Spike Lee, who speaks under the auspices of the University of Colorado Denver tonight, is among the most fascinating and frustrating of modern directors. He’s extremely talented and relentlessly passionate, yet during the two decades-plus since the breakthrough success of 1986’s She’s Gotta Have It, he’s only occasionally been able…
A lot of women need to be kicked out of their houses this time of year, like mama bears from their dens, and forced to put on makeup, buy new outfits and rejoin the real world. The only difference is that unlike the bears, who’ve been hibernating and emerge skinny…
Standup comedy is best seen live. The atmosphere of a live set (not to mention the alcohol usually involved) has caused me to laugh at jokes that I didn’t actually think were funny. It takes more skill — and better jokes — to create a standup routine that people will…
Funplex, the B-52’s’ first album in sixteen years, pumps up the volume, cranks the guitars, and rocks harder than anything the veteran group has done since its 1979 debut. There’s nothing here as sweet or as catchy as “Roam” or “Love Shack,” both of which made these unlikely new-wave rejects…
Last fall, rock mags aplenty spilled ink on behalf of the Black Kids, a Florida combo that scribes repeatedly described as a cross between the Cure (thanks to singer Reggie Youngblood’s Robert Smith-like pipes) and the Go! Team (by virtue of pep squad-style chanting). As it turns out, this description…
Since his 1979 debut Look Sharp, Joe Jackson has into delved into a variety of genres, traversing through pop, jazz, Latin, even trying his hand at classical. While some of the twenty subsequent albums he’s released have been grandiose affairs, his latest effort, Rain, is stripped to the bare essentials…
Even politicians, whose careers frequently hinge on a perpetual state of economic denial, are beginning to face up to the ugly fact that this country is in the grips of a full-blown recession. In trying times such as these, people naturally turn toward the time-honored traditional means of dealing with…
Slide Show! On Friday, April 18, Erico Motorsports, 2855 Walnut Street, hosted a night of fashion, shopping, music and free drinks — four of my very favorite things. The event was packed with revelers enjoying margaritas, martinis and champagne cocktails made from St. Germain, a versatile French elderflower liqueur that…
Sporting a pretty sweet suit he found at a local thrift store, Denver actor/comedian Charlie Schmidt wears his “green” politics on his sleeve — literally. Mr. Schmidt is currently tearing up Breckenridge in the Backstage Theatre’s production of Reefer Madness, a farcical exploration of America’s other hot, “green” political debate…
If you somehow accidentally missed last night’s episode of 30 Rock (and no, there is no valid excuse for missing the funniest show on TV), then you simply must visit www.nbc.com pronto to catch up. While 30 Rock regularly shines with genius, last night’s one-two punch of a Project Runway…
Denver has a thriving fashion scene and tons of great local designers, but thanks to Kevin Larson, a new type of fashion is popping in this town. This Saturday, April 26, you can experience a balloon couture fashion show as part of Kevin Larson’s Sixth Annual Birthday Bash. The fashion…
Could have sworn I’ve seen this episode of Baby Mama before — like sometime in January 2007, when it was originally titled “The Baby Show” and aired on the other prime-time series starring Tina Fey, 30 Rock. (Waitaminute — you say Baby Mama’s a movie and not a TV show?…
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A lonely dwarf, a wisecracking Cuban-American and a grieving mother walk into each other’s lives, laugh together, cry together, grow, change and heal each other’s emotional wounds. Cue Sundance prizes, Miramax pickup, torrent of glowing reviews and surprisingly robust indie box office…
Watching Marilyn Monroe in Cinemascope, a critic once wrote, is “like being smothered in baked Alaska.” Reading that as a teenager raised some thrilling questions: Is that good or bad? What is “baked Alaska”? And then a realization: How singular it must be for a woman — or a filmmaker…
Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg wrote Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle with a novel idea: What if you made a John Hughes movie, but instead of writing garishly caricatured bit players with names like Long Duk Dong, you cast an Asian actor as the smart, handsome, upwardly mobile…
First of all: God bless Atlus. As a publisher devoted to bringing obscure Japanese gaming gems to the West — basically, the much-needed heir apparent of Working Designs — Atlus is the only hope for gamers who crave oddball, strange, or downright niche titles from the Land of the Rising…
The intimate Germinal Stage Denver theater is a perfect venue for The Birthday Party, Harold Pinter’s claustrophobic puzzler of a play. On the stage, the furniture is almost insultingly nondescript — a round wooden table, worn-looking chairs, a bulbous fish ornament. We’re inside an English bed-and-breakfast run by a very…
Artie Shaughnessy is an untalented songwriter with a dream — and it’s because she feeds this dream, as well as his ego, that he loves Bunny, his confident, glossy, mindlessly positive girlfriend. The fact that he’s married to the aptly named Bananas presents very little problem: As soon as he…
The Baseball Show. Evil, malaprop-prone Vincent Vascombe, owner of the Beloit Bulldogs, is determined to hold on to his star player, Bill “The Bomber” Dawson. But Dawson — aided by his smart, competent fiancée, Helen — has plans for the majors, and there’s a talent scout hanging around. So Vascombe…
When two different groups of people, one made up mostly of artists, the other comprising collectors and donors, began to separately brainstorm back in the 1990s about the creation of a new contemporary-art museum in Denver, one of the biggest motivating factors was the desire to showcase art made in…
The Denver Art Museum’s outlandish Hamilton Building (100 West 14th Avenue Parkway, 720-865-5000, www.denverartmuseum.org) has fans and detractors. As for myself, I love it and think it’s one of the great landmarks of the city. But there are some problems with the handling of the interior. The cheap and already…
Inspiring Impressionism. This is hardly your run-of-the-mill effort in which a cavalcade of big-name European artists are represented by minor works. Instead, it’s an intellectually stimulating exhibit crowded with iconic pieces by some of the most significant artists who ever took brush to canvas. Curated by the DAM’s Timothy Standring…
