Fair Games

Contemporary furniture-maker Chase DeForest already has a style all her own, building topsy-turvy cabinets and drawers from both reclaimed materials and fine hardwoods alike. But it’s her side line, inspired by her own sports-minded disposition, that’s turning heads and making people smile these days. That endeavor, characterized by pieces built…

Liberal Learning

Paul Krugman might not be everybody’s cup of tea — there are those who argue that his biweekly op-ed column in the New York Times is more partisan than academic — but the man’s got brains, and you can’t argue with that. A professor of economics and international affairs at…

High Brow Art

Day of the Dead devotees will just die for Beads, Braids, Brows and Bones, an All Saints Day tribute to apparitions past and present, featuring ten local artists flaunting their Fridastyle. This is the third year Studio Bead has hosted the haunting affair, which shines a light on art, culture…

The Singing Bee

This year’s Cocktails & Karaoke fundraiser for the Kunsberg School for chronically ill children (located on the National Jewish Medical and Research Center campus) is going to be much like the previous five — because you can’t improve on perfection. After all, what could possibly be more entertaining than a…

Your Royal Spyness

Gentlemen, polish your best British accent, practice your witty one-liners and prepare to step into the shoes of suave secret agent James Bond. Ladies, slip on a cocktail dress and adopt a suggestive double entendre as a pseudonym, and who knows? Maybe you’ll meet the Bond of your dreams. Tonight’s…

Bee Movie

After making a mint off a series about nothing, Jerry Seinfeld apparently decided his first feature film ought to be about something — in the case of Bee Movie, the enslavement and torture of bees for the pleasure and profit of humans, which is, like, hilarious. It’s rather tempting to…

Dan in Real Life

Dan in Real Life has this much going for it: It is not the worst Steve Carell film of 2007. That honor, of course, goes to Evan Almighty, which even the Lord walked out of during the second reel. Fact is, Dan in Real Life isn’t really much of a…

Lake of Fire

Named for the spot in Christian-fundamentalist hell where sinners are condemned to spend eternity, Tony Kaye’s Lake of Fire is a provocatively beautiful movie on the hottest hot-button issue in American life: a woman’s right to an abortion. The British-born Kaye, an enormously successful maker of deluxe TV commercials, relocated…

Control

Rock films come in two forms. The first is the concert/documentary variety, the best of which dynamically pinpoint a band’s musical moment within the context of its era: the Maysles Brothers and Charlotte Zwerin chronicling the Stones in Gimme Shelter, Martin Scorsese celebrating the Band in The Last Waltz. Then…

Reservation Road

I gave up after about 100 pages of John Burnham Schwartz’s 1998 novel Reservation Road, a typically overwritten and contrived slice of mass-market literary pablum that hopscotches between the points-of-view of three people — the grieving mom, the grieving dad and the perpetrator — involved in the hit-and-run death of…

Gruesome Twosome

It’s Halloween, and you want to go see a scary movie, but you’re less than thrilled with your available choices. The Denver Film Society feels your pain, which is why, on October 30 and 31, Starz FilmCenter in the Tivoli is screening a Gruesome Twosome, featuring the flicks Murder Party…

Big Bang for Your Buck

Whether it’s $600 PlayStation 3s or the five bucks Nintendo shamelessly charges for 20-year-old NES games on the Wii’s Virtual Console, gamers have gotten used to assuming the position when it comes to the costs of their hobby. So if you’ve just heard about The Orange Box — five of…

The Boys Are Back

Directors Series: Stanley Kubrick(Warner Bros.) Most of the old Kubrick DVDs were crap: full-screen editions with poor pictures and virtually no special features. This set makes up for them with 2001, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut (hey, who farted?), all looking great and…

Up and Coming

The Adventures of Aquaman (Warner Bros.) The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Volume One (Paramount) Battleship Potemkin (Kino) Breathless: The Criterion Collection (Criterion) Commune (First Run) The Company (Sony) Fantastic Planet (Accent Cinema) Home of the Brave (MGM) Hostel: Director’s Cut (Sony) Hostel: Part II (Sony)Into Great Silence (Zeitgeist) The…

The Night Heron

The setting is a hovel in England’s Cambridgeshire fens, a flimsy wood structure that offers only the barest protection from the elements, both natural and human. The protagonists are a pair of gardeners who have lost their jobs at Cambridge University’s Christ Church College — Wattmore because of accusations concerning…

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

The curtain call saddened me. As the performers gathered on stage looking jacked up and happy, audience members were already pushing along the aisles and heading for the doors. I could understand their impatience: It had been a long and unsatisfactory evening. At the same time, I think it’s rude…

Now Playing

Defiance. The second play in a projected trilogy (the first is Doubt, which took the Pulitzer Prize and will be staged at the Denver Center in spring), Defiance examines the state of the U.S. Marine Corps in 1971, when the Vietnam War had lost all vestige of legitimacy for most…

Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver

Last week, as I stood at the corner of 15th and Delgany streets and took in the nearly finished Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver, a part of me still couldn’t believe it had actually happened. In just over a decade, this little, privately funded and perpetually-strapped-for-cash institution had grown from a…

Substance: Diverse Practices From the Periphery

Don’t expect to see Movado watches, Venini vases, Barcelona chairs or any other luxury item in Substance: Diverse Practices From the Periphery, the large and ambitious design show at Metro State’s Center for Visual Art in LoDo (1734 Wazee Street, 303-294-5207, www.mscd.edu). Instead, curator Lisa Abendroth has given the show…

Now showing

American Dreams. Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid were among the first artists to embrace conceptual realism in the 1960s. Although the two no longer collaborate, American Dreams, at the Singer Gallery, focuses on a body of work they did in the 1990s. The paintings and collages combine images of George…

The Best Medicine

For some, Greg Baumhauer is the foul-mouthed host of the open-mike comedy night at the Squire Lounge. For others, Baumhauer is the drag-queen waitress making you squirm, then over-tip, at the Bump ‘n’ Grind Cafe. For me, Greg is my comedy partner who recently broke both of his hands swerving…

Big Bad Woolf

Are you a theater junkie forced to stay home and wallow in an absinthe-induced haze because Denver stages are dark on Monday nights? Well, don’t start hallucinating yet: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (the Mike Nichols film) is playing tonight at 7 p.m. at Starz FilmCenter in the Tivoli, in…