Some art-house programmer would be wise to schedule a double bill of The Aristocrats, Paul Provenza’s talkumentary about the dirtiest joke ever told, and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, writer-director Judd Apatow’s near-brilliant movie about a grown-up geek who simply lost interest in trying to get laid. Both offer countless giddy variations…
Red Eye may not seem to be your typical Wes Craven movie. It’s not really horror, there are no marketable monsters, and unlike Cursed, Scream 3, and other recent Craven offerings, it’s actually an enjoyable time at the movies. But heroine Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams) is very much in the…
Once upon a time, Wheat Ridge was the carnation-growing capital of the planet. Those sweet days have faded like a post-prom corsage, but the city continues to celebrate its floral heritage by throwing a kick-ass Carnation Festival every year. This summer’s festivities will bloom like never before with the Wheat…
Thursday, August 18 Some people just have to be the first to do everything. If you fit that profile, grab your tickets for tonight’s Historic Denver 35th Anniversary Gala. The swanky fundraiser doubles as a sneak peek at the renovated Quigg Newton Auditorium Theatre — home of the elegant new…
“This isn’t a Michael Moore movie,” Gary Austin says of his new one-man stage show, Oil. “I’m entertaining an audience in the same way that any theatrical presentation is meant to. But I want to actually inform as well as entertain. That’s how I get my point across.” When it…
MON, 8/22 Every year the Colorado Theatre Guild holds a fundraising gala, but this year’s offering, Theatre Night In, is a little different. To begin with, the guild intends to use the proceeds not for administrative purposes — the organization helps theater artists network and promotes the art form’s visibility…
FRI, 8/19 When I was growing up, pretty much every kid I knew received a brand-new remote-control car for Christmas. This was not because of some vast improvement in remote-control-car technology, but because by the end of the year, our old cars were so devastated through use that they were…
SAT, 8/20 Get a hip-hop education tonight at Blackberries Ice Cream & Coffee Lounge, 710 East 26th Avenue. Tupac’s acting debut, Juice, will screen as part of the of the Colorado Hip-Hop Coalition’s every-other-Saturday Hip-Hop Flix Film Series. The show goes on at 7:15 p.m., and admission is free, although…
FRI, 8/19 You can get everything you want except “Alice’s Restaurant.” That’s been songsmith Arlo Guthrie’s refrain for the past ten years or so. For one thing, the silver-haired folkie royal felt the autobiographical, anti-war, marathon story-song that was his signature for decades was simply too long to remember or…
I well recall the first time I saw Warren Kelly’s work. It was the summer of 2002, and I had found myself at Pirate: a contemporary art oasis. In the main space was a thoroughly amazing and absolutely unforgettable painting solo. I thought to myself, Whoever did these pieces has…
There are big changes afoot at Pirate: a contemporary art oasis (3659 Navajo Street, 303-458-6058). The most important one is that the co-op’s longtime home has gotten substantially smaller. Landlords Chandler Romeo and Reed Weimer are remodeling the space, putting in new walls, new doors and a new entrance. As…
2005 Biennial BLOW OUT. This is the third in a series of biennials presented at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art. In the past, participation in these biennials was limited to artists from around here; for the 2005 version, it’s been expanded to include artists working in most of the Western…
Impulse Theater. Basements and comedy go together like beer and nuts or toddlers and sandboxes. The basement of the Wynkoop Brewery where Impulse Theater performs is crowded, loud and energetic. Impulse does no prepared skits, nothing but pure improv — which means that what you see changes every night, and…
“I always cannot understand why girls don’t wanna be with me for a long time,” says Timothy Treadwell, subject of the documentary Grizzly Man. “I have really a nice personality — I’m fun, I’m very very good in the…umm, well, you’re not supposed to say that when you’re a guy,…
The old John Wayne-Dean Martin hayburner The Sons of Katie Elder wasn’t a very good movie the first time around — Dino and a cowboy hat go together about as well as Sinatra and bib overalls — and John Singleton’s jokey, urbanized rehash, while not bad, isn’t likely to snow…
Pity the daily newspaper critic who must review The Aristocrats without using such phrases as “A longshoreman’s arm up a little girl’s ass,” “Then my wife goes down on my son while the dog’s licking his balls,” “My grandmother’s covered in my cum,” and “Is it shit before piss, or…
The Aristocrats may be the foulest-mouthed movie of the summer, but Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo is the foulest in deed, actually depicting some of the nigh-unspeakable acts that are merely hypothetically talked about in the former film. It’s been a while since we’ve seen a big-time gross-out comedy, and European…
“The most daring rescue mission of our time is a story that has never been told,” boasts the poster for The Great Raid. The credits of the film, however, reveal that it’s based on not one, but two books about the 6th Ranger Battalion, which ventured 30 miles into enemy…
The Skeleton Key ranks high on the list of 2005’s funniest films, bested only by the first two-thirds of The Wedding Crashers, all of The Aristocrats, and that part in Stealth where the airplane starts sassing Josh Lucas. Doubtful that was the intention of director Iain Softley (K-PAX, an inexplicably…
The disturbing French filmmaker Francois Ozon (Swimming Pool, Under the Sand) has never won any friends in America among the Focus on the Family crowd. Long obsessed with the hazards and the hidden agendas of traditional marriage, Ozon has now launched a full-frontal assault on the whole notion of conjugal…
“You can tell right away our flick ain’t for everyone,” begins a letter by filmmaker Penn Jillette on the website for The Aristocrats, a documentary he helped make. “Our movie uses that four-letter word that begins with “C.’ Our movie uses that word a lot.You know the word; it’s the…
Thursday, August 11 San Francisco-based sound-art superstar Pamela Z, a long-ago graduate of the CU-Boulder College of Music, returns tonight for a concert drawn from her extraordinary repertoire of avant-garde performance/compositions, many of which have been heard around the globe. Already gifted with a set of trained soprano operatic pipes,…
