FRI, 9/30 “Some of my greatest friends from college were people that I considered comedy hippies,” says Boulder-based writer and comedian Dave Burdick. “They got into worshiping Del Close and the Upright Citizens Brigade and the spirit of improv. Lately, I’ve been realizing I’m a comedy hippie, too. I just…
SAT, 10/1 I started listening to Johnny Mathis as a joke. Well, not a joke, exactly — but I first embraced his honey-dipped hokeyness with a punk smirk and an ear for kitsch. Years ago, a friend turned me onto the ossified tones of KEZW, 1430 AM, shortly before the…
Desperate Housewives: The Complete First Season (Buena Vista) ABC’s juggernaut drama is made up mostly of elements that have trickled down from HBO: black humor, self-awareness, the radical notion that women over thirty can arouse the national libido. The bonus deleted scenes don’t add much to the story, and behind-the-scenes…
The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D (Buena Vista) Anthrax Anthrology: No Hit Wonders (Sanctuary) The Batman: Season 1, Volume 2 (Warner Bros.) Battlestar Galactica: Season One (Universal) Born Into Brothels (ThinkFilm) Brothers (Universal) Cowards Bend the Knee (Zeitgeist) Divan (Zeitgeist) Inside Deep Throat (Universal) It’s All Gone Pete…
Monica Petty Aiello and her husband, Tyler, are well-known fixtures in Denver’s contemporary art world because they run Studio Aiello, the largest commercial art gallery in the region for the time being. I say “for the time being” because come the first of the year, the Aiellos will cut back…
A Visual Voice. Though not a full-blown retrospective, A Visual Voice: The Language of Herbert Bayer is a significant exhibit. Bayer, one of one of the most important artists who ever lived and worked in the state, was first a student and then a master at the Bauhaus, the early-twentieth-century…
At the center of Lynn Nottage’s gentle, appealing play, Intimate Apparel, is the figure of Esther, a black woman in her thirties living in a boardinghouse in 1905 New York City, and — like so many poor and displaced women before and since — making her living as a seamstress…
As a reviewer, I see a lot of theater productions, and it’s rare for me to want to see one for a second time. But Germinal Stage Denver has more than once mounted a play I’d have liked to re-experience. This is because artistic director Ed Baierlein picks works that…
The Denver Center Theatre Company is beginning its first season under new artistic director Kent Thompson, former director of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. Thompson, 51, took the reins from Donovan Marley, who announced his retirement in January 2004, after 22 years. Theater buffs are wondering what to expect from the…
Assassins. Assassins seethes through the mind like an unsettling wind, hurling aside platitude and raising a host of tormenting questions. This brilliant musical by John Weidman and Stephen Sondheim is exactly the kind of project local companies should be undertaking. It tells the story of nine people who either assassinated…
By conservative estimate, Tim Burton stands to rake in half a billion dollars at the box office this year, thanks to a childlike chocolate maker in mauve rubber gloves and, now, to a lively dead girl with marriage on her mind. As inventive as it is original, Tim Burton¹s Corpse…
In the tradition of A Beautiful Mind and Good Will Hunting comes Proof, a psychological drama about a math genius and the people who worship, care for and endure him. Based on the Pulitzer- and Tony-winning play by David Auburn, Proof is a strong film with intense focus. Its characters…
Flightplan, starring Jodie Foster as a mother who’s either lost her daughter or her mind during a flight from Berlin to New York, is a wonderful movie for about an hour — a moving, gripping rumination on loss, grief and sanity. It works primarily because of its star, whose delicate,…
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…
When one goes to see a movie titled El Crimen Perfecto (literal translation: The Perfect Crime), it might seem unlikely that the title of this Spanish film has been altered for American audiences. But it has — in Spain, the title is Crimen Ferpecto, which makes the crime a general…
It would take a critic more churlish than this one to sneer and bare chicken-like talons at Roll Bounce, a formulaic crowd-pleaser that hits familiar marks but does so well enough that it’s hard to fault anyone involved. The retro-’70s vibe seems kind of obvious, and the irritating Mike Epps,…
What a dazzling prospect: The most accomplished U.S. filmmaker of the last thirty years turns his microphones and cameras for nearly four hours on a legendary musician whose very name has been a condition of life in this country for the last forty. To Martin Scorsese, who’s given us such…
Thursday, September 22 Katrina evacuees continue to be showered with relief, but Indigena Gallery owner Sandra Renteria wants to know where the art supplies are. Her Art Creation Foundation for Children has already been on the scene for victims of political turmoil in Haiti and tsunami survivors in Thailand. Her…
Neil Gaiman seems to be obsessed with “Daisy Bell,” a song from 1892. The antiquated tune pops up like a resurgent weed in several of his short stories and novels. During a phone conversation from his home in Minneapolis, he tries to suss out its significance. “When I was a…
FRI, 9/23 The IMAX feature Mystic India: An Incredible Journey of Inspiration might not be as steamy as HBO’s new series, Rome — it’s a family flick, after all — but its visual pageantry, shown four stories high, can’t be beat. The film, opening today at the Phipps IMAX Theater…
SAT, 9/24 There’s a fine art to selecting your fighting name. It’s got to be something aggressive, but a potential pugilist can’t fly off half-cocked and just hurl out a bunch of words. For instance, the novice brawler can’t pick something like Tom “Once Ripped Out a Guy’s Eyeball in…
FRI, 9/23 Last year, on August 29, KGNU made history. The stalwart, Boulder-based independent radio station — Colorado’s home for such lauded syndicated shows as Democracy Now! — purchased the broadcast frequency of 1430 AM in Denver, expanding its potential audience by millions. “It’s a process, and we’re just barely…
