It takes a good while for Ricky Gervais to warm up in Ghost Town; it takes even longer for the audience to warm to Ricky Gervais. During the opening minutes of Ghost Town — an occasionally effective mash-up of Ghost, The Sixth Sense and The Frighteners — Gervais, as Bertram…
Earlier this year, when I found myself assigned to jury duty on a drug-related trial at the Los Angeles Superior Court, our jury foreman turned out to be a blond, blue-eyed reality-TV producer from the bedroom community of Altadena. During the jury-selection process, when the judge asked if we had…
Most of the characters in Avenue Q are college graduates in that in-between stage — bright and literate, finished with school but not ready for the daily grind of making a living — and they’ve congregated on New York’s grungy Avenue Q. Idealistic Kate is a kindergarten teacher and also…
There’s a period in women’s lives — roughly the years between 18 and 24 — that strikes me as profoundly touching. During this time, young women are often filled with inchoate plans and longings, and they haven’t yet figured out the distinction between possible and impossible. They’re absolutely alive to…
From the standpoint of 2008, the French new wave that broke half a century ago is a towering monument to a particular moment — a solitary whitecap in a Courbet seascape. What was that surge? As a film critic or a filmmaker (or, in most cases, both), each of the…
Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The fall opener at the Center for Visual Art is a conscientious survey of the careers of Christo and Jeanne-Claude as seen through their personal print collection documenting their pioneering conceptual work that began in the 1960s. The exhibit, which includes more than a hundred works of…
Okay, so there’s about a week left till Halloween. You know what that means to me? It means that if I get started now, I might be able to make it through every last one of the myriad mazes and haunted houses that the metro area has to offer, starting…
Remember how the designers got all crafty and constructed sweaters out of mop heads and dresses out of plastic cups in the first episode of the current season of Project Runway? Well, with the Whole Foods Challenge you, too, can construct fashion out of food and food-related products and you’ll…
Style trends are changing almost everyday. Five days a week, I am confined to the halls of my school, where I see teen fashion all around me. What happens when guys and girls swap their “norms” of style? I see the guys taking on skinny jeans — tighter then the…
Slide show Plenty of people had a fashion statement to make at last weekend’s Monolith festival. Don’t believe me? Check out the slide show and vote for your favorite hipster. Nothing like watching all the hipsters trying to out hip each other…
If you like supporting local fashion designers and independent film makers, then this weekend’s Toofy Film Festival in Boulder is for you. For only $20 you can get a pass for all 6 independent films to be screened, plus access to the Toofy After Party Fashion Show at 10 p.m…
I don’t know if my theory holds, but I think global warming signals a heavier chance of rain on the Front Range in the spring and fall. But if I’m right, we all need to buy a good pair of rain boots immediately. Luckily, deciding to do so is just…
Students from The Art Institute of Colorado’s Industrial Design program will have a chance to exhibit their work alongside the masters of modern design tonight at the Design Within Reach studio in Cherry Creek North, 2500 East Second Avenue. The exhibit will feature 19 designs that were picked for their…
Yesterday it was announced that the proposed Centennial IKEA will be built on 13.5 acres on the west side of I-25 in the Park Meadows Mall area. The Swedish home store will be 400,000 square-feet large and will sell nearly 10,000 exclusively designed items. The store will also feature 50…
On September 3, I made my way to the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver as I’ve done so many times since the new building opened last year. But this time I wasn’t in pursuit of an art show. Instead, I was headed, along with a few hundred others, to the memorial…
The death last winter of Mark Travis, a contemporary artist who made his reputation in Denver’s go-go scene of the 1980s, left a big question mark regarding a scheduled exhibit of his work. His representative, Michael Burnett of Space Gallery (765 Santa Fe Drive, 720-904-1088, www.spacegallery.org), had asked Travis to…
Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The fall opener at the Center for Visual Art is a conscientious survey of the careers of Christo and Jeanne-Claude as seen through their personal print collection documenting their pioneering conceptual work that began in the 1960s. The exhibit, which includes more than a hundred works of…
The Eyes of Babylon. Jeff Key is an ex-Marine — a man devoted to the idea of patriotism and service to his country — whose homosexuality represents a deep part of his psyche. He left the service in part because of the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, but also…
Masters of the carefully crafted cheap shot, Joel and Ethan Coen have built a career on flippancy. Given their refusal to take anything seriously — least of all the enthusiasm of their fans — the brothers surely got a chuckle from an upcoming academic tome, The Philosophy of the Coen…
What do you think this is?” cries a lady who lunches in Diane English’s remake of George Cukor’s The Women. “Some kind of ’30s movie?” Even without the fourteen-year struggle to get the Murphy Brown writer’s pet project past studio doubters, it would be a tall order to remake George…
The moment you walk into the theater for Curse of the Starving Class, you know you’re in Sam Shepard country — a place suffused with memories of the mythic Old West, but where the breadth and purity of that myth serve only to underline the disappointing realities of contemporary life…
Bubs is a crossover production, a play accompanied by songs, a concert yoked to a narrative, and that’s not a bad thing: Crossovers attract new people to an art form that everyone seems to agree is in trouble (though we’ve been worrying about theater for decades, and it never does…
