Fashion calendar is full of holiday style in early December

With holiday shopping in full swing, we’ve packaged up some fashionable events to make your season bright in early December — starting with the Red Ball, an annual fundraiser for the Colorado AIDS Project. See also: Diana Vreeland might have loved words as much as she loved fashion…

The Artsmyths costume shop is puttin’ on the ritz at the Mercury Cafe

Halloween is long gone, but costume fiends don’t care: they’re always on the hunt for the next party. Which is why the Denver mask shop ArtSmyths is presenting Puttin’ On The Ritz at the Mercury Café this Saturday, November 30. ArtSmyth’s owner, Tiffany Smyth, is throwing Jazz-era dead-celebrities funeral party,…

The Denver Art Museum has your Passport to Paris

When the Denver Art Museum doubled its exhibition space in 2006 by building the Frederic C. Hamilton wing across the street from its iconic Gio Ponti tower, the idea was to use the new building for temporary exhibits — in particular, big blockbusters. A lot of people, especially art writers,…

Looking for ’80s action? Homefront almost delivers

Once upon a time — the 1980s — you could walk into a movie theater any day of the year, plop down a few bucks, and watch one man kick another man’s ass. Not every action flick was great, but most were good enough, the film equivalent of pizza. Back…

Oldboy: Has Spike Lee lost his stylistic touch?

Unlike the Park Chan-wook picture it’s based on, Spike Lee’s Oldboy is drab and humorless, devoid of the stylistic curlicues that can get you through even a bad Spike Lee film. Like its hero, a clueless lug who’s imprisoned for twenty years by an invisible captor for a transgression he…

Jackie and Me strikes out at the Denver Center

I’m no sports fan, but I am capable of responding to the myth and magic of baseball. A couple of years ago, I was absorbed and delighted by Ken Weitzman’s The Catch, which grew out of the Denver Center’s New Play Summit to receive a full production. This play presented…

Now Showing

Clark Richert. In the few years it’s been in business, Gildar Gallery has mostly showcased young and up-and-coming artists, but with Dimension and Symmetry: Clark Richert, the intimate space on Broadway has moved to Denver’s big time, as Richert is among the best-known artists in the state. The show comes…

Now Playing

Rancho Mirage. The dialogue in Rancho Mirageis swift and clever and the characters are vivid, if not particularly deep or likable. But while the trials and tribulations of the three couples involved are standard-issue — infidelity, money problems — they’re presented in ways that are completely, off-the-map absurd. We start…

Pass the Tofurkey

If you don’t eat meat, holidays like Thanksgiving — which revolve around food — can be a bit daunting, because not only do you have to deal with the typical obnoxious-relative routine, but there’s not even a plate full of goodies to concentrate on while you pretend not to hear…

Hot To Trot

That pecan pie packs plenty of calories, but you can preemptively burn them off today at the 40th Annual Mile High United Way Turkey Trot in Washington Park. Last year, more than 9,500 runners registered, and upwards of 20,000 attended the celebrated trot, which Forbes has called one of the…

Sketchy Details

We usually see finished artwork in gallery exhibits: pieces that tie up the loose ends of a process to make a visual — or visceral — statement. But the process is also interesting, and that’s what fascinated Emily Moore of Love Gallery as curator of a new invitational show, Origins,…

Think Small for the Holidays

If you ask Denver milliner Susan Dillon, it’s okay to want to get a good price on a new TV — but is it really worth camping out in front of Best Buy for two days? Dillon’s all about thinking small, local and handmade this holiday season, and she’s put…

Put on Your Red Dress

When the Red Ball fashion show started out in 2009, it was a much smaller affair, recalls Jeff Trujillo of the Denver branch of the Colorado AIDS Project. But its intent remains the same. “This year’s show, being the fifth anniversary, happens to fall on World AIDS Day,” he notes…

Behind the Mask

The pairing of clay artists Gayla Lemke and Marie EvB Gibbons goes back more than twenty years; friends and colleagues, they met at the old Off-Center co-op in Arvada and have since shown work side by side many times, in various settings. Now the two ceramic wizards will again get…

Speaking as One

Hosted by local comic Ben Roy and featuring a performance from Jonny 5 of Flobots, tonight’s Raise Your Glass, Raise Your Voice fundraiser benefits the Denver Voice, a nonprofit newspaper that works to end the stigma of homelessness: Not only is the newspaper a method of communication for the community,…

I’m Your Puppet

It’s that time of year when every stage in town begins to haul out its treacly family-friendly holiday fare, which is nice…but maybe redundant. Fa la la la la, ho-humbug. If yet another round of A Christmas Carol or It’s a Wonderful Life doesn’t put the schnapps in your hot…

Motel Flicks

“I had a dream, as a young person, that there was somebody burying humans, upright, in their garden,” recalls Cruel Autumn horror-movie series host Theresa Mercado. “Their heads were above the ground, but they couldn’t talk, for some reason.” It wasn’t until years later, while working in a video store,…

Light It Up

Ringing in the eighth and final night of Hanukkah, this evening’s Festival of Lights is a party tailor-made for everybody. A BYO-menorah lighting celebration is just one part of the Colorado Hebrew Chorale’s annual interfaith gathering of song, dance and generous servings of latkes. Joined by the Rocky Mountain Ringers,…

Blind Ambitions

RedLine Gallery has a reputation for housing exhibitions with a global stretch, but once annually, it shines the spotlight on its greatest asset: its own diverse group of resident artists, who paint, sculpt, install and create on the premises in studios awarded for two-year terms. For this year’s resident-artist exhibition,…

Fast-Acting Fun

Whatever happened to the days when someone said, “Hey, gang, let’s put on a show!” — and things happened overnight, just like that, to rave reviews? Outside of a few summer-break escapades in the rec room, it’s not so common an occurrence these days, at least not until now. Boulder-area…