hell out of each other. McCarthy —…
