There are many, many ways for a production to be awful, and The Yiddish Are Coming, at the New Denver Civic Theatre, hits on just about all of them. It’s a cheap little venture — small cast, easy set and costumes, empty-headed concept — put together for the sole purpose…
The Caretaker. The setting is a grimy, one-room flat filled with papers, boxes and mismatched bric-a-brac. It’s an appropriate mole hole for sad, befuddled Aston, who thinks he’s good with his hands, tinkers constantly with a screwdriver and dreams about building a shed in the yard — but it also…
For comic geeks, an X-Men game that promises to fill in the backstory between movies sounds hotter than a date with Jean Grey. Finally, we get to discover what Wolverine has been up to between films — besides winning Tony Awards as alter ego Hugh Jackman, of course. That’s the…
The Devil’s Sword (Mondo Macabro) Few trash movies live up to their reputation, but here’s a balls-out wonder that surpasses it. Grab a 12-pack of Bintang and cue up this jaw-unhinging slab of Indonesian sword-and-sorcery circa 1983 — a start-to-finish feast of martial arts, mullets, flying heads, vestal virgins, dry-ice…
Commander in Chief: 2-Disc Inaugural Edition Part 1 (Disney) The Complete Sherlock Holmes Collection (MPI) Cow Belles (Disney) Danger After Dark (TLA) Evil (Magnolia) Is It Really So Strange? (Frameline) Failure to Launch (Paramount) Family Affair: Season One (MPI) Fear Factor: The First Season (Universal) Imagine Me & You (Fox)…
The one bad thing about PrideFest is that it’s never long enough. We wait all year for our one day in the sun, and when it’s finally here, we give mad props. We wear silly costumes, we march in the parade, we dance, we flirt, we drink warm, weak draft…
Every generation needs an anthem, and for the Beat Generation, it was “Howl.” Spewed onto paper in the mid-’50s by a young Allen Ginsberg, the poetic rant began with “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness” and foresaw much of what’s come since, from the rise…
Eureka! There’s no Starbucks in Silver Plume. No Baby Gap. No Disneyfied vision of what the Olde West must have looked like. That’s because Silver Plume is still the real deal: a National Historic Landmark District largely unchanged from the way it looked when silver was dug out of the…
Tango — the dance of love — seems to be gaining the kind of popularity that swing dancing garnered six or seven years ago. And although you might be tempted to brush off the tango scene as yet another dance fad, there’s more to those slow-slow-quick-quick-slow steps than meets the…
Bicycling is freakin’ cool. It is. Rollerblading never even neared cycling’s mastery of coolness. Actually, there’s nothing that can contend with biking, and apparently, more than 18,000 people in metro Denver agree: That’s how many participated in last year’s Bike to Work Day. “This year, we expect around 20,000 people,”…
About three-quarters of the way through Waist Deep, the hero of the piece — an indestructible ex-convict who calls himself O2 (2 Fast 2 Furious star Tyrese Gibson) — peers out through the swirling smoke and the bloody mayhem of an urban killing ground and experiences a revelation. “Somethin’ ain’t…
Click may be the first Adam Sandler movie in which the high concept isn’t dependent upon the star. Sandler comedies tend to take his standard character of the petulant man-child with anger-management issues and place him in different wacky situations: elementary school (Billy Madison), the golf course (Happy Gilmore), the…
It may not be an “iconic manifestation of civilization,” as documentarian Ken Burns proclaims, but the New York Times crossword puzzle is undoubtedly an institution. Printed every day for the past 64 years in weekly cycles of increasing difficulty, the puzzle draws politicians, working stiffs, comedians, musicians, coders and homemakers…
UC-Berkeley gymnast Dan Millman (Scott Mechlowicz) is one of the best at what he does, and he has it all: perfect abs, a big bulge in his crotch (the camera focuses on it early on), beautiful girlfriends and the ability to balance full beer glasses on his feet. There’s just…
In case you’ve been snoozing on the couch for a couple of decades, here’s an update: Edward R. Murrow is dead, and most television journalism has degenerated into shlocky infotainment. That’s the none-too-startling conclusion of documentarian Brian Malone’s Breaking News, which presumes to explain all over again that the boob…
For the first time in its history, the Museum of Contemporary Art/ Denver is hosting a set of exhibitions that collectively work like a blockbuster. Decades of Influence: Colorado 1985 – Present sets out to be a sociological analysis, if not a historical survey, of the art scene on the…
Cydney Payton, the director of Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art, must be a workaholic. Not only was the groundbreaking for the new David Adjaye-designed building just a month or so ago, but she is now undertaking the most ambitious show of her curatorial career, Decades of Influence: Colorado 1985 -…
The Armory Group. In a summer art calendar that’s uncharacteristically filled with significant exhibitions, The Armory Group: 40 Years has got to be one of the most important of them all. The story begins back in 1966 in Boulder — specifically, in the fine-arts department at the University of Colorado…
The Tennessee Williams one-acts at Germinal Stage are tone poems, mood pieces, as much about language as they are about character and action. They are also about love, loss and despair. Couples reach for each other but are unable to connect; each play ends in stasis. Like all great writers,…
The Caretaker. The setting is a grimy, one-room flat filled with papers, boxes and mismatched bric-a-brac. It’s an appropriate mole hole for sad, befuddled Aston, who thinks he’s good with his hands, tinkers constantly with a screwdriver and dreams about building a shed in the yard — but it also…
Not long ago, video games were about collecting coins and rescuing the princess. Now you’re more likely to gun her down in a drive-by. Or eat her alive. Welcome to JAWS Unleashed. You’re a pitiless great white, hungry for human flesh. Unfortunately, this absurd and aimless chompfest can’t decide whether…
Night Watch (Fox Searchlight) Every once in a while, Hollywood needs somebody else to steal a genre and totally reimagine it; it keeps old ideas young, like celluloid Botox. Well, Hollywood’s gonna need one big needle to absorb Night Watch, an insane, insanely cool Russian action/horror/sci-fi brew that’s like nothing…
