Halfway through Surfwise, a mesmerizingly ambivalent documentary about an itinerant family of Jewish surfer-dude health nuts, we meet the 84-year-old patriarch, “Doc” Paskowitz, at Los Angeles’s Museum of Tolerance, showing director Doug Pray a blown-up photo of a Nazi preparing to shoot a Jewish mother and child at close range…
You want a history lesson? Take a class. You want clanging swords, sneering villains, storybook romance and bloody vengeance? Here’s a brawny old-school epic to make the CGI tumult of 300, Alexander and Troy look like sissy-boy slap parties. Mongol, alias Genghis Khan: The Early Years, may compress, elide and…
A man in a Michael Jackson outfit — red shirt, black jeans, white face mask — rides hunched over the tiny frame of a clown bike. Jutting out to his side, attached by a wire, is a stuffed monkey puppet with angel wings. The background is a nondescript go-kart track…
The idea behind the Gaia Film Festival is that simple choices can inspire us to make a difference, thus changing the world, one choice at a time. That’s why you’ll find films such as the Colorado premiere of Saida Medvedeva’s Water, which examines the secrets of the most common substance…
It’s probably a good thing Game On wasn’t around to review Ninja Gaiden when it hit Xbox in 2004 — we probably would’ve written “an awesome, brutal, majestic action masterpiece,” then filled the rest of the space with crude crayon drawings of ninjas. Because really, there’d be nothing else to…
This is how the New York Times’s 2003 review of Matt and Ben begins: “Is there anyone who isn’t sick of Ben Affleck, with his J.Lo and his Gigli and the salaams he elicits when he deigns to show up in Project Greenlight?” But therein lies my problem with this…
Thaddeus Phillips, who visits Buntport every year or so, is one of the most interesting theatrical forces around. His Lucidity Suitcase offers proof that all you need for great theater is creativity, imagination and performers with guts, talent and integrity — performers like Tatiana Mallarino and Phillips himself. Phillips approaches…
The Denver Project. Created by Steven Sapp and Mildred Ruiz of New York’s UNIVERSES, this is an attempt to bring the realities of life on the streets to us, the well-fed patrons of Curious, to show that the homeless constitute a society and culture of their own, one that abuts…
It was in the nineteenth century that artists in Europe and the United States, for the first time in millennia, went outside to create their works. This led to a rise in the status of landscape paintings, previously a secondary type of art overshadowed by historic narrative painting and the…
Using pictures to tell stories was definitely a no-no in classic modern art and for the first three quarters of the twentieth century. Manipulating form was the thing for painters to do instead. But in the 1980s and ’90s, narrative painting made a huge comeback in contemporary art circles, and…
Abstraction. A group of untitled abstracts by Ania Gola-Kumor launches this exhibit, which was organized by Sally Perisho. Gola-Kumor is little known around here; in fact, she could be called the best unknown artist in Denver, though she had her first show in town back in 1982. She’s represented here…
When is a Wiffle ball more than just a Wiffle ball? When it’s a light object created by lighting artist Chris Armijo. You can catch Armijo’s work — unexpected light installations that link together mass-produced items — alongside furniture by graphic and industrial designer Dan Sjogren, who “stitches” flat sheets…
If you think there’s something inherently wrong with laughing on a full stomach, stop right here. Tonight’s Standup Comedy and Dinner Shows at the Gorilla Room in Littleton is not for you. On second thought… Here’s the haps: Chow down on a four-course gorge that includes a chicken marsala entree,…
Despite its name and status as the unofficial kick-off party for PrideFest, Gay on Santa Fay isn’t really that gay. Rodney Wallace of 4 Art Studios, one of the founders and organizers of the event, says it’s about celebrating diversity and about the arts community giving back to the gay…
If you’ve never experienced the cute mountain town that is Crested Butte, now’s your chance to take in its rich backdrop of snowcapped peaks and pines and aspens again — and again and again and again. The Bridges of the Butte 24-Hour Townie Tour is not a race. It’s a…
The kids in Artlab, a collaboration between Jose Mercado’s Labryinth Arts Academy and the Platte Forum, had already been working on their theater project on homeless youth for several months — meeting with teenagers at Urban Peak, reading books and surfing online — when they finally gave a reading of…
Don’t put Pinetop Perkins in a pine box — because he’s still got things to do. At a few weeks shy of his 95th birthday, Perkins, who joins Koko Taylor for a taping of tonight’s etown radio show, can no longer hear well enough to conduct telephone interviews, but he…
Decades ago, the gold miners who frequented the Gold Coin Saloon, 120 Main Street in Central City, would throw coins at the wooden-plank ceiling. Those were the days before life insurance, and miners knew that the coins that stuck in the ceiling’s cracks would be used to help support their…
A tip for newbie skateboarders: Start making stickers of the letter G, so that when you encounter one of the gazillion signs that proclaim “No Skateboarding,” you can change the “No” to “Go.” “But, officer,” you can say, “I was just obeying the sign.” Then push like mad down to…
Have you ever had to ask a loved one to pop a pimple or lance a boil located on a part of your body where the sun doesn’t shine? Or sucked on a lozenge and found it falling from your mouth into the lap of a total stranger? Or had…
Teacher’s Pet: I’m a People Person (Lies told in resumés and during job interviews) at Buntport Theater, 717 Lipan Street, is the latest installation in a monthly series that gives participating audience members five minutes on stage to do anything relating to that month’s theme — from singing to reading…
A couple of months ago, Brad K. Evans joined friends at a movie, and although he doesn’t remember the flick they saw, he vividly recalls the fun they had hurling popcorn at the screen, each other, and anything else in range of their lethal kernels. Hence the inspiration for tonight’s…
