In the gangsta pantheon, nobody gets more respect than Tony Montana. Consider all the homages: Not one, but two rappers have named themselves after Montana (Scarface of the Geto Boys and Tony Yayo of G-Unit), and Nas borrowed Montana’s slogan for his breakout hit, “The World Is Yours.” Indeed, the…
Anna Karenina (Kino) Arrested Development: Seasons One-Three (Fox) The Best of the Scripps National Spelling Bee (ESPN) Beverly Hills 90210: The Complete First Season (Paramount) Cinema Paradiso (Weinstein) The Fallen Idol (Criterion) Freak Out (Anchor Bay) Jag: The Complete Second Season (Paramount) The James Bond Collection: Volumes One and Two…
Jack Finlaw, the director of Denver’s Division of Theaters and Arenas, has a handsome collection of cufflinks. He should — he’s been collecting since he was a boy. “I got my first pair when I was nine or ten,” Finlaw says. “I wanted to copy my grandfather.” When he landed…
Skinnies or boot-cut jeans? Is black really the new black? Getting stylishly dressed in the morning is hard enough, but what do you wear on election day if you’re vying for Colorado’s top job? The Cat’s Pajamas decided to help Bob Beauprez and Bill Ritter out with that pressing question,…
Constance Eaton-Brown owned an antique store on the East Colfax Avenue strip for years and years. Old-timers will remember Eaton-Brown’s shop, Collector’s Choice, as a cramped, dark and musty antique store that specialized in costumes and even won some Westword Best of Denver nods back in the ’80s. Eaton-Brown was…
You can’t see Happy Feet at the Cherry Creek Shopping Center. As with Narnia — the movie that inspired last year’s holiday display — Happy Feet won’t be showing at the Colorado Cinemas Cherry Creek 8, because the independent chain doesn’t have the pull of a giant, five-billion-screen multiplex. Pity…
Well-known wine writer and entrepreneur Alexis Lichine once said: “When it comes to wine, I tell people to throw away the vintage charts and invest in a corkscrew. The best way to learn about wine is the drinking.” And this week, our epicurean mayor encourages everyone to do just that:…
In this day and age, it’s not uncommon to see some color instead of stark, unending black at a funeral or memorial service. But those who dared to don anything else at such affairs would have been socially ostracized in Victorian times. And wearing black wasn’t the only rule of…
If I got to make one wish, know what I’d wish for? The chance to meet a pirate named Jack. Well, Captain Jack, preferably. Maybe it’s Johnny Depp’s impish smile, or the devil-may-care glint in his gorgeous, bottomless eyes when he straps on the persona of Captain Jack Sparrow. Maybe…
Artist Anna-Karin is all about the light in New Mexico. She left her home on the Baltic Sea to travel the world, and when she got to the Land of Enchantment, she was captivated by the Southwestern splendor. Ever since, she’s been using vibrant color to paint dramatic landscapes and…
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is funnier than its malapropic title — the audience with whom I saw the movie wasn’t laughing so much as howling — and even more difficult to parse. Eyes wide, face fixed in an avid grin, Sacha Baron…
Milestone in Motion Picture History: On Halloween weekend 2006, Saw III grossed $34.3 million to become the Iraq War era’s bloodiest chart-topping torture movie whose victims don’t include Jesus of Nazareth. God or Jack Valenti only knows how this work of pure entertainment got away with an R rating “for…
Almost everything about OpenStage Theatre’s production of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan is superb, with the exception of the director’s basic concept — and that’s a very big exception. The cast, led by Jessica V. Freestone as Joan — a strange, stubborn young peasant woman of fifteenth-century France who emerges…
The novel Phantom of the Opera was written by Gaston LeRoux in 1911. Although it has inspired several films, most people know the story from the massive, windy Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, with its throbbing score and astonishing special effects. Before that version hit, playwright Arthur Kopit and songwriter Maury…
The Big Bang. Sometimes it’s nice not to have to think too much, to just settle back and watch a couple of frenetically energetic guys working really hard to earn your good will — and your entertainment dollars. Oh, and to make you laugh. The Big Bang posits the following…
Mayor John Hickenlooper’s predecessors made that whole mayoral-legacy business look like a snap. Federico Peña can be credited with many important things, including shoving the idea of a lower-downtown historic district down the throats of property owners, thus saving the neighborhood from being scraped for surface parking. And he became…
Now that famous New Yorker Steven Holl is no longer involved with designing the courthouse portion of the Justice Center complex (see review, page 44), all the talk is about whether or not the local architectural firm klipp is up to the job. So it’s perhaps relevant to look at…
Eugene Yelchin. Over the past several years, Singer Gallery director Simon Zalkind has often presented exhibits highlighting the work of Jewish artists who hail from the former Soviet Union. And for these exhibits, Zalkind has turned to Mina Litinsky, director of the Sloan Gallery in LoDo, who’s an acknowledged expert…
Mission: Impossible III: Special Edition (Paramount) On the commentary track, director J.J. Abrams and star Tom Cruise sound like they’ve fallen in love; you might say they complete each other’s sentences, except that’s just Cruise interrupting the Alias creator, who rescued a franchise by streamlining it, lightening it, brightening it,…
Few phenomena are as hugely popular and bitterly mocked as the Dance Dance Revolution series. That’s probably because humanity falls into two camps: fleet-footed whiz kids and rhythm-impaired klutzes. This reviewer falls into the latter category, despite having seen Riverdance an unhealthy number of times. For a game that’s mainly…
Baywatch: Season 1 (First Look) The Benny Hill Collection (Music Video Dist.) CSI: Miami — The Complete Fourth Season (Paramount) Down to the Bone (Hart Sharp) Future-Kill: Limited Collector’s Edition (Subversive) Ghost in the Shell SAC: Complete Collection (Manga) The Ghost Whisperer: The Complete First Season (Paramount) Hardcastle and McCormick:…
Thanks to Audrey Hepburn’s Gap commercial, skinny jeans are everywhere this fall. But, seriously, The Cat’s Pajamas knows that unless you actually want to exaggerate those child-bearing hips, these things should only be worn by the tiniest of bulimics — and then only if they’ve got waif legs, too. So…
