Gratuitous randomness: Spider-Man about town

What with Tobey Maguire all sincerely pining for Mary Jane and the (admittedly badass) spectacle of CGI overload in the new Spider-Man movies, we occasionally long for the good old days, the days when Spider-Man was shittily drawn and was sort of a dick. Well, that second part isn’t necessarily…

Twitter Tuesday: Don Lemon’s comin’ out

If Don Lemon’s recent admission about his sexual orientation via his Twitter account (and through the discussion of his new memoir, Transparent, due out next month) isn’t testament to the power of this micro-social networking site, we don’t know what is. In fact, it was this piece of personal news…

Hooters urges you to lop off your dog’s testes with free chicken wings

The least likely demographic to neuter a dog, a recent PetSmart study found, is apparently also the demographic most likely to attend a monster-truck-related event, purchase a Coed Naked T-shirt or enjoy the delicious food and ambience of Hooters, everyone’s favorite restaurant named after mondo gazongas. The study found that…

Screensaver porno fail: Your moment of lulz

In this crazy culture of individuality, people like to express themselves. They like to personalize their personal things so that everybody will know how personal they are, because our lives in the culture of personalization hinge on the assumption that other people are not too relentlessly self-involved in their own…

Comment of the day: Connecting with the energy of the earth

Nothing makes a better target for ironic mockery than sincerity, and when it comes to sincerity, hippies — with their happiness and their frolicking — are a reliable go-to. Whatever you say about them, though, they clearly know how to have a good time; at least, hippie-sympathizing writer Amber Taufen…

Our commercial culture: Google Chrome is the new reality

Advertising is like a cultural mirror, which shapes the way we think of ourselves and others. But are our commercials reflections of us or are we reflections of our commercials? This question of advertising’s power to shape our culture comes to mind when watching this new spot for Google Chrome,…

Today in Stoke: Never Summer’s Heather Baroody, Class of 2011

Heather Baroody is so hardcore she wears snowboard binding screws as earrings. We last caught up with her last January as part of our cover story profile on her sponsors at Never Summer, and it turns out she’s been busy since then: Last month she won both the Women’s Slopestyle…

Jesus vs. Bono: Who would win? The founder of PeaceJam intends to find out

Come Saturday, Colorado’s poised to have more incoming messiahs than anybody ever asked for, including the evangelicals; besides being the scheduled day of Jesus’ second coming according to Biblical number-cruncher Harold Camping, it’s also the day Bono comes to Denver with U2 for a show at Invesco Field — all…

Now Showing

15 Colorado Artists. The Kirkland Museum is presenting a historical show that tracks the beginnings of post-war modernism in Denver using the artist group 15 Colorado Artists as an index. The story goes that the Denver Artists Guild was hostile to modernism at the time. This led to a split,…

Now Showing

Five Course Love. This production consists of five musical scenes set in five different restaurants, each one a broad parody in which author Gregg Coffin spoofs stereotypes while shamelessly using and abusing them. There’s a barbecue place featuring country/Western music; an Italian restaurant where a mob wife is cheating —…

Rutger Hauer is a man on a mission in Hobo With a Shotgun

Pick a reason to balk at this spot-on, garishly threadbare paean to ’80s no-budget sleaze: It apes a genre that was already creaky when its director/co-writer, Jason Eisener, was still in nappies; it’s nauseatingly violent; it began life (and arguably should’ve finished it) as a mock trailer for faux-grindhouse gazillionaires…

The Pirates franchise is just about washed up

After sinking into self-important tedium with its prior two overstuffed installments, Pirates of the Caribbean seemed destined for burial at sea. And yet the soggy franchise and Johnny Depp’s foppish rapscallion return again for On Stranger Tides — to search for the fountain of youth, no less, a quest that…

Mel Gibson loses it in The Beaver

An earnest, intermittently droll dramedy about a manic-depressive toy manufacturer and his bewildered family, The Beaver is a parable that’s not easily parsed. While director Jodie Foster fails to maintain a consistent tone — could there be such a thing as inspirational satire? — the movie’s lopsided wobble is undeniably…

A Number ponders identity issues and nature vs. nurture

Caryl Churchill is not a playwright who repeats herself. She doesn’t have an immediately identifiable writing style or revert to certain kinds of characters or situations. Although her work tends to be politically aware, highly original and inventive in terms of stagecraft, each play is distinctly different. A Number, first…

Billy Elliot dances around its shortcomings with Broadway cliches

The story of Billy Elliot is deeply appealing: During the 1980s, as Maggie Thatcher wars with the powerful coal-mining union as part of her campaign to destroy British labor, an eleven-year-old miner’s son stumbles into a ballet class and discovers an unlikely love of dance. Naturally, this appalls his tough…

Tonight: Jerry Aronson appears with an Allen Ginsberg double feature

When director Jerry Aronson screened his documentary The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg for Ginsberg himself before the film’s release in 1994, the iconic poet is said to have nodded his head and reflectively quipped, “So that’s Allen Ginsberg.” With good reason: Even all these years later, Life and…