Again this year, Denver Film Festival artistic director Brit Withey is offering his must-see picks for each day of the fest — including many flicks that movie lovers might otherwise miss amid the flood of silver-screen goodies. Today he spotlights a selection for November 10, 11 and 12: Quality Time, AlphaGo and Easy.
According to the Colorado Department of Transportation, 375 drivers in the state were arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence throughout Halloween weekend. That’s a huge increase from the same weekend last year. And the numbers are also way up for for busts over what CDOT refers to as its “Fall Festivals DUI Enforcement Period,” with law enforcement agencies averaging a staggering 47 driving-under-the-influence arrests per day during that span.
Since early 2015, authorities in Aspen have sought to make Landin Smith pay for two separate incidents in which he kicked members of the local police department. But in the end, Smith received no jail time for giving officers the boot, even though he’s committed similar acts so often that he was nicknamed the Aspen Cop Kicker. Moreover, Smith has spent plenty of time behind bars for his previous actions.
Approximately 168 bears have been euthanized by Colorado Parks and Wildlife personnel in the state during 2017 to date and another 107 or so have been relocated, usually because of problematic interactions with or near human beings, including multiple break-ins to homes and cars. According to one CPW administrator, these numbers have been growing steadily of late for reasons that are both wide ranging and intertwined, forcing wildlife officers to take actions they’d much prefer to avoid.
Outside magazine compiles an annual list of the 100 best places to work in these United States, and each roster seems to feature more Colorado businesses. The 2017 edition is no exception. An impressive 41 firms from the state are highlighted. Learn more about all of them here.
“This is one of my favorite films in the festival,” says Denver Film Festival artistic director Brit Withey about Under the Tree. “It’s an Icelandic and Danish coproduction by the same producer who made Rams, which won as our best feature film in 2015.”
Jennifer Reali, popularly known as the “Fatal Attraction” killer, has reportedly been granted parole following a bumpy ride through the criminal justice system. In 2011, her sentence for murder was commuted by then-Governor Bill Ritter, but the state parole board subsequently rejected three appeals centered largely on the depth of her Christian faith.
Mere day after the City and County of Denver agreed to pay $4.65 million and change some jail policies to settle claims involving Michael Marshall, who died in a Denver detention center circa 2015 during a mental-health episode, a Career Service Board hearing officer has tossed out minor suspensions against Carlos Hernandez and Bret Garegnani, two deputies who took part in the incident.
News that two-time Cy Young Award winning pitcher Roy Halladay had died on Tuesday, November 7, after a plane crash into the Gulf of Mexico shook the Major League Baseball community. After all, Halladay, who retired in 2013 after sixteen years of sparkling play for the Toronto Blue Jays and the Philadelphia Phillies, was widely considered a lock for the MLB Hall of Fame, and his reputation as a human being was just as impressive. But Halladay’s death was felt with particular shock in the Denver area, where he was born forty years ago and first came to the attention of scouts as a hurler for Arvada West High School.
With no statewide ballot issues, the election in Colorado yesterday, November 7, was hyper-local, with voters determining the fate of proposals that will directly impact them. Here are the latest numbers for Denver and other municipalities in the metro area in regard to the biggest issues.
For Denver Film Festival artistic director Brit Withey, the November 8 screening of Ramen Heads is an opportunity to learn from a miscalculation he made last year.
Donna Lynne, a Democrat who’s both Colorado’s lieutenant governor and the state’s chief operating officer, is running for governor in 2018. In the following in-depth interview, she touts her experience in both the public and private sectors and her intimate understanding of policy under her current boss, Governor John Hickenlooper, as reasons voters should choose her from among a very crowded field bidding for Colorado’s top elective office.
The ten intersections with the most accidents in Denver right now include plenty of well-traveled roadways in the metro area. If you live and work in the Mile High City, there’s a good chance that you’ve driven through one or more of these danger zones this week.
The day after former Colorado resident Devin Kelley murdered 26 people at a Sutherland Springs, Texas church on November 5, filmmaker Michael Moore tweeted that this tragedy has pushed the April 20, 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, the subject of his 2002 Oscar-winning documentary Bowling for Columbine, from the list of America’s ten worst mass shootings.
Diane Kruger, who was named Best Actress at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival for her work throughout In the Fade, “plays a German woman who’s married to a Turkish man,” Denver Film Festival artistic director Brit Withey goes on. “One day, she’s dropping their son at their office, and as she’s leaving later that day, a bomb goes off and it kills her husband and their little boy.”
The fortieth annual Denver Film Festival got off to a fine start with Lady Bird, an opening night flick well worth discovering. Since then, the event’s attendance has been impressive despite a lack of star power on par with Emma Stone’s appearance for La La Land last year and the mixed quality of the six movies I caught during the fest’s first weekend. Note that a Q&A with costar Kyra Sedgwick on November 3 barely mentioned Submission, the DFF’s centerpiece presentation at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House for which she was ostensibly on-hand, and no one seemed to care.
You’ll have a hard time understanding the local sports pundits who predicted that your Denver Broncos would defeat the fast-rising Philadelphia Eagles during their face-off on Sunday, November 5, because they’ll be choking on crow feathers all day long. The final score of the contest was 51-23, but the actual game wasn’t that close. Moreover, the Twitter debate about who should start at quarterback for Denver as this already lost season moves forward focused less on whether Brock Osweiler, the man under center yesterday, is better than Trevor Siemian, the hurler he replaced, and more on which of them sucks harder.
On Sunday, November 5, just over a month after Stephen Paddock killed more than fifty people at a Las Vegas country music concert, and less than a week since Scott Ostrem gunned down three at a Thornton Walmart, a man named Devin Patrick Kelley murdered at least 26 parishioners at a church in tiny Sutherland Springs, Texas. We’ve subsequently learned that Kelley is a former member of the Air Force and a onetime resident of Colorado Springs who appears to have been fueled by strong feelings about religion, as were at least two killers who shook the community in the past.
“Thelma is a film from Norway that’s actually the country’s submission for Best Foreign Language Film,” says Denver Film Festival artistic director Brit Withey. “It’s an interesting film of the type that you don’t necessarily find in film festivals all that often. It’s sort of a supernatural, paranormal thriller, but a really intriguing one.”
Vic Mensa, who opens for Jay-Z on Sunday, November 5 at the Pepsi Center, represents the highest form of hip-hop. His latest recording, The Autobiography, is not only among 2017’s best albums in any genre, but it’s essential listening for anyone who wants to understand the social, cultural and political moment in which we find ourselves. In the interview below, he explains why with both passion and compassion, not to mention a fierce intelligence that spares no sacred cows.
On a recent edition of KWGN’s morning program Daybreak, co-host Natalie Tysdal was joined by Jason Granger, founder and CEO of Infinity Marketing Group, for a segment in which he showed off three phone apps that allow users to track the whereabouts of family or friends. But neither viewers nor staffers at the station knew at the time that Granger was arrested, convicted and served time in jail last year for stalking a former family member.
Twenty-five years ago this week, Colorado voters approved Amendment 2, whose backers portrayed it as outlawing “special rights” for gays, lesbians and bisexuals. The measure’s passage on November 3, 1992 provoked outrage nationwide, with Colorado’s branding as the “hate state” resulting in boycott calls from singer Barbra Streisand and other members of the national entertainment community. But while Amendment 2 was deemed unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in a landmark 1996 ruling, a University of Denver professor sees its legacy in the current Masterpiece Cakeshop controversy and other cases she considers to be problematic on every level.
