Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis: Sleazeball or victim? Probably both

Consider this scenario: The guy who created Girls Gone Wild, the collection of Mardi Gras tit-flashing videos popular with frat-boys and lonely unskilled laborers everywhere, offers to give three girls a ride to their car — but then instead of taking them to their car, despite their protests, takes them…

Reader: Lee Mulcahy is a bit of an idealist

Lee Mulcahy’s protracted and very public battle with Aspen’s Skico (which operates Snowmass) over ski instructor pay may have ended in some sense with his firing, but he’s not giving up yet; when he got a commission to do a bike sculpture for the USA Pro Cycling Challenge’s leg through…

How (and why) you throw a party at a hospital

Hospitals are gloomy places, but thankfully, life is all about perspective. Instead of wasting everyone’s time on some boring flowers, a shiny balloon and some chocolate, I wanted to show my friend — and some patrons on the fourth floor at Denver Health — that hospitals are not the depressing,…

YouTube University: How to save a wet cell phone

Long before cell phones began making beelines for toilets, pools and other dangerous bodies of water, pagers were seeing the same fate. If you recall, Usher once sang about girls beeping whenever they wanted to get freaky, and if you (like the author) wore your pager on the front pocket…

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Joseph Coniff. This smart and at times extremely funny show, titled Joseph Coniff: This Is What It’s Like, highlights the efforts of an emerging conceptual artist. Coniff, who studied at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, where he was a protegé of Clark “Drop City” Richert’s, is just…

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Cats. There’s not much of a plot to Cats. You meet the Jellicles, with their cheerful faces and bright black eyes, who dance “under the light of the Jellicle moon”; the Ming-vase-smashing cat burglars, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer; fat, elegant, gentleman’s club-haunting Bustopher Jones; and contrary-minded Rum Tum Tugger. The show’s…

Denver gets Attack the Block, a smart, funny, cheap monster movie

The smartest, funniest cheap monster-movie import this side of June’s Trollhunter, Attack the Block is a near-perfectly balanced seasonal trifle: Anchored in social realism yet determinedly goofy, it’s neither too eager for laughs nor overtly preachy. Set in a sprawling London public-housing compound, the film follows a group of teenage…

The Interrupters follows peace brokers in Chicago

Inspired by a 2008 New York Times Magazine article by Alex Kotlowitz, Steve James’s commanding documentary The Interrupters, about “violence interrupters” in Chicago, who intervene in conflicts before they escalate into gunshots, unfolds as deeply reported journalism. Much like Hoop Dreams (1994), James’s in-depth examination of the athletic aspirations of…

Denver TV host Chris Parente gets bitch-slapped by Steve Carell

Don’t talk shit to Steve Carell, because apparently he will slap you like a bitch. Not in a scary, Wayne-Brady-turned-evil kind of way — no, Steve Carell is way too nice for that, and also, in a weird way, he’s even scarier. Because somehow, Steve Carell is a sweet enough…

Viva la Lucha! Mexican Wrestling takes over El Diablo (Photos)

It was back in 1942 that a mysterious, silver-masked Luchador known only as El Santo appeared on the scene in Mexico City as an unknown contestant in an eight-man battle royale. He won that fight, but what was more important was that he would change wrestling forever — an influence…