The dark empire of Church of Scientology, well known for its extensive real-estate holdings, expanded its reach in Denver yesterday by throwing down $8.5 million in cash money on a new facility to house its secretive minions. Believed by its adherents to be the one true path to enlightenment and…
You might think that 2010 was the year of the platformer, but here we are in 2011, and the damn things are still oozing out of people’s brains and onto the Internet. It’s not a bad thing, by any means, but we’re pretty certain critical mass was reached late last…
Jennifer Figge, the Aspen-based endurance athlete who swam the Atlantic (from the Cape Verde Islands to Trinidad) in 2009, then did it again in 2010 just for kicks, is now swimming the Pacific. She dove in from the shore of Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, on December 30 and is headed…
After getting her start in the inner workings of the entertainment biz as a music promoter (for a while in Denver), Tig Notaro got an itch to be on stage — not as a musician, but as a comedian. In that respect, she’s been more successful than many; she’s done…
If anyone is in need of further proof that we live in strange and litigious times, they need look no further than the gossip that’s arisen around the first episode of ABC’s The Bachelor, which aired yesterday. A slap in the face delivered by contestant Chantal O’Brien to bachelor Brad…
When you call your local government office and ask whether they are covering up a dragon population in the sewers, the usual response is an auto-reply. Greeley, faced with only slightly less outlandish accusations, has taken a more proactive route by fielding citizen concerns in a View-style talk show on…
It’s been a rough couple of years for the Shadow Theatre Company. Not long after moving into what it calls a “state-of-the-art” space three years ago, founder Jeffrey Nickelson took ill; he died in early 2009. After that, it seems — from an operational standpoint, anyway — things got rough…
When Stranger Than Paradise hit the big screen, in 1984, indie director Jim Jarmusch was right in the thick of a trend: the American movie, made over in a drifting, plotless European sensibility that aped the way life usually continues to unfold, without a real storyline, sometimes in parallel worlds…
Since the establishment of horror as a legit genre somewhere around the late ’70s, it’s always been almost a tradition to infuse the gore with a liberal amount of sex — and in a literary sense, few have been as shameless about those twin preoccupations than Mario Acevedo, whose credits…
You’d think that publishers would take the first weeks of the year off when it comes to new releases, so that people don’t forget about things during Best of the Year time, but there is a theory in the psychology world that people tend to think best of two different…
Add one more sport to Denver’s lengthy list of athletic obsessions. The city now has its very own Denver Skeeball League. For the past month, twenty teams have been battling for ruler of the ramp every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, starting at 6 p.m. at the Breckenridge Brewery…
There’s been a lot of John Cusak-related hubbub about the end of the Mayan calendar meaning the end of the world, but Harold Camping isn’t buying that crap. “It’s like a fairy tale,” he chuckles. Because by the time 2012 comes around, according to Camping, who developed his theory with…
The Denver Roller Dolls’ first home bout of 2011 at the First Bank Center isn’t until February 19, but it’s never too early to get a piece of the action: Tonight at 6 p.m. the Roller Dolls will host the first practice session and informational meeting for their new Junior…
Kelly Canter is the Courtney Love of country stars. Spectacular meltdowns on stage have forced Kelly (an inconsistently twanging Gwyneth Paltrow) into rehab. There, her decolletage decked out in black lace and a bling cross, she jams in more than one sense with singer-songwriter-janitor Beau (Tron fox Garrett Hedlund) until…
Generously bankrolled (then shelved) by an imperiled Weinstein Company and peopled with Oscar nominees, it’s tempting to call All Good Things an upscale version of straight-to-cable True Crime crap — only that makes it sound more entertaining than it actually is. The fiction feature debut of Andrew Jarecki, director of…
Dissolute action-movie star Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), first seen doing laps in his black Ferrari, has no destination in Somewhere, Sofia Coppola’s mood ring of celebrity lassitude. Coppola’s fourth feature, winner of the Golden Lion at Venice this year, is, at times, similarly aimless and empty. But those who groan…
More than a thousand blackbirds, grackles and starlings fell from the sky on New Year’s Eve in Beebe, Arkansas. So far, there has been no official explanation for the avian precipitation, but we thought we’d look to other unexpected things falling from the sky for some context…
Blame it on the holiday influx of cheese logs, goose-meat and cases of Hofbräu, but you’ve been feeling a little sluggish lately. And broke. Plus, “sluggish” and “broke” is a very negative combination of things to be feeling, according to your court-ordered therapist, which also makes you feel anxious. Luckily,…
The newly rehatched Denver Art Talks, hosted by Eric Matelski, will hit the new year running by featuring designer/seamstress extraordinaire April Hoy as its first guest of 2011. Hoy has stitched her way through many behind-the-scenes professional layers: She’s a stage costumer, a corset-maker, a textile restoration worker, a pattern…
Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey’s musical Next to Normal won the Pulitzer for its authors — the book and lyrics are by Yorkey, the music by Kitt. Yet it began simply as an exercise for a musical theater workshop, one of those “show us everything you’ve learned in 10 minutes”…
When Johnathan McFarlane and his partner Tim DeMasters created the Festivus Film Festival four years ago, they had trouble attracting audiences to all of the screenings at the Oriental and Bug theaters. Since then, the event has picked up buzz and grown its budget. The 2011 festival later this month…
Not all failures are noteworthy. In fact, most of us experience quiet failure in every single waking moment of our lives — and nobody wants to hear about that. That shit’s just depressing. There are moments, however, when failure becomes transcendent, when you fuck something up in a way so…
