When Bette Davis agreed to play the second-fiddle role of Maggie Cutler in The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942), she was at the height of her career. But she’d been playing “a pile of mean, nasty characters and wanted some good press,” says Chris Loffelmacher, director of cultural programming…
It says something about our collective cultural irony that the once-towering term “modernism” has been consigned to describe the detritus of the past — namely, the kitschy and angular trappings of mid-twentieth-century America. But even in today’s so-over-it world, there remains a real love for the bygone decades of chrome,…
I’ve never been crazy enough to run a half-marathon — especially not one on a freakin’ mountain, and especially not a fourteener — but if I ever did reach that level of insanity, and if I actually managed to finish, here would be the first two things I’d want when…
Annie. Boulder’s Dinner Theatre is at the top of its form; it has to be. How else could the company make Annie — its mandatory summer family show — anything but a smirking sentimental bore? As everyone knows by now, the story of Annie concerns a little red-haired girl’s rough…
The Denver Art Museum will get a head start on Halloween at tonight’s Untitled # 24 event: Subtitled Crossbones, the once-monthly highbrow party where anything goes (in a controlled sort of way) turns its artful focus on spooky stuff this time around, inspired by the DAM’s own little-known ghost stories…
It isn’t everyday a teen, particularly one who’s considered at-risk, gets to create a billboard. But that’s just what’s happened this summer at PlatteForum, where twelve youths enrolled in the gallery’s ArtLab program teamed up with student mentors from Metro State College of Denver’s Communication Design Department to create six…
“Monday ain’t a fun day/Tuesday’s a goof day/Wednesdays are frenzy/Thursday’s the worst day/Friday is great/’Cause I can hardly wait until the weekend.” Brit rocker Dave Edmunds surely had the working class pegged when he wrote those words back in the ´70s, and it hasn’t much changed. So pop those lyrics…
Though Thrill the World dance events circled the globe last October, there’s no doubt that Michael Jackson’s untimely passing this year will spark even more interest among people who want to emulate MJ’s famous Thriller moves in public while dressed as zombies this Halloween. I mean, like, who wouldn’t want…
Surely one of the most interesting places in Denver for fans of modern art is Burns Park, a triangle of grass and trees at the western edge of Hilltop, bounded by Colorado Boulevard, Alameda Avenue and Leetsdale Drive. What makes the park a hot spot for art enthusiasts is the…
Big-Lots. This show comprises some very big abstract paintings by Wendi Harford that are strong and artistically ambitious. Harford earned a BFA at the University of Denver in the 1970s, where she studied with the late Beverly Rosen, and there are subtle references to her mentor’s influences throughout the show,…
Annie. Boulder’s Dinner Theatre is at the top of its form; it has to be. How else could the company make Annie — its mandatory summer family show — anything but a smirking sentimental bore? As everyone knows by now, the story of Annie concerns a little red-haired girl’s rough…
Early in Betty Blue, aspiring novelist Zorg (Jean-Hugues Anglade) declares, “She was like a flower with translucent antennae and a mauve plastic heart” in so solemn a tone that it practically dares the viewer to laugh. And so it goes throughout this divisively fleshy 1986 opus. Betty (Béatrice Dalle), who…
Energetic, inventive, swaggering fun, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is a consummate Hollywood entertainment — rich in fantasy and blithely amoral. It’s also quintessential Tarantino — even more drenched in film references than gore, with a proudly misspelled title (lifted from Italian genre-meister Enzo Castellari’s 1978 Dirty Dozen knockoff) to underscore…
I don’t understand quantum mechanics. I tried after seeing Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, a play about a meeting between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg during World War II, and long before that, when I was seventeen, I read Erwin Schrodinger’s What Is Life for a physics class and found myself as…
Sure, you know all about Homer and Marge, Bart and Lisa and Selma and Patty, but how much do you know about Amber Simpson? Lurleen Lupkin? Tonight you can test the depths of your Simpsons knowledge at the Yellow Fever Quiz, an all-Simpsons pub trivia game at Moe’s Original Barbecue,…
If you’ve ever been to a mushroom festival — particularly the legendary Telluride Mushroom Festival, which this year runs from August 27-30 — you already know that mycologists (’shroom experts) are in a league of their own. And so is the documentary Know Your Mushrooms. The flick combines material filmed…
If you want to explore some of the many ways being naughty can feel nice, check out the Fetisch und Kink party tonight at Bender’s Tavern, 314 East 13th Avenue. And don’t worry that you aren’t hardcore enough for the fun: This bash is firmly aimed at newcomers and the…
Most stage magicians bank on flash and misdirection. But Boulder’s Erica Sodos has a passion for the art that runs far deeper. Weaving together wonder, mysticism and the almost mythic stature of magicians both modern and ancient, Sodos will bring her new show, The Power of Magic, to the b.side…
Every woman envies pin-up girls — beauties basking in male attention, making coy faces with those big doe eyes and stretching those impeccable figures into flirtatious poses. We envy them for obvious reasons: because we want to be them, of course — lovely and girly, rejoicing in female sexual empowerment…
Denver’s a bike town, and we’ve got every kind of biker under the sun: mountain bikers, road racers, cruisers, commuters, anarchic DIYers, pixie bike fanatics, baby-pullers and lots of kids with handlebar fringe flying. So when local bike advocate and cycling trade-show veteran Carol Johnson decided to promote a bike…
Poet and filmmaker Gwylym Cano describes his recent work as cine-poetics, since it melds repurposed video with verse — or at least the sense of verse — in a marriage of his favorite disciplines. The result is pure, true, funny, wise, profoundly visual and especially subjective, forged in the footsteps…
The fine art of making fun of terrible films was perfected by the groundbreaking series Mystery Science Theater 3000. When that show ended, in 1999, fans had to make fun of movies on their own until 2006, when show writer and star Michael J. Nelson revitalized the concept with RiffTrax…
