Today, video-game competitions are serious business, with tens of thousands of dollars in prize money at stake, sponsorship deals and all the other trappings of a big-league sport. But there was a time when video game competitions were much simpler – and probably a lot more fun, too. If you…
With six galleries, there’s always something eye-catching and thought-provoking at MCA Denver, and tonight the museum will unveil two exhibits at the same time. On the first floor, in the Photography Gallery, is Kevin O’Connell, a show curated by former MCA staffer John Grant. O’Connell is a well-known Colorado photographer…
Herb and Dorothy Vogel are not typical art collectors. They began quietly, buying works here and there in the early 1960s, when nobody was paying attention to the minimalist and conceptual artists littering the landscape. To continue growing their collection, they decided to live on Dorothy’s librarian salary alone and…
In the right hands, the Charles Busch formula – camp up a film niche, turn it into a simultaneous homage and parody, then throw in a guy in drag – is fail-safe funny for anyone already enamored with pop culture. Such is the case with a new production of Die…
Any metro-area denizen who’s ever been surprised by a fox crossing the alley or a blue jay squawking in a backyard tree won’t be surprised to learn that the city is teeming with wildlife, if you just know where to look. But with that knowledge comes a certain responsibility, and…
There’s no community like bike community. It’s a cooperative society that rolls softly and carries a big wrench, so it’s no wonder Chris Loffelmacher at the Denver Public Library’s Fresh City Life saw in it a big DIY-inspired opportunity just waiting to be mined. “People (heart) their bikes,” he says,…
Renaissance fairs are pretty much old hat: Dress up in tights, speak in faux olde English, eat a roast turkey leg, watch the Society for Creative Anachronism knock the hell out of each other with padded swords, yadda yadda. So to spice up the local medieval festival, Pagosa Springs added…
The human figure is the most essential referent in the world of art, and it surely has the longest history, as revealed by the Venus of Willendorf, a sculpture of a nude woman created in what is now Austria around 26,000 years ago. The Venus was recovered a century ago,…
Damien Hirst. You’d have to be living under a rock — or have absolutely no interest in contemporary art — not to know that Damien Hirst is a superstar, and that everything he makes is worth millions of dollars apiece. The tight solo at MCA Denver (formerly known as the…
Annie. Boulder’s Dinner Theatre is at the top of its form; it has to be. How else could the company make Annie — its mandatory summer family show — anything but a smirking sentimental bore? As everyone knows by now, the story of Annie concerns a little red-haired girl’s rough…
The astronaut drama Countdown is a curio from both a historical and filmic standpoint. The movie, co-starring James Caan and Robert Duvall, both pre-Godfather, arrived in 1968, a year before the initial moon landing, but at a point when it was clear the United States was on the verge of…
In terms of both sensibility and mission, theater director Terry Dodd and the Barth Hotel are made for each other. The Barth, a beautiful nineteenth-century structure, is owned by Senior Housing Options, a charitable organization originally created to provide shelter for the poor and homeless displaced during Denver’s 1970s oil…
Don’t let the PG rating fool you: The dark arts are back with a vengeance in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the generally grim, occasionally startling and altogether enthralling sixth chapter in a movie franchise that keeps managing to surprise just when one would expect it to be puttering…
Jennifer Lynch — like Sofia Coppola on occasion — has been tarred with the unfounded claim that her films get made only because of who her father is. David Lynch serves as executive producer of Surveillance, Jennifer’s first film since the near-stoning she received after her 1993 debut feature, the…
Colorado’s SolVista Bike Park at Granby Ranch got the best endorsement imaginable when it was chosen to host this summer’s USA Cycling Mountain Bike National Championships, featuring both the elite of international mountain biking, hundreds of them, and an equally rampant onslaught of amateurs in cross country, downhill, single speed,…
Despite its intimate — read “tiny” — space, the Sandra Phillips Gallery (744 Santa Fe Drive, 303-573-5969, www.thesandraphillipsgallery.com) has big ambitions. Owner Sandra Phillips has relentlessly filled the place with something worth seeing, often turning to established talents and zeroing in on those who only rarely exhibit their work. Such…
The Magafan Twins. Ethel and Jenne Magafan were identical twins born in Chicago but raised in Denver. In the 1920s, their art teacher at East High School was so impressed with their talent that he paid their tuition to attend Denver’s School of Modern Art, run by Frank Mechau; they…
Annie. Boulder’s Dinner Theatre is at the top of its form; it has to be. How else could the company make Annie — its mandatory summer family show — anything but a smirking sentimental bore? As everyone knows by now, the story of Annie concerns a little red-haired girl’s rough…
Hamlet really is a narcissistic ass. I’m not talking about his famous, almost play-long dithering about whether or not he should kill the uncle who murdered his father and married his mother — and if so, when and how, and what it says about his character that he’s unable to…
The Thief of Baghdad is an enormous contradiction of the auteur theory. The 1940 release credits three directors — Ludwig Berger, Tim Whelan and Michael Powell — and only the latter assembled a filmography of any particular note. Moreover, it’s likely that producer Alexander Korda and others contributed to the…
Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker is a full-throttle body shock of a movie. It gets inside you like a virus, puts your nerves in a blender, and twists your guts into a Gordian knot. Set during the last month in the year-long rotation of a three-man U.S…
Heterosexuals can’t understand camp because everything they do is camp,” opined an associate of the old Play-House of the Ridiculous, a New York theater known for its good-natured, anarchic sexual farce. Such, more or less, is the method of the new Sacha Baron Cohen extravaganza Brüno. Communist Poland supported a…
