It’s a sure sign that Hollywood has truly run out of ideas when they start mining ski culture for not one but two upcoming movies. Last week, Chris Outcalt showed you the trailer for Hot Tub Time Machine, which actually has the potential to be 1) funny and 2) the…
The art season for galleries and museums begins every fall, with the winter holidays representing its high point. That means that exhibition venues can be expected to have some of their most important offerings on view at this time. Currently, three top commercial hotspots are featuring very strong offerings involving…
Allen True’s West. Allen Tupper True was Denver’s premier muralist during the first third of the twentieth century. Sadly, many of his commissions have been painted over or were lost when the buildings they were in were demolished. In an act of cooperation, the three big cultural institutions on the…
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of conversation, skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. Creator-performers Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein have worked together for many years; at some point, they read their early diaries to each other and were transfixed…
“Everything’s already happened to me,” admits Harry Caine, the blind, middle-aged filmmaker in Broken Embraces. “All that’s left is to enjoy life.” ¡Sí! His own sights set low these days in his latest movie, reformed bad boy Pedro Almodóvar has at least hit on a vivid metaphor for his diminished…
There’s no city-clogging traffic jam in Nine, the musicalized version of Federico Fellini’s movie-about-moviemaking urtext 8 1/2, but the result feels like the celluloid equivalent of a twelve-car pileup. An assault on the senses from every conceivable direction — smash zooms, the ear-splitting eruption of something like music, the spectacle…
Does Nancy Meyers hate women? The thought ran through my head not very long into It’s Complicated, Meyers’s biennial stocking stuffer about the romantic trials and tribulations of obscenely privileged and narcissistic Southern Californians. Once more into the breach goes Meyers to show us what women really want, this time…
“People are delighted to have a place to eat on Christmas that isn’t a $25 plate of buffet food from a hotel,” insists Louis Wolfe, owner and pit master of Wolfe’s Barbecue, the sauce-and-ribs joint that he’s operated since 1985 at 333 East Colfax Avenue. “It’s typically a very good…
For some, Christmas can be a “rough time of year,” acknowledges 3 Kings employee and Ooh La La Burlesque member Michelle Scheffer (aka Fannie Fitztightlee). One year, she and fellow Ooh La La producer Kitty Crimson were alone for the holidays and decided to throw a bash for themselves at…
There’s something magical about Christmas Midnight Mass, and the Saint Augustine Orthodox Church puts on one of the best in the city. The Ambrosian Choristers specialize in liturgical music from the era of Gregorian chants onward, with a special emphasis on the great composers of the late eighteenth and early…
Woe was the Jew on the Christmas Eve of old, the lonely, left-out Jew with a $1.25 scoop of fried rice and a $10 ticket to Whatever Disney’s Shilling. But not since 2007, when Heebonism made its debut in Denver, has that young(ish), probably (though not necessarily) single Jew had…
“Is this the start of a new era, or the last year for the Winter Park ski train?” That’s the cryptic question on the home page of www.riograndescenicrailroad.com/skitrain, and the answer could be: both. As it stands, the new era will start at 7:15 a.m. today, when a train pulls…
The Improv Cavalcade at the Avenue Theatre is a parade not just of the city’s best improvisational performers, but some of our quickest-witted ex-pat talent. “We have a number of improvisers that used to perform here in Denver and either moved to Chicago or L.A. to continue on,” says the…
The theater at Elitch Gardens once boasted the oldest summer-stock company in the country, with stars ranging from Douglas Fairbanks Jr. to Robert Redford. But the company disbanded in 1963, and then the amusement park left northwest Denver altogether, leaving behind the circa-1891 theater. Although the exterior of the historic…
As any karaoke audience can tell you, context is everything. But when directors Sally George and Stephen Walker made the 2007 documentary Young@Heart, they proved that context, as well as musical beauty, is in the eye and ear of the beholder. The film follows the Young@Heart Chorus, a group of…
It’s Christmas Eve, you haven’t finished your shopping, and now you’re in full-blown panic mode. Stop running around like a reindeer with its head cut off, take a deep breath — and head to Larimer Square between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. today for the second annual Christmas Eve Celebration,…
Best ski deal…best ski deal. Echo Mountain earned Best Ski Deal honors in the Best of Denver 2009, and the deal keeps getting sweeter. Now that Echo offers night skiing until 9 p.m., its lift tickets are a real bargain: a full twelve hours of skiing will cost you about…
Christmas is over, but the week-long festival of Kwanzaa is just beginning. And the Denver Zoo’s fourth annual Kwanzaa celebration, which runs from 5 to 9 p.m. tonight and tomorrow at the zoo’s Gates Center, 2300 Steele Street, is another holiday animal altogether. “There will be stations about African animals,…
Tonight’s FORK Anniversary Show will serve up the result of four amazing years of travel, workshops and over 500 productions across the country. “This is just a huge culmination of everything we’ve been doing,” says FORK player Jon Jon Lannen. “It’s just a huge party to celebrate what a good…
Winter Park’s annual Christmas Eve Torchlight Procession down Lower Hughes takes on extra significance this year as part of the resort’s 70th anniversary celebration. Santa and his crew will be on hand to get one last run in before clocking in for the night, and the aprés ski scene includes…
Thousands of words have been spilled in gushing praise of legendary director François Truffaut’s Small Change, but leave it to equally legendary film critic Pauline Kael to sum up this 1976 movie most succinctly, describing it as “a poetic comedy that’s really funny.” A series of vignettes filmed with Truffaut’s…
Since Josh Blue, a local comic with cerebral palsy, won NBC’s Last Comic Standing back in 2006, things have certainly changed — including his material. “Now that people know who I am, I don’t really have to talk as much about the disability stuff,” Blue says. He’s also been hitting…
