Bam! Ka Pow!

It’s official. You can finally tell your parents they were wrong when they said that comic books were a waste of time and money. Why? Because all those afternoons spent in musty comic-book stores and reading X-Men in the basement will pay off tonight when Geeks Who Drink present The…

Bollywood at Bat

Bollywood meets baseball tonight in a flurry of elaborate costumes and choreography at the Colorado Rockies International Night “They really wanted to make this year’s international day a bigger spectacle than in the past,” explains Renu Kansal of the Bollywood West dance studio. “They wanted something upbeat, high-energy, youthful and…

Soup for You

Expect something special when Joel McHale, star of E!’s The Soup, hits the stage of the Paramount Theatre tonight. “I come out wearing the largest codpiece in North America…because I want to impress the ladies,” he says. “Then I talk about Ryan Seacrest for two hours.” With a little prodding,…

Best Foot Forward

“We are focusing on design this entire year at DAVA,” explains Viviane Le Courtois, program manager for Downtown Aurora Visual Arts. That explains why the upcoming Fashion Forward show — a collaboration between DAVA youth and local fashion mavens such as Mona Lucero — is heavy on the elements of…

A Downtowner World

As the owner of the Downtowner Media publishing company, Danial Griggs dabbles in film, comedy and music – and he sees a lot of ways that all three can work together. So when it became clear to him that his Downtowner Film Festival had outgrown its home in a Littleton…

Look Out Below!

You haven’t really experienced skateboarding until you’ve seen downhill skateboarding, a breakneck extreme sport requiring special longboards that are built more for speed than fancy skateboard tricks. And it takes a special kind of athlete to pilot one – in particular, one who’s addicted to adrenaline and probably has some…

Nesting Instinct

One supposes it would be tough to hold down an artist as diverse in style as Peter Coffin, an internationally known master of multi-media whose work plays out in every form, from video to sculpture. But the Aspen Art Museum did: Coffin served as the museum’s second Jane and Marc…

Makin’ Whoopee

When’s the last time you had a laugh-out-loud good time in an art museum? Like, never? That will all change when a show that brings out the Three Stooges in all of us opens tonight in the Project Gallery of the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver. Denver artist Jim Green’s sound-art…

Big Knights

No less than an all-out love affair between British comedy and the Great White Way, Monty Python’s Spamalot pairs a plot blatantly (and with blessings) stolen by Eric Idle and Mike Nichols from the screenplay for Monty Python and the Holy Grail with music and lyrics by Idle and John…

Roland Bernier at Walker Fine Art

For decades, Denver artist Roland Bernier has used words written out in printed letters as the principal forms in his paintings, works on paper, sculptures and installations. A workaholic, Bernier has relentlessly found new ways to employ words, such as in collages made from photocopied magazines and comic books, with…

Now Showing

Curiouser. Singer Gallery director Simon Zalkind is one of the top curators in town, and one of the secrets to his success is presenting artists whose efforts are worthwhile but who for some reason rarely exhibit their work. That’s what’s happening now with the unusual show Curiouser: A Dozen Years…

Now Playing

Eccentricities of a Nightingale. It’s fascinating to observe the different acting styles on stage in this production, and to think about the ways they work with Tennessee Williams’s characters and dialogue. Brian Landis Folkins subsumes his personality to the role he’s playing. Minute by minute, the outlines of the character…

The Lady From Shanghai

Among the most pleasurable entries in director Orson Welles’s filmography are those projects that find him trying to wedge his eccentricities into a standard genre template and failing to do so with fascinating results. The Lady From Shanghai, a late-’40s noir elaboration being screened on Tuesday, May 5, as part…

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past

Two weeks after jowly Matthew Perry transformed into pretty Zac Efron to relive his adolescence in 17 Again, Warner Bros. releases Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, another backward and backward-looking child-is-father-to-the-man rom-com, with Matthew McConaughey, who, eighteen years Efron’s senior and slightly butcher, has just a few more years of prettiness…

Sugar

Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have transformed some of the saggiest, most cliched genres with smarts, non-screechy politics, superb acting and visual beauty. Though on paper its premise could have easily elicited groans, Half Nelson — their 2006 feature debut (that Fleck directed and the two co-wrote) about a white…

Work That Body

Teresa Shear, director of cheerleaders and game entertainment for the Broncos, used to get calls every year from people asking if they could come watch cheerleader tryouts. The answer was always no, because she didn’t have the right space or setup to accommodate an audience. But this year, she thought,…

Bowling for Zombies

When there are no more open lanes in hell, the dead will roll on Earth. Or at least that seems to be implied strongly by the existence of the Zom Bowl-A-Thon tonight, a fundraiser for the upcoming locally produced movie Atom the Amazing Zombie Killer from Bizjack/Flemco productions. “I thought…

Not Its First Rodeo

“It’s been around for a long time,” Rose Berner says of the Royal Gorge Rodeo. Try 137 years. It almost makes the 34 years Berner has been attending the event sound paltry. The 66-year-old was asked twenty years ago by the Royal Gorge Rodeo Association if she would stand in…

Garden of Eden

Meet Tracy Weil, tomato farmer. After the local painter and graphic designer saw the potential on his expanded RiNo studio grounds, he planted nearly 250 heirloom tomato starts this spring, with dreams of planting his own little urban farm right in, yes, his own back yard. Okay, so maybe Weil…

Down the Rabbit Hole

In high-school psychology class, we took an IQ test biased toward black men growing up in the 1970s. Oddly enough, I got a perfect score, primarily because I had watched every black-themed film of the time, from Shaft to Foxy Brown to Blackula. I couldn’t get enough. And now I’m…

Flick Pick

Among the most pleasurable entries in director Orson Welles’s filmography are those projects that find him trying to wedge his eccentricities into a standard genre template and failing to do so with fascinating results. The Lady From Shanghai, a late-’40s noir elaboration being screened on Tuesday, May 5, as part…