Wheel Art

Motorcycle exhibits are all the rage at local museums and galleries, but Mario’s Double Daughter’s Salotto is doing something a little different. All this month it’s hanging custom lowrider bicycles built by Tyler Stans. “About a decade ago, a friend pulled three antique bikes out of the trash, then proceeded…

Motorcycle Mania

FRI, 11/18 Get ready as the Cycle World International Motorcycle Shows lay rubber at the Colorado Convention Center, 700 14th Street. Today through Sunday, size up tricked-out choppers as well as custom and vintage bikes you won’t see anywhere else. When the polished chrome and roaring toys aren’t making you…

Peel Rubber

SAT, 11/19 Winter is a despondent time for motorcyclists. As the weather turns cold and the roads get icy and unsafe, they unenthusiastically nestle their cycles and motorbikes into a warm, safe space for ninety days or more of hibernation. And though those motorcycles totally have it made, the owners…

Sea Fare

FRI, 11/18 Woodie Guthrie had the Dust Bowl. John Denver had the Rocky Mountains. Likewise, Gordon Bok has always been associated with a particular place: the icy, isolated coast of his home state, Maine. For forty years, the songwriter has been a stalwart presence on the folk scene, issuing a…

Blessed Are the Buttmunches

Beavis and Butt-head: The Mike Judge Collection, Volume One (Paramount) This three-disc, 40-episode volume chronicling Beavis and Butt-head’s early years will come as a relief to anyone who was stuck in a teenage wasteland when the MTV series first hit the air; turns out, we weren’t just stoned — this…

Street Fighters

Rockstar Games has a winning recipe: Blend a nuanced story with a rich environment, add a dash of sensational marketing, then drench the confection in blood. What else would you expect from the publisher that gave us Grand Theft Auto? Rockstar’s latest release, The Warriors, proves that the bad boys…

Our top DVD picks for the week of November 8

Bang Rajan (Hart Sharp) Big Fish: Special Edition (Columbia/Tristar) Blue Collar TV: Season 1, Volume 1 (Warner Bros.) Burn (Columbia/Tristar) Christmas With the Kranks (Sony) Cronicas (UMVD) Edward Scissorhands: Anniversary Edition (Fox) 50 Cent: Refuse to Die (New Line) Jumanji: Deluxe Edition (Columbia/Tristar) La Dolce Vita: Deluxe Collector’s Edition (Koch…

Future Tense

Construction workers are finishing up one of the first high-rises to be built downtown in about twenty years. It’s the new Hyatt Denver Convention Center Hotel, at 14th and California streets. For a decade now, the severe under-performance of the Colorado Convention Center has been laid at the feet of…

Gary Lynch

In what was shocking news for the city’s community of fine-art photographers, Gary Lynch died suddenly on October 24. To all appearances, the tall and robust Lynch was hale and hearty, but he had, in fact, been dealing with several health-related problems over the past few years. Born in Denver…

Sketches

Andy Warhol’s Dream America. Hot on the heels of its smash hit, Chihuly, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center is presenting yet another blockbuster devoted to the work of a household name in contemporary art: Andy Warhol’s Dream America. The exhibition was curated by Ben Mitchell of Wyoming’s Nicolaysen Museum…

Exterminating Love

At the beginning, Bug seems hyper-realistic. We’re shown a drink- and drug-addled woman, Agnes, living in a motel room on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. The set, by Charles Dean Packard, features a shag carpet and rumpled bed, and it’s entirely convincing. We have been here before. It is, among…

Songs Triumph

Boulder’s Dinner Theatre frequently transcends expectations, offering shows far better than the usual dinner-theater fare. There’s a lot of talent in the resident company, and the sets and costumes tend to be appealing and the direction sharp. But The King and I feels like a bit of a throwback. Some…

Now Playing

The Fourth Wall. Playwright A.R. Gurney is a courteous, upper-crust kind of guy, so when he found himself enraged by national politics, he didn’t respond with agitprop or searing realism. Instead he imagined a comfortably middle-class housewife, Peggy, who — by way of protest — rearranges all the furniture in…

Off the Tracks

Movie-goers with a taste for nasty villains will get all they can handle from the heavy in Swedish director Mikael Hfstrom’s Derailed. Philippe LaRoche — played with obvious relish by a craggy-faced Vincent Cassel — is not the kind of effete Frenchman you find reading poetry in the corner bistro…

Private Dicks

As a screenwriter, Shane Black has built a reputation on action movies featuring mismatched partners: Crazy Mel Gibson and aging Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon; sassy Samuel L. Jackson and amnesiac hit-woman/housewife Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight; burnout detective Bruce Willis and football player Damon Wayans in The…

Love at First Fight

Keira Knightley, who is all of twenty but has the grace and gravitas of someone a good decade older, probably considers herself the luckiest lass in all the world at present. Just as Pride & Prejudice begins filling the cineplex with dewy, hopeless romantics who can’t get enough of Jane…

Aboard Game

Pay attention, Disney: This is how you do a family film right. Neither pandering nor dull, Zathura plays exactly like a no-limits replica of the kind of space adventure that imaginative kids left to their own devices might enact. Assuming there’s no Xbox to distract them, naturally. Loosely based on…

Bum Rap

About halfway through Get Rich or Die Tryin¹, the new movie starring rapper 50 Cent (a.k.a. Curtis Jackson) and loosely based on his life, 50’s character Marcus is in prison, being visited by his girlfriend Charlene (Joy Bryant). Surprised by his inability to communicate with her, she asks the gangsta…

The NeverEnding Story

German director Wolfgang Petersen’s relentlessly strange fairy tale The NeverEnding Story (1984) has gained well-deserved cult status over the years, not least because it’s one of the only children’s movies ever made whose villain is not some evil wizard or hulking monster, but the existential void. The first English-language film…

DIFF Burns On

Film directors Ang Lee (Eat Drink Man Woman; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), Claude Lelouch (A Man and a Woman, Les Misérables) and Ryuichi Hiroki (I Am an SI Writer, Girlfriend) and actors David Schwimmer (Friends, Duane Hopwood), Philip Baker Hall (Dogville, The Truman Show) and Petra Wright (Laura Smiles) will…

Day-by-Day Picks

Thursday, November 10 When Gypsies Collection maven and Louisiana native Carolyn Fineran rolls out her to-die-for trunk show this weekend, fans of the sumptuous feast of ethnic clothing and handcrafted jewelry won’t be the only beneficiaries. Artisans delivered a blow by hurricanes Katrina and Rita will also luck out, since…

Still Waters

The Prince of Puke will descend upon the roost of the religious right on Thursday, November 10, when the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center hosts John Waters, iconoclastic filmmaker of such cult-classic cinema as Pink Flamingos, Desperate Living, Hairspray and A Dirty Shame. The evening offers a film screening of…