In Sporting and Recreation: Furniture, the current exhibit at Ironton Studios and Gallery (3636 Chestnut Place, www.irontonstudios.com), Chase DeForest has a lot of fun adding narrative content to things like sideboards and chairs. The items all reference some kind of leisure activity like a game. But DeForest is also interested…
It’s hardly a new observation to say that the invention of photography revolutionized the visual arts; it’s trite, but true. Before photography, the best way to capture the appearance of exterior reality was to paint it. Once people could take photos, however, the idea of painting as a window on…
La Cage Aux Folles. This is a big, splashy musical with lots of big, splashy song numbers. But unlike many such musicals, La Cage Aux Folles also has heart, humor and a good story to tell. In a time of intense mean-spiritedness and prejudice, it carries a message of tolerance…
For many years, the Denver Center Theatre Company presented A Christmas Carol every holiday season, but this year, artistic director Kent Thompson has replaced it with a big song-and-dance-laden musical: White Christmas. Both shows are sentimental, feel-good fare; both feature protagonists who learn to renounce their own cynicism and hard-heartedness…
To turn Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice into a play, writer Jon Jory chose an approach somewhat reminiscent of reader’s theater, and the current Denver Center Theatre Company production maintains the style. The story of the vulgar Mrs. Bennet’s attempt to marry off her five daughters — and how, despite…
Battlestar Galactica: Razor (Universal) The Best of Crank Yankers (Paramount) Bob Hope: MGM Movie Legends Collection (MGM) Erik the Viking: The Director’s Cut (MGM) Exiled (Magnolia) The Flash Gordon Collection (Passport) Tyler Perry’s House of Payne: Volume One (Lionsgate) Ingmar Bergman: Four Masterworks (Criterion) Lady Chatterley (Kino) Law & Order:…
The Girl Next Door (Anchor Bay)If the horror of Saw was a poblano pepper, this here is the habañero. Derived from Jack Ketchum’s infamous novel, sometimes word-for-word, The Girl Next Door — based on a true story — is a sort of Hostel meets Stand By Me: A group of…
For a game that’s considered Microsoft’s premier 360 title this holiday season, it’s amazing how sloppy Mass Effect is. Graphical glitches distract from otherwise fascinating character designs and alien vistas, constant stops and stutters lengthen load times, and the inventory system must be the worst in history. And just as…
Re-reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement last weekend, my first thought was: I hope to God that Joe Wright — whose broadly grinning Pride & Prejudice made a mess of Jane Austen two years ago — doesn’t screw up this wonderful novel about lust, love, loss and what art can do to…
There are comedies of discomfort, and then there’s Margot at the Wedding, Noah Baumbach’s scalding followup to The Squid and the Whale. An immersion in sibling malice and simmering resentment, with one of the most infuriating characters in recent movies holding us under, Margot tramples the commandment that only the…
Casting Nicole Kidman as The Golden Compass’s glacial, intractably smooth megalomaniac Mrs. Coulter is no less inspired for being obvious. Indeed, she was the first and only choice for director Chris Weitz, who adapted this first installment of Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy. Despite the book’s description of the…
Justin Martinez missed school — again — on November 2. But this time, the nineteen-year-old’s absence was excused. He had to go to Pueblo to see his father. In the morgue. Justin’s parents had split when he was just a kid. Justin and his brothers stayed with their mother in…
Managers at the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News value veteran journalists for their experience, their wisdom and their institutional knowledge — and for the way they improve the bottom line when they leave. The Rocky submitted a buyout proposal to longtimers earlier this year, and the Post has…
Late last January, David Isberg took a urine test at a hospital to figure out what was wrong with him. The 42-year-old inmate had started peeing blood while serving a three-year sentence at Kit Carson Correctional Center in Burlington for marijuana possession. But before the results came back, Isberg was…
Dear Mexican: I was born in beautiful El Paso, and my parents are from Juaritos. I always wondered why Mexican restaurants en los Estados Unidos use queso amarillo — which I associate with los Estados Unidos — on their food instead of queso asadero or queso Oaxaca, which taste so…
First of all, City and County of Denver, I want to thank you for coming to me in this, your hour of need. Okay, okay, so it was actually the Diversity Advisory Committee (the less-fun DAC) of the separate Career Service Authority that made the impossibly awful diversity training video,…
Coors hasn’t canceled Christmas, but after two decades, the brewer is no longer making its seasonal Winterfest beer for the public, choosing to focus instead on a winter beer from the company’s Blue Moon brand. The news brings the same mixed sentiments that accompanied the retirement of Jesse Helms: hard…
John McCain stood up to his North Vietnamese interrogators, but he caved last month when an elderly supporter asked, “How do we beat the bitch?” Rather than refuse to answer the query (or point out that she wouldn’t ask “How do we beat the prick?”), he called it an “excellent…
“Flying out tomorrow morning…been penned up with my parents all weekend. I see adds on here occasionally for sex at DIA…can that really happen? Love to suck cock and get sucked,” writes one eager poster in the “men seeking men” section of craigslist. “Stuck at dia in red carpet club,”…
“Hot for Teacher,” Adam Cayton-Holland, November 29 Teacher’s Fret As a former Graland alumna (alumnae? — I didn’t take Latin at Graland), I found Adam Cayton-Holland’s take on the whole sex-scandal situation almost dead-on. I feel his indignance about many former classmates. It’s been twenty years, and I’ve stayed in…
Today the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida in Tallahassee upheld the Democratic Party’s right to enforce its primary rules — and spanked the Florida delegation for pushing up its state vote to early January “We’re pleased the court ruled in our favor, recognizing the constitutionally…
“Music is My Hot, Hot Sex” by Cansei de Ser Sexy, better known as the song in the iPod Touch commercial, is the worst song in the world. This grating, repetitive burst of vapid noise is guaranteed to get stuck in your head for days after a single exposure. While…
