So lame it’s…cool? Nancy Drew, writer-director Andrew Fleming’s attempt to jump-start a new Warner Bros. franchise, is a movie flaunting a most obvious demographic strategy: a teen flick with a sensibility, or at least a sense of humor, that’s most definitely parental. Invented in 1930 by the same Stratemeyer syndicate…
Joe Orton is one of those working-class bad-boy authors that the British middle class so enjoys being poked in the eye by. John Osborne, author of Look Back in Anger, preceded him; Martin McDonagh is a modern example. Orton’s small body of work — all completed in the 1960s, when…
This is not a play, and it’s not exactly a cabaret act, either; it’s sort of a cross between a slumber party and a church service. The premise: A group of women who sang together as children in a choir called the Heavenly Voices comes together for a reunion. They…
Last week I took in the recently unveiled permanent installation of the selections from the Herbert Bayer collection that are now displayed on the lower level of the Frederic C. Hamilton Building of the Denver Art Museum. The ad hoc exhibition spaces, which form the lobby of the conference room…
Next month the Clyfford Still Museum presents a sampling of its spectacular collection of work by the late abstract-expressionist giant, including “Self-Portrait,” from 1940 (detail pictured). The exhibit, being mounted at the Denver Art Museum, will be the first opportunity to see the CSM’s collection on display — and the…
Altar Girls. Two very different exhibits roughly collide into one another in the middle of the Museo de las Américas. One part, put together by Museo curator Kristi Martens, is an extravaganza of santos made mostly in Colorado, Mexico and New Mexico, and primarily culled from a recent gift to…
Glastonbury (THINKFilm) Only a Julien Temple concert doc would get the R rating — for nudity (male, mostly, and not terribly flattering at that), drug use (weed, mostly — yawn), language, and sexual content. Also dig the overwrought BBC narration, in which Glastonbury is described as a former refuge for…
I was driving home from work the other day when it occurred to me that, despite being college-educated and reasonably intelligent, I have no idea how my car works. I know the gas goes in, because I do that part. But after that it gets fuzzy. When the mechanic’s telling…
Blood & Chocolate (Sony) Breach (Universal) The Cecil B. DeMille Classics Collection (Passport) Deadwood: The Complete Third Season (HBO) 52 Pick-Up (MGM) Ghost Rider (Sony) The Hardy Boys Nancy Drew Mysteries: Season Two (Universal) Hellboy: Blood & Iron (Anchor Bay) James Stewart: Screen Legend Collection (Universal) Jesse Stone: Night Passage…
Everyone knows where to go for great road food, right? At off-ramp diners, backwoods barbecue shacks, street-corner burger joints and anywhere along the highway that’s built in the shape of something other than a restaurant — a tepee, a dinosaur, a giant banana, what have you. From blue-plate meatloaf to…
When the city’s performing-arts complex was still wishful thinking, planners anticipated that the swath of park along northbound Speer Boulevard between Champa and Arapahoe streets would become an expansive entrance into downtown, an introduction into this city’s cultural life. More than thirty years later, that vision is about to be…
Last time I checked, the beach was hundreds of miles away. Makes it kinda tough to lounge the day away on the sand, soaking up rays, cooling off in the water, catching up on summer reading and ogling the scantily clad hotties meandering past. But before you pack up the…
Die-hard Monty Python and the Holy Grail fans hoping to take those dusty coconut shells off the shelf this summer for Film on the Rocks will have to wait another year, as will families banking on an animated or G-rated feature for the kids. It’s not that the Denver Film…
All of the rain and snow we’ve had has created “a really good year for wildflowers,” says city naturalist Gayle Weinstein, “but it’s a really good year for weeds, too. The flowers are outnumbered a billion to one.” And we’re pulling for the wildflowers, which will be the focus of…
mu-zjik n : 1. a Russian peasant. 2. The highest-scoring stand-alone word possible in SCRABBLE, earning the lexical leviathans who drop it 29 points, plus another fifty if they’re clearing their rack at the end of the game — and that’s without any of that sissy triple-word-count baloney. If you…
Nobody does underbelly, let alone Bangkok underbelly, better than John Burdett, whose detective thriller Bangkok Haunts is set into motion by the unsolved mystery surrounding the victim of a snuff film. This is the third installment in Burdett’s series, which stars Thai cop Sonchai Jitpleecheep and a corrupt cast of…
Foul, foul, foul! We just can’t have any fun without The Man sticking his rules where they don’t belong. Seriously, in the NBA, you can’t even trash-talk without a penalty these days. (Shi’, honky — everyone knows that’s half the fun.) Well, if you’re tired of that no-contact, mind-your-manners version…
When I was a kid, my dad scooped me up every night when he got home from work, and I loved the gasoline scent on his flight suit and his prickly, day-old stubble. When I was a teenager, he invited me on his weekly Corvette cruise, where we would drum…
Before ballroom dancing became a left-field TV sensation thanks to So You Think You Can Dance and Dancing With the Stars, there was Burn the Floor, a live production that began touring the globe in 1999. Floor artistic director/choreographer/dancer Jason Gilkison doesn’t take credit for the success of these broadcast…
The fun starts as soon as the doors open tonight at 6 p.m. at Pandora Jewelry, 220 East 13th Avenue. “We’re immediately doing a free tote-bag giveaway to the first fifty people,” says owner Stephanie Shearer. Then Vivienne VaVoom from Burlesque As It Was (aka Westword contributor Michelle Baldwin) will…
The closing reception for artist Bill Amundson’s Colorado Landscape II: Suburban Graffiti is more final than usual. For several weeks, Amundson has been creating Landscape — a sprawling work that combines illustrations with ambient audio and text representations of random remarks — on the walls of the Philip J. Steele…
Admit it: You know you watch those crazies on TV juggling flaming chainsaws. The burning tools of death float and twist in the air, tossed up and down in a mesmerizing blaze. Deep down, you wish you were that marvelous stuntman, one slip away from losing your hand, one twitch…
