3 things to do for free in Denver this week, August 26-29

If seeing all the students heading back to school has you longing for fresh notebooks and classroom walls, you can satisfy that desire for education without heavy tuition costs. Whether you want to hear about astrobiology from professors at the Deer Pile, take a tour to find out more about…

Hope Tank moves to Broadway and expands its community

When Erika Righter opened Hope Tank a year and a half ago, she thought Denver’s Arts District on Santa Fe would be the best place for the charitable boutique. But this year she made the move to Broadway, where her original idea continues to grow, with more events, bigger names…

High Plains Comedy Festival: Local comics to watch

This weekend Denver’s funny business will mark a significant milestone with the High Plains Comedy Festival. While the scene has put together a handful of notable comedy fests over the years with Laugh Track and the Fine Gentleman’s Club’s Too Much Funstival, High Plains will be the first nationally recognized…

You don’t have to be mid-century to love the Denver Modernism Show

In the new millennium, modernism is something of a conundrum. As immediate as it is retro, the mid-century ethos of streamlined design and space-age concerns is enjoying something of a style renaissance. Blame Mad Men if you must, but mid-century is cool again. That explains why Dana Cain’s Denver Modernism…

Buntport member Erin Rollman’s amazing next act

We’ve all heard of the concept of paying it forward, but Erin Rollman, one of the creators and mainstays of Buntport Theater, is taking it several steps further than most of us could ever have imagined: She’s donating a kidney to someone she’s never met. Evan Weissman, longtime Buntport collaborator…

100 Colorado Creatives: Winnie Wenglewick

#51: Winnie Wenglewick Winnie Wenglewick of Denver’s Dangerous Theatre is a theatrical Jill-of-all-trades who came by her profession through the back door: ten years of volunteering with a Florida fringe festival. With no formal training, she’s turned Dangerous into a working, if struggling, entity. A lady who does as she…

Fantasy football and the pillars of geekdom

Like millions of other people across this great land of ours, my wife and I spent a few hours of our weekend drafting our fantasy football teams. I’m not going to regale/bore you with the details of my team (ahem, Aaron Rodgers, Wes Welker, Ray Rice), but while we sorted…

High Plains Comedy Festival: Behind the scenes with Andy Juett

We’d both been to some pretty amazing comedy festival setups ranging from Bridgetown Comedy Festival in Portland, Oregon to the now defunct HBO US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colorado and we both agreed that Denver deserved a truly sustainable festival that would be uniquely “Denver.” We thought by joining forces with creative fire stokers like Pete and Virgil Dickerson that we could make something special. Between our collective backgrounds and interests it just ended up being a pretty great team. It’s like Sesame Street. Cooperation is a real fucking thing.

Now Showing

Catalyst. The beautiful grounds of the Denver Botanic Gardens are the ideal place to mount an outdoor sculpture show, and over the past few years, there has been one such presentation after another. This year, the theme is contemporary sculptors in Colorado. The pieces are picturesquely sited throughout in clearings…

Now Playing

50 Shades of Loud. Heritage Square Music Hall will close down at the end of the year after more than two decades of hilarity in its Golden home, where a unique small company evolved an equally unique performing style. The shows are simultaneously bumbling and brilliantly staged, professional and apparently…

The gorgeous Ain’t Them Bodies Saints will get under your skin

In David Lowery’s sublime new film, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, Bob Muldoon (Casey Affleck), who’s serving 25 to life for armed robbery and wounding a cop during a shootout, frequently puts pencil to parchment paper and writes love letters to his girlfriend, Ruth (Rooney Mara). Bob’s aching, lovelorn voice can…

British comedy The World’s End has a bittersweet edge

The laddish pleasures of The World’s End, Edgar Wright’s comedy about a group of middle-aged guys drinking beer and facing mortality, come with a bittersweet edge. In the old days, the lead character, Gary King, used to be the coolest kid in school, at least in the outlaw sense: He’d…

Actress Lake Bell takes on a Hollywood boys’ club

In the world of In a World…, the directing debut of preternaturally understated comic actress Lake Bell, voiceover work — specifically, the authoritative yet anonymous man-speak heard in movie trailers — is a field in which women aren’t welcome. Bell, who also wrote the script, plays Carol, an underemployed vocal…

Brian De Palma on how and why he made Passion.

Brian De Palma had a good reason for remaking the erotic French thriller Love Crime: He could do it better. “I think it’s very dangerous to remake a classic,” says De Palma. “Leave it alone.” But the 2010 corporate-catfight flick about two female frenemies had a framework he loved —…