Judging by this weekend’s Facebook frenzy over the Denver Film Society’s “Bargain Bin” film selection of picks for the 2011 season of Film on the Rocks, there is just no fucking with moviegoers. On Saturday night, Karla Rodriquez, Director of Social Media for the organization and its summer program, dropped…
After watching Drew Barrymore’s Whip It with her daughters two years ago, Robin Bond — the Denver-based filmmaker behind the new documentary Derby Baby — set out to chase down some roller derby dreams of her own. She didn’t get very far. “I’m fairly athletic, and had started skating a…
OMG like how hot are vampires right now? So hot, is how hot they are right now, but as everyone knows, Dracula is pretty much played out and the whole vampires-as-sexy-brooding-potential-lovers thing is already taken — what we need is a new angle on vampires. So let’s see… how about…
We miss Saturday mornings sometimes, when we would run downstairs filled with sugary cereal and spend the day watching cartoons and “educational programming.” Even though these days we’re well aware of the alphabet (some of us, at least — mostly those that don’t comment articles on the internet) and the…
Yogi Berra: the man, the baseball legend and the quote machine. Over the course of his life, Berra — born Lawrence Peter Berra on this very day in 1925 — has come up with countless expressions and sayings, golden nuggets in the English vernacular that are still quoted today in…
15 Colorado Artists. The Kirkland Museum is presenting a historical show that tracks the beginnings of post-war modernism in Denver using the artist group 15 Colorado Artists as an index. The story goes that the Denver Artists Guild was hostile to modernism at the time. This led to a split,…
“The circus is tough and beautiful,” says a talking head in Circo, Aaron Schock’s documentary on the small, struggling, family-owned Circo Mexico. It’s an apt description of the film itself, a riveting patchwork of interconnected dramas that include difficult in-laws, arguments about money and familial exploitation, and the wrenching tensions…
Bridesmaids is a high-profile test case. Directed by Paul Feig (a sitcom journeyman most lovingly known as the creator of Freaks and Geeks), it’s the first female-fronted comedy produced by Hollywood kingpin Judd Apatow, who has weathered criticism in the past for his brand’s dude-centric point of view. It’s also…
Tenacious indie Kelly Reichardt has specialized in quirky, minimalist quasi-road movies in which loners come unmoored in some great American space. Meek’s Cutoff, shown at the last New York Film Festival, is that and more — one great leap into the nineteenth-century unknown. The members of a small wagon train…
When it came out in 1974, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was one of the most violent movies ever made — so violent it was actually banned in several countries — but that’s not what makes it so great. In fact, by today’s CG-enhanced standards, it pretty tame. A long shot…
Now in its roughly one-millionth year, Who Wants to be a Millionaire is still going strong, although it’s a little different now than it was before you probably stopped paying attention. For one thing, original host Regis Philbin is long gone, replaced by Meredith Vieira, who, disconcertingly, kind of resembles…
The finest Western you’ll see this year is set in aristocratic sixteenth-century France, in the heat of counter-Reformation. In The Princess of Montpensier, Mélanie Thierry’s father barters her for the titular title, marrying her off to Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet’s shy, pained prince — instead of her heart’s first choice, Gaspard Ulliel’s…
Galileo’s Garden. Husband-and-wife artists Tyler and Monica Aiello are the subjects of conjoined solos at Space Gallery. The exhibit, Galileo’s Garden, includes over three dozen pieces. Though working in entirely different mediums — Tyler in metal sculpture, Monica in mixed-media painting — they long ago forged a formal relationship by…
Something Borrowed is based on a 2005 work of chick literature by Emily Giffin. It was directed with extraordinary impersonality by Luke Greenfield (Rob Schneider’s The Animal) and produced by Hilary Swank, in collaboration, apparently, with the restaurant Shake Shack — one of the lifestyle brands prominently featured in this…
Just in case you doubted that Westword was the foremost authority on dumb shit that happens in the media, know this: We’re such an authority even other media outlets seek our expertise. And when I say “our expertise,” I mean “my expertise.” Yesterday, in advance of the Violent Torpedo of…
Ben Affleck has acted in some truly horrible movies. After citing the Oscar he won with his best friend, Affleck’s resume reads like a list of the worst movies from the late ’90s that we all thought were sorta okay at the time (just like Sugar Ray). In 2003, he…
Blink! A young curatorial assistant at the Denver Art Museum, Jill Desmond, has stepped up to the big time by putting together an over-the-top exhibit of electronic and mechanical art titled Blink! Light, Sound and the Moving Image. Beginning on the first level of the Hamilton and taking over the…
Written and directed by Quentin Dupieux, Rubber follows the exploits of a tire (listed in the credits as “Robert”) that figures out how to control its own motion and then rolls through the desert on a killing spree, blowing shit up with its mind. Rubber’s methods of address make it…
“This one perfect moment.” “That soul-crushing mistress.” “Our forever night.” These and other understated definitions are obsessively applied to a certain dreaded/anticipated ritual throughout Prom, a timely pop product set in a suburban high school during the last weeks before summer break and destined for the immortality of Vitamin C’s…
While we’re pretty much terrified of shrubbery now after Thorin Klosowski’s earlier post on murderous fictional plants, it’s important to remember that even if in movies plants bring certain death, in the real world, they bring life. And tonight on Rocky Mountain PBS, the locally produced documentary Green Up Colorado…
Blink! A young curatorial assistant at the Denver Art Museum, Jill Desmond, has stepped up to the big time by putting together an over-the-top exhibit of electronic and mechanical art titled Blink!: Light, Sound and the Moving Image. Beginning on the first level of the Hamilton and taking over the…
Sharing the narrative opacity and marginal milieu of Hamilton, its 2006 predecessor, Putty Hill, the assured feature-length followup from Matt Porterfield, surveys the effects of a young man’s overdose death on his extended working-class family. And like the militantly decentralized storytelling that Porterfield favors, their grief surfaces in flashes but…
