Artbeat

There’s an elegant solo exhibit at Edge Gallery that’s definitely worth seeing. Installed in the middle space at the co-op, Intersections features the latest work on paper by well-respected Denver artist Susan Goldstein. The meaning of the show’s title is hard to pinpoint. As Goldstein herself suggests in the statement…

Birth of a Notion

The set is an arrangement of black platforms and boxes. It stretches a long, long way back so that — despite the overall intimacy of the theater — an actor standing in the rear looks very small and far away. Periodically, grotesque forms limp, shamble or crawl around this space…

Bobby Love

Like Clint Eastwood, Robert De Niro is one of those guys who can make just about any material inherently enjoyable. Also like Clint, he will sometimes make you wish he’d pick roles that are a little more challenging. His recent record of relatively disposable films speaks for itself: Tough-yet-sensitive cop…

Vote Here

Iranian films that make it to American shores generally fall into two categories: sensitive dramas featuring young children, à la The White Balloon and Children of Heaven, or pointed political statements about the plight of women, such as The Circle and The Day I Became a Woman. Secret Ballot is…

True Lies

How many times was Peter Sagal told he has the perfect radio voice before he became host of National Public Radio’s weekend news quiz game Wait Wait…Don¹t Tell Me!? Exactly none, he says, mellifluously. In fact, smooth-talker Sagal’s elegant vocal cords had never set foot, so to speak, in a…

Days of the Dead

Most rock bands come and go. Others stick around for a decade or more, and a few, such as the Stones and the Who, seem to have been touring since the invention of fire. But no band has transcended the bounds of space and time in quite the same way…

Showdown at Skyline

For the past few years, one of Denver’s most urbane public spaces — Skyline Park, by world-renowned landscape architect Lawrence Halprin — has been continually endangered by various remodeling plans, some of which include the threat of demolition. Let’s put it this way: To even discuss the destruction of Skyline…

Artbeat

For almost twenty years, the Curtis Arts & Humanities Center (2349 East Orchard Road, Greenwood Village, 303-797-1779) has sponsored an annual exhibition open to all artists in Colorado. The process goes like this: Artists deliver original works (not slides), and a celebrity juror goes through the hundreds of entries and…

Blurry Picture

In Oscar Wilde’s famed novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the protagonist remains youthful and beautiful through all the decades of his evil life. Only his portrait, hidden in the attic, reveals the ravages of sin and time. Dorian Gray, the OpenStage musical production now showing in Fort Collins, worked…

Ultra-Violence

Any young movie director seeking to make a mark in the underworld gravitates to certain conventions of the crime genre. Major bloodletting is a must. It doesn’t hurt to stage a power struggle between an established mob boss and his overly ambitious protégé, preferably with undertones of Greek tragedy. There…

Photo Opportunity

When Robin Williams was America’s favorite funnyman in films like Mrs. Doubtfire, it always felt a little strange admitting that the guy seemed kinda creepy. When he “got serious” in irritating tearjerkers such as Hook and What Dreams May Come, it was certainly in vogue to proclaim him annoying, but…

Last Laugh

Bathed in the glow of a tiki torch, trapped on a deserted island — or stage — with nothing more than their funny bones, a group of Denver comics will try to outlast each other in the first Improv Survivor. As in other improvisational shows, these ten players will solicit…

A Shot of Tequila

Sick of too-hip-for-you nightclubs, with their complicated cocktails, goateed pretty boys and bitchy size-2 cocktail waitresses? Then what you need is an unpretentious bar with a blaring sound system and beer-sippin’ folks looking for love. You need a tavern whose dress code demands shoes that can’t be sullied by tipped-over…

Fallon Fast

Things you will learn from a forthcoming oral history of Saturday Night Live: Dan Aykroyd slept with, among others, Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman and writer Rosie Shuster, the latter of whom was, at the time, married to the show’s producer and creator, Lorne Michaels. To this day, Chevy Chase regrets…

Timeless Music Wins Out

Perhaps this will give you some idea of the effect of I Love a Piano: The morning after seeing it, seated in my hairstylist’s chair while he snipped away, I started humming “Cheek to Cheek.” Just as I was beginning to wonder if I was embarrassing him and should stop,…

Star Power

Mark Lundholm is a terrific performer. He holds your attention effortlessly. He’s vital, funny and charming, and he also communicates strong emotion, moving freely from anguish to laughter and back again. (If anyone wants to excerpt this review for publicity purposes, this is where to stop.) But even though Lundholm…

A Norse Odd Couple

As heroes go, the two just-released mental patients struggling to make a new life in Peter Naess’s touching social comedy, Elling, are notably short on glamour. When we meet him, the shy, middle-aged title character, portrayed by an exquisitely subtle actor named Per Christian Ellefsen, is a quivering bundle of…

A Mind’s Coda

Between the onset of Greta Garbo’s tuberculosis and the victory over Russell Crowe’s schizophrenia, moviegoers have endured a relentless barrage of disease — and they have relished almost every tearjerking, Kleenex-wringing minute of it. Who but a soulless curmudgeon could resist the emotion (no matter how manufactured) of Ali McGraw’s…

Keeping Secrets

Citizen-soldiers eager to renew hostilities in the American culture wars can shoot a couple of spitballs at each other this week over Little Secrets, a teen-anxiety movie that leaves no doubt where it stands on “family values” and moral absolutes. It approves. The shock troops of the Cinema Without Limits…

Broken China

You fly halfway around the world clutching a snapshot in your hand, with little more to go on than a full money belt and an infinite collection of worries and hopes: It’s becoming a common experience for the growing wave of American families opting for foreign adoptions in China. And…

Carving a Legacy

Saint-makers tend to be as humble as their subject matter. “It’s a calling,” says Catherine Robles-Shaw of Nederland, a santera who makes her own historically correct gessoes and varnishes to finish delicate retablos, bultos and altars carved from native woods. “It’s the stuff of my life.” Littleton native Jose Raul…

Sex in the City

Here at the beginning of the 21st century, it seems strange that so many artists persist in their attempts to render external reality with paint and brushes. Didn’t abstraction (on the one hand) and photography (on the other) vanquish the old warhorse of representational painting over a hundred years ago?…