Midnight Mayhem

SAT, 10/15 Sid Pink, the self-proclaimed “Host with the Most Boast,” is Colorado’s premier mocker of ceremonies. But besides emceeing scores of events around Denver over the past few years, Jason Stoval’s coiffed and zinger-spitting alter ego is infamous for two comedy projects: Think Pink, a riotous fake game show,…

Word Music

SUN, 10/16 “I had trouble with poetry when I was in school,” confesses Golda Solomon. “It wasn’t accessible. My life experiences didn’t relate to great British poets and all of that. I found that I related more to poets that told stories.” Solomon has plenty of her own stories to…

Roll Play

Last year’s Katamari Damacy was so quirky, it should have been subtitled “Marketed to Stoners.’ Its star, a little green prince, was forced to roll a giant gravity ball to atone for the sins of his father, the King of the Cosmos, who had gotten drunk one day and knocked…

Another Look at a Legend

Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection (Universal Studios) Alfred Hitchcock may be the best pop filmmaker in our history, and this gorgeous 14-film set is certainly worthy of the master. Licensing issues kept it from being as “definitive’ as the box claims — missing, most notably, are Hitchcock’s classic Cary Grant…

Our top DVD picks for the week of October 4.

The Amityville Horror: Special Edition (Columbia/Tristar) Beyond the Gates of Splendor (Fox) The Black Keys Live (Fat Possum) Christmas With SCTV (Sony Music) Count Duckula: The Complete First Season (Koch Vision) Cream: Royal Albert Hall (Warner Strategic Marketing) Drawn Together Uncensored: Season One (Paramount) The Fly and The Fly II:…

Land Shapes

In January 2003, Carol Dickinson, then director of Foothills Art Center in Golden, went to that institution’s board of directors with an idea for a contemporary sculpture garden to commemorate her and her husband Don’s commitment to the center. After a decade of service, Dickinson was contemplating her retirement and…

Jess Moroles: small sculptures

Jesús Moroles is the artist of the moment following the recent unveiling of his “Granite Aspens,” the centerpiece of the brand-new Carol and Don Dickinson Sculpture Garden at Foothills Art Center in Golden (see review). To coincide with that event, Artyard Contemporary Sculpture (1251 South Pearl Street, 303-777-3219) is presenting…

Sketches

Full and PLANNING.ABSTRACT. Denver painter Bruce Price is clearly Colorado’s preeminent post-minimalist, as proved by the recent batch of fabulous creations in FULL: New Paintings by Bruce Price. These paintings, though clearly a continuation of Price’s past efforts, are also completely new-looking and very different conceptually. A protegé of the…

A World Apartheid

Athol Fugard’s Master Harold and the Boys takes place in a teahouse in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, during the time of apartheid. The Master Harold of the title is a seventeen-year-old boy; during the play, his mother is manifest only as a voice on the phone, and we learn that…

Now Playing

Ain’t Misbehavin’. Five terrific performers and a slate of Fats Waller songs. How can you go wrong? Ain’t Misbehavin’, a jazzy, bluesy Waller showcase that brings the world of 1930s Harlem to life, is often staged in a broadly presentational style, with lots of humor, shtick, dancing and acting out,…

Say Cheese

Ah, Wallace and Gromit. Who doesn’t get a little lift at the sound of those names? Who doesn’t feel the edges of her mouth begin to tickle toward a smile, her heart grow warmer with images of the love between a (plasticine) man and his (plasticine) dog? Perhaps you’re not…

Something Missing

In 2001, Jonathan Safran Foer made an astounding literary debut. “A Very Rigid Search,” published by The New Yorker, was his hilarious, heartbreaking account of an attempt by a young American man (named, cheekily, Jonathan Safran Foer) to find a Ukrainian woman who had saved his grandfather from the Nazis…

Goy Gevalt

Director Curtis Hanson, a journeyman only recently bestowed with the title of Great Director, has already made his horror movie (1973’s The Arousers), his kiddie action comedy (1980’s The Little Dragons), his teen sex romp (1983’s Losin’ It ), his handful of Hitchcock riffs (1987’s The Bedroom Window, 1990’s Bad…

You Got Served

All the publicity for Waiting… has focused on the scene in which an annoying customer at the fictional chain restaurant ShenaniganZ sends her food back to the kitchen, where it meets with all sorts of nasty modifications, courtesy of some dandruff, pubic hair and mucus. The teaser posters depicted similarly…

The Face of Terror

One of the strongest — and sure to be controversial — films of the year, The War Within goes places that other films wouldn’t dare go. Thoughtfully written and nicely acted, it follows an Islamic suicide bomber who comes to New York City with a deadly plan. The film in…

The Conformist

Two years before he stunned the film world with 1972’s Last Tango in Paris, 29-year-old Bernardo Bertolucci directed The Conformist, a deeply unsettling portrait of a Fascist secret policeman (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who represses his true urges — social and sexual — in a cowardly attempt to embrace the dangerous ideological…

Doll Parts

Jacqueline Susann’s 1966 bestseller, Valley of the Dolls, explored the price of fame, wealth and love in the duplicitous world of Hollywood excess. A trashfest rife with jealousy, plastic surgery, insanity and self-destruction, the camp classic — laughably adapted for the screen in 1967 — proved conclusively that uppers and…

Day-by-Day Picks

Thursday, October 6 The folks at the Colorado Center for the Book will take a different tack tonight at the annual Colorado Book Awards Gala, casting an air of celebrity upon this year’s honorees with an e-town-style ceremony that re-creates the Boulder public-radio show’s successful amalgamation of music and interviews…

Cooked

Fresh off a charity show in Dublin with Denis Leary, red-hot comedian Dane Cook likens his career in comedy — which has him teetering on the precipice of Seinfeld-like superstardom — to that of a ballplayer’s. “At first you’re just trying to get hits,” Cook explains. “But once you’re Mark…

Talking Shop

Mistress Raven’s been around the block, but this time she’s hoping to stay put. The driving force behind Rave’s Oh My Goth! has moved her emporium — originally an Uptown antique- and vintage-clothing store favored by drag queens — three times, but this latest location looks like the perfect spot…

Rolling, Rolling, Rolling

THURS, 10/6 Alcohol tends to facilitate both good and bad ideas. Bad ideas come in the form of, say, the woman in Georgia who last month assaulted an officer with a plate of chicken wings after being pulled over for drunk driving. In contrast, a good idea would be the…

Chop House

SAT, 10/8 Artists and the Hells Angels have a long and storied history. In 1965, freelance journalist Hunter S. Thompson introduced Ken Kesey to a few of the Angels he was writing about at the time. The grizzly road soldiers were smitten with the wide-eyed piper and accepted his invitation…