While the rest of America was at home watching the film establishment’s glitzy annual circle jerk, where it elaborately congratulates itself on a year of acceptable filmmaking, my girlfriend and I were in an otherwise empty Chez Artist watching one of the worst indie films I expect to see this…
In terms of reasons to justify what some negative Nancies would call your “excessive drinking” but you would call your “spirit of festivity,” February has been a pretty lean month, leaving you with little to toast to but the bitter disenchantment of a life mostly squandered — not that it’s…
Is that a suspiciously shaped tendon, Jesus, or are you just happy to see us? A tad nonplussed at the photo (above) the Denver Post ran today on page 14D of Rebecca Vaughan and Peter Illig’s “Celestial Navigation” — part of the artist’s Displaced show at Ice Cube Gallery, which…
In Drive Angry, Nic Cage plays a man who broke out of hell to make things right, and now he’s got one last chance at redemption. Now, read that last sentence again in the gravelly voice of the “In a world… guy and note that Nic Cage also drives a…
When you’re talking about a silent sci-fi-parody movie based on the 1971 concept LP Bark, commonly regarded as one of Jefferson Airplane’s worst albums, it pretty much only makes sense that it would be set on the moon in the 26th century and prominently involve buffalo. Also that the narrative…
As far as fictional characters go, there is maybe no archetype so boring as the Hero, that figure of unwavering nobility and poise. Whether that hero is deftly vanquishing foes like Superman or valiantly overcoming adversity a la Odysseus, the construct is the same: The Hero represents the David-like ideal…
When Matt Vogl and Harrison Rains started Mile High Sci-Fi five years ago, Vogl says, “We agreed never to watch Mystery Science Theater 3000 ever again.” In many ways, their show’s premise is the same — screen terrible movies and make fun of them — but Vogl and Rains also…
It’s well known that Philadelphia is a cultural armpit that has never produced anything of value except for Gilbert Lewis, but the town’s community of second-rate trivia geeks is apparently up to speed on random facts as posed by a cross-section of obscure Philadelphia celebrities. Last weekend, a crack trivia…
Minor celebrities are often doomed to live out their careers remembered primarily for that one thing they did that was really famous. For comedian David Alan Grier, that’s probably Antoine Merriweather, his flamboyant pop-culture commentator from the early 1990s show In Living Color. But say what you will about the…
It came from Crested Butte, and it was absolutely awful. No, it wasn’t Heidi Montag; it was Snowbeast, a 1977 abomination that is a classic in no sense of that word, not even in a so-bad-it’s-good way. “There is absolutely zero, nothing to love in this movie,” says Matt Vogl…
The unexpected confluence of two seemingly unrelated ideas has always been the theme of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver’s Mixed Taste lecture series, where the MCA brings in a pair of experts to tag-team-discuss two disparate topics. But in its new Mixed Taste on Ice winter series, says programming…
Although he argues that Peter Shaffer’s Equus is a theater classic on a level with Death of a Salesman or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Craig Bond, director of Vintage Theatre’s upcoming performance has an explanation for why it isn’t staged all that often. “The play won’t give you…
Bart Simpson was arbitrarily declared 32 years old today by Twitter trends, a designation that had something to do with the release of the first episode of The Simpsons in 1989 plus Bart’s age, which has always been ten years old. Except the show debuted on December 17, 1989 as…
When you consider the elaborate costume, the mystical powers and the “popemobile,” it’s pretty clear that the pope is a superhero. Or possibly a supervillain. Whatever the case, like a superhero/villain, the pope also has a rich inner life that gets lost in the glitz and glam of his popular…
The Dude abides. By definition, in fact: perhaps more than any other film in recent history, the Coen Brothers’ magnum opus The Big Lebowski has proven its longevity — if the number of academic papers written about it can be seen as a barometer of its importance, then The Dude…
It seems like a pretty steep price to pay for a website with terrible search engine recognition (it doesn’t even come up in the first page of results) and no current discernible purpose (it’s basically just a bunch of links right now), but the domain name sex.com sold at auction…
If you watch The Dog Whisperer with even a fraction of the unhealthy frequency with which we do, you know that dog ownership is a power-struggle. In a dog pack, the alpha dog establishes dominance and, once established, rules. These are the same dramas that play out in human-dog relationships…
Fresh off headlining the fashion show of Westword’s Artopia on Saturday night, local clothing brand DVLP announced yesterday that it will close its doors. The brand, which carved out its niche with eco-friendly materials, domestic manufacturing and relaxed but stylish designs, expanded quickly and went international in 2007, maintaining lines…
Originality is a tough sell. People tend to like the things they already like, because the idea of new is foreign and scary and seems poised to usher in a depraved era of dogs and cats living together, which would be immoral. “Can’t understand it?” MF Doom once rhetorically asked…
In the way that anything has at least its category in common with its opposite (red is the opposite of green, for example, but they’re both colors), a magazine and a zine are opposites: Where magazines tend to be slick, polished and pandering (ours excepted, of course — we never…
#100: Dana Cain If the overarching Colorado arts scene is like an awesome picture of a unicorn galloping across a rainbow — and we’re going to go ahead and say that it is — then Dana Cain is like the glitter: essential. A tireless arts cheerleader and all around rolling…
When you were young, they told you that you could be anything when you grew up — hell, if you worked hard and applied yourself, you could even be president. As time went on, though, you somehow never quite got the hang of working hard enough, at least not for…
