In defense of Seth MacFarlane

Filmmaker Seth MacFarlane’s A Million Ways to Die in the West hit theaters recently and on this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, the Village Voice Voice’s Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek, with L.A. Weekly’s Amy Nicholson, talk about his generally offensive body of work. Also on this week’s pod: reviews…

Ten things to do on a Denver stay-cation

There’s a reason why tourists crowd Denver’s city streets each summer: It’s a happening town and sports valhalla, with pro teams, adventurous and ethnic eateries, a downtown mall, urban neighborhoods, a gallery scene, great museums, miles of greenway trails and all the promise of that blue mountainscape on the horizon…

Photos: The new Space Gallery’s grand opening exhibition

Michael Paglia visits Space Gallery in this week’s review, taking in its new architect-designed building on Santa Fe Drive. The opening show fittingly entitled Space Gallery Grand Opening showcases work from every artist associated with Space, including painters and printmakers. Continue reading for photos from Space. See also: Tobias Fike’s…

Army of Darkness approaches geek perfection

There are better films than Army of Darkness. Hell, there are better Evil Dead films than Army of Darkness (ahem, Evil Dead II is clearly the best in the franchise). There are more important films than Army of Darkness (just ask any film school professor). There are probably even more…

Another 100 Colorado Creatives: Laleh Mehran

#76: Laleh Mehran Laleh Mehran represents the new wave of tech-savvy artists, jumping between mediums and testing new ground internationally in the widening digital-art arena. Her video work can be seen on downtown LED screens and as part of the recently departed Monkey Town’s programming, while a new interactive and…

Now Showing

Amy Metier. The William Havu Gallery is currently showing Amy Metier: Preconceived Notions, a marvelous solo that’s filled with modernist-derived abstractions. The show — Metier’s first in-town solo in two years — fills the gallery’s entire main level, not only with her signature paintings, but also with prints featuring experimental…

Now Playing

Shrek: The Musical.There are a lot of things to like about Shrek: The Musical at Boulder’s Dinner Theatre. They include the Dragon, created by Cory Gilstrap and manipulated by a handful of actors. Blessed with the rich, seductive voice of the inimitable Amanda Earls, she’s a riveting, literally huge presence…

Tom Cruise comes full circle in Edge of Tomorrow

In 1986, peaceniks were mad at Tom Cruise. That year, the Navy thanked Top Gun for boosting enlistment with another 20,000 recruits. Since then, Cruise has made more critiques of the military than advertisements for it, most of which (Lions for Lambs, Born on the Fourth of July, The Last…

The Dance of Reality is part memory, part Marquezian fairy tale

The grand old dirty pope of midnight-movie voodoo and post-’60s turn-on, drop-out mythopoeia returns with a vengeance, in his autumnal phase and with — surprise! — a personal look backward at his own childhood. The Dance of Reality may be Alejandro Jodorowsky’s best film, and certainly, in a filmography top-heavy…

The sentimental Ping Pong Summer captures the restless energy of youth

There’s no doubt that Ping Pong Summer is someone’s childhood. It plays like a cherished memory, rosy and warm, rebuilt in minutiae with such affection and detail it’s hard not to be moved by its sincerity. Writer-director Michael Tully weaves his coming-of-age story with all the trappings of the ’80s,…

The new Space Gallery went from prefab to fabulous

Though Denver’s art world can trace its roots back to the late nineteenth century — the Denver Art Museum, for example, was founded in 1893 — it has only reached critical mass since the dawn of the 21st. The most obvious evidence of this was the construction of the DAM’s…

Peggy Jo and the Desolate Nothing is nothing much

Peggy Jo Tallas was an outwardly conventional, quiet-spoken Texas woman who, after a mildly adventurous youth, lived with her mother for many years. Starting at the age of forty, she also robbed banks — perhaps because she was bored, perhaps because she was seeking a fuller and more interesting life,…

The Fault With Our Adapters

Cancer, so costly in real life, can be thrown around pretty cheaply in fiction, which is why most cautious readers and moviegoers are wary of it as a plot element. Call it the Love Story syndrome. But the presence of mortal illness has always been a staple of romantic melodrama,…

Shwing!

The hardest part about making Alamo Drafthouse Cinema’s Wayne’s World Quote-Along work isn’t finding good lines – it’s deciding which great lines are going to make the cut. “When I think about how the quote-alongs are put together, try to whittle it down to the best lines,” explains Keith Garcia,…

Light Fantastic

A celebration of a visually stunning art form born in the late 1970s and brought into the contemporary age with the newest technology, Laserium: The Cosmic Laser Concert returns to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science’s Gates Planetarium for a limited summer run today. The multimedia exhibition blends the…

Red Fang

Red Fang started out at the height of stoner rock’s popularity, and the band’s music displays some of the hallmarks of that movement: sludgy, colossal riffs and distorted vocals scaled to epic dimensions. But the members of Red Fang also spent some of their ’90s youth in Portland, witnessing all…