It’s the holiday season, which means it’s time to give back to communities and do a little philanthropy. Well, for some folks it is anyway. If you’re too cheap and lazy to help a brother out, we have one suggestion: play a game for science. The game is Phylo, a…
At most performances, a front row seat is the most desirable spot to be — aside from marking your status as the best person to shank and rob after the show, it’s also the best way to see the action. At a comedy show, though, it’s a little different. Much…
Echo Mountain opens up today, and this time you don’t even have to call in sick to get a piece of the action: They’re keeping the lights on until 9 p.m. Terrain park manager Marc Moline and his crew have been building new obstacles out of recycled materials — propane…
The internets are alive with the sound of music today. Specifically, they are alive with the music of Giga Pudding, some sort of obscure Japanese gelatin product that sports one of the most bizarre, irritating ad jingles of all time; the two-minute ad appeared embedded at the top of every…
When U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) isn’t prowling our borders for drug traffickers, it’s prowling our digital borders and shutting down torrent domains that facilitate the piracy of copyrighted material. But seizing a domain name is a lot like playing Wack-a-mole: the second you hit one, another one rears…
If you’ve ever wanted to have some sort of educated-sounding title but didn’t want to go through the rigamarole of academia, then consider the time-honored baccalaureate of hipsters, prisoners and the unemployed everywhere: mixology, the only degree besides communications that directly involves booze. Of course, degrees require money, and you…
It’s the most wonderful cash crop of the year, this Christmas thing. And while we feel there’s been a decline in the quantity of Christmas movies lately (a political correctness issue, perhaps?), Hollywood can’t help but put out one or two cheer-baiting full-lengths annually. Not to sound cynical — we…
The Mayan Theatre marks its eightieth birthday tonight — and the survival of the art deco theater is indeed something to celebrate. There were times when it didn’t seem like the Mayan would make it to the millennium, much less become the city’s premier arthouse — complete with a bar!…
Technology can be confounding. I mean, it’s like you’ve gotta be a rocket scientist just to program your VCR, amiright? In all seriousness, though, when it requires five remote controls with some twenty buttons apiece to operate the television, when half the things you own somehow serve the function of…
As we’re nearing the year-end lull, new releases are getting few and far between. That doesn’t mean we didn’t track down some awesome stuff this week, though — in fact, if you’ve got a love for all things Disney, you’re in for one hell of a treat, and if you’ve…
It’s a common complaint about art: “I don’t get it.” The French theorist Nicolas Bourriaud explored that idea back in 1996 — how art can often be so removed from the everyday human experience, cordoned off in museums and behind velvet ropes, that it becomes something obscure, something elite and,…
Earlier this month we joined Boardistan and others in bitching about the pre-sale prices for the Denver Big Air contests coming to Civic Center Park January 25-26. This week, the Metro Denver Sports Commission announced new lower prices: Tickets for the Nature Valley Challenge Big Air Freestyle Ski event on…
So many young artists — those in their twenties and thirties — come out of colleges, universities and art schools every year that they often have trouble getting noticed. Nowhere is this situation more pronounced than in China, where seemingly a million students have, upon graduation, become internationally famous. Even…
Ania Gola-Kumor and Andrew Speer. The tiny Sandra Phillips Gallery has shoehorned in two solos, both highlighting longtime Denver painters. The first is Abstraction 2010: Ania Gola-Kumor, featuring the recent work of a Polish-born artist who’s been exhibiting in Denver for decades. The paintings here display her signature style, in…
Astronomical Sunset. Jim is a man destroyed by guilt because a social-networking site he created led to…actually, it’s not quite clear what, but it had to do with a teenage boy posting compromising photographs of his girlfriend, and the boy is now in prison. The plot doesn’t make a whole…
The fifth collaboration of director Margarethe Von Trotta and actress Barbara Sukowa, Vision continues the proto-feminist canonization of Blessed Hildegard von Bingen (Sukowa), twelfth-century Benedictine magistra, scientist, visionary composer and literal receptor of visions. Cloistered at age eight, Hildegard grows into hardball politicking in the Holy Roman Empire as a…
You’re looking for a warm, lively, sweetly sentimental holiday-season show, but you’ve had it up to here with Santas and Tiny Tims, as well as would-be funny take-offs on Santas and Tiny Tims. Say hello to Hello, Dolly! Boulder’s Dinner Theatre director Michael Duran has a long history with Hello,…
In the modern world, advertising is one of the most powerful tools available to get one’s message out to the public. Urgent issues are spread wide through our wonderful super technology. But just because you can send a message out to millions of people simultaneously doesn’t mean it’s going to…
Rest in peace, Irvin Kershner, you director of RoboCop 2 and some film called The Empire Strikes Back. Born in 1923, he died over the weekend at the age of 87 and left behind an oeuvre of great filmmaking — including no small number of sequels. So it makes sense…
At the leftover Yam Jam on Friday, skiers and snowboarders alike gathered to face it off freestyle in a casual post-Thanksgiving competition. They were facing off against each other — the skier and snowboarder events were separate — but the real rivalry was, of course, between those who favor riding…
How Santa can be in so many places at once is something we will never know, but one thing is for sure: Right around Thanksgiving (and all the way until Christmas), you can find him anywhere people are buying stuff. We decided to stake out each incarnation of Santa in…
Eternally white-haired king of the spoof Leslie Nielsen passed away yesterday at the age of 84, due to complications from pneumonia. His best-known roles varied from the science-fiction classic Forbidden Planet to Airplane!, the king of all cinematic parodies; through that movie, he helped start a movement that eventually led…
