Thursday, July 28 Metro-area scooter boosters have one last chance to buzz through town en masse on their shiny Vespas, Lambrettas and Aprilias: This year’s Mile High Mayhem event, titled Eight Is Enough, will be the last. That said, the gathering conceivably could get downright weepy, were it not for…
“Thunderdome,” says the man, grim-faced, caked in dust. “How do I get in there?” “That’s easy,” comes the crossbow-wielding woman’s retort. “Pick a fight!” Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the final installment of Mel Gibson’s futuristic film franchise, appeared in 1985 and symbolized every prejudice and paranoia of that decade –…
Booze and boats hit Sloan’s Lake. Sat 7/30 I figured if I’d seen one Colorado Dragon Boat Festival, I’d seen them all. Well, I was wrong. For this year’s fifth annual Dragon Boat Festival at Sloan’s Lake, 25th Avenue and Sheridan Boulevard, organizers have put together a party that’s bigger…
Training camp lures true Orange and Blue fans. Fri 7/29 For years along the Front Range, sports nuts have had little diversion from the summer doldrums. With no major-league baseball team here until 1993 — and not much of one since then — fans have often taken this time to…
A freewheeling benefit ushers in Ladyfest. Sat 7/30 In the five years since its inception, Ladyfest has blossomed into a bona fide international phenomenon. Humbly conceived in Olympia, Washington, as a showcase to celebrate and encourage the artistic, organizational and political work and talents of women, Ladyfest has gone on…
Guitar Town has Copper strumming. Sat 7/30 It’s dog-eat-dog in the summertime for all of Colorado’s mountain resorts, big and small. But at least one of the underdogs, Copper Mountain, took a dilemma by the horns this year by rolling out an entire season of special events, many of them…
Local troupes help raise funds for a future festival. Thurs, 7/28 “We felt like the Denver improv community was a bit fragmented,” comments Linda Klein, founding member of the local improvisational comedy troupe A.C.E. “We wanted to bring it together because there are a lot of fun and great things…
The second quarter of the twentieth century can be described as a golden age for Colorado art. Right after World War I, the Broadmoor Academy opened in Colorado Springs, developing a reputation as a nationally significant art school. But this was not the first aesthetic outpost in the Colorado wilderness;…
As I wandered through the Bethany Kriegsman solo, aptly named Treasure Island, at the William Havu Gallery (1040 Cherokee Street, 303-893-2360), it occurred to me that the Golden-based artist just might be the most overlooked first-rate artist in the region. As evidence of this, despite the fact that her show…
2005 Biennial BLOW OUT. This is the third in a series of biennials presented at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art. In the past, participation in these biennials was limited to artists from around here; for the 2005 version, it’s been expanded to include artists working in most of the western…
Central City Opera’s Madama Butterfly is beautifully sung, if a little over-directed. First performed in 1904, Puccini’s opera tells the story of an American officer, B.F. Pinkerton, who is stationed in Japan and enters into an exploitative union with a teenage geisha. Such fake marriages, which the groom could leave…
The Elephant Man. The Elephant Man is based on the life of Joseph Merrick, who was born in Victorian London and suffered from a hideously deforming disease that resulted in overgrowths of bone and hanging excrescences of putrid flesh. Abandoned by his father and stepmother, Merrick became the primary attraction…
It should come as no surprise that the hero and heroine of the new Michael Bay action extravaganza are clones. Exact copies of other people. You don’t get to be a Hollywood hit-meister like Bay — 200 Zillion Tickets Sold! — without indulging in formulas, and the characters that Star…
The questing hero of Hans Petter Moland’s The Beautiful Country is a slender, big-eyed young man named Binh (California-educated Damien Nguyen), who has little going for him but his obsession. Ostracized in his homeland because he’s the offspring of a Vietnamese mother and an American G.I. father — bui doi,…
MTV Films made a wise purchase in picking up Hustle & Flow at Sundance: The soundtrack is killer. Rapping over music composed by Three 6 Mafia and Al Kapone, star Terrence Howard has the skills. The rest of the songs heard on screen — most of which fall into the…
Going to the theater this summer has been like stepping into a time machine where your fondest childhood memories are retooled by cynics and sadists. Bewitched, Herbie: Fully Loaded, last week’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and now Bad News Bears are meant to be gobbled like comfort food by…
When rocker-turned-director Rob Zombie’s House of 1,000 Corpses was released in 2003, after years of bouncing around between studios afraid to put their name on a movie about a cartoonishly murderous family, it was anticipated as a hardcore gorefest. Instead, it was a plotless mess, with decent violence but nothing…
For those who like to keep their minds (and their Brunswicks) in the gutter, a screening of The Big Lebowski and a few lines of play at a downtown bowling alley should be just the thing this week. The 1998 movie by Ethan and Joel Coen (of Fargo fame) is,…
“Biennial” means every two years — so a biennial convention of dental hygienists would probably be a squeaky clean but dull replay of their last gathering, complete with the same flossing diagrams. But the Museum of Contemporary Art’s rapid-fire 2005 Film Biennial, unspooling this weekend at the Starz FilmCenter in…
Thursday, July 21 Local mainstream fashionistas will stylishly strut out of the woodwork to land in the Ballpark neighborhood tonight for Undercover, a chic evening featuring new designs by Frisco native Gabriel Conroy. The event runs from 7 to 9 p.m. at + Gallery, 2350 Lawrence Street. Conroy’s couture this…
While living in a small Spanish town, my friends and I regularly attended a weekly pub quiz at the local Irish bar. On any given Monday, thirty to fifty people of various nationalities would be there, tackling trivia that definitely skewed toward the operators’ native Emerald Isle. Every contest had…
THURS, 7/21 The urban landscape is inundated with hard-strapped creative kids whose dreams might just be a little harder to reach were it not for ArtLab, a branch of Denver’s Arts Street economic-development program that offers paid training opportunities to at-risk youth artists at the collaborating PlatteForum Gallery. It seems…
