You might think it’s impossible for these sultry summer nights to get any hotter. But you’d be wrong, because this evening’s Hot Summer Nights Bachelor Auction will crank up the temperature several notches. Each of the fifteen participating eligible gentlemen will be auctioned off with a pre-planned date, ranging from…
Slipped into the summer movie season like acid into your happy meal, Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly is a blockbuster of counter-programming. No matter that the dude from The Matrix is its star — or would be, if he weren’t half hidden under a thick swath of digital paint. Linklater’s…
Owen Wilson has moved up in the world: He’s gone from crashing weddings to crashing entire marriages. In the listless farce You, Me and Dupree, his eponymous ne’er-do-well, having lost his job and been evicted from his apartment after taking time off to be the best man at the Hawaiian…
Perhaps no one can pinpoint the exact moment vaudeville died, but there’s a moment early in Strangers With Candy where you’d swear you had just witnessed the death of visual comedy. En route to her first day of high school, a tarty middle-aged jailbird — this is not a Disney…
Boulder came of age in the 1960s, right along with the first baby boomers. The beautiful little town became a national center for the counterculture and the New Left, creating social and political currents that flowed into the 1970s. The visual arts got caught up in the times, too, thanks…
Weilworks (3611 Chestnut Place, 303-308-9345) is an elegant little contemporary gallery in the River North area, not far from downtown. It’s in a smart-looking building that’s something like a post-modern farmhouse. For the current offerings, which opened late in June, owner Tracy Weil wanted to come up with something that…
Balanced Dissolution. Chuck Parson, one of the region’s top sculptors, is an artist whose work you’d expect to see in a fall slot, but his solo, Balanced Dissolution, is on right now at Artyard. Parson does non-objective metal sculptures with deep roots in conceptual art and constructivism. He’s chiefly interested…
Actress Lucy Roucis, who’s playing the witch Addaperle in The Wiz, her thirteenth production with the Physically Handicapped Amateur Musical Actors’ League (PHAMALy), has a standup routine about the pros and cons of her Parkinson’s disease, which she recites softly during a break in rehearsal: Pro: Killer parking spaces. Con:…
The Ballad of Baby Doe. Central City Opera is celebrating the fiftieth birthday of Douglas Moore’s famed piece with a lively, glowing production full of beautifully proportioned sets that look like Victorian Christmas cards, a talented, energetic ensemble and a cluster of glorious voices. The opera conjures up all the…
From Pokémon to Dragon Ball Z, Japanese pop culture has captured the imagination of American kids. The latest import craze is Naruto. Anyone hip to Harry Potter will find the story familiar: A bunch of otherwise ordinary kids, including titular hero Naruto Uzumaki, study ninjitsu (rather than wizardry) in a…
Grand Prix (Warner Bros.) John Frankenheimer, as underrated as he was brilliant, made a racing picture in 1966 that’s yet to be topped forty years later. James Garner suffered through the director’s churlish demands (which Frankenheimer reveals and owns up to, in archival footage on one of the documentaries here)…
Basic Instinct 2 (Sony) Bill Maher: New Rules (HBO) Bridezillas: The Complete 1st and 2nd Seasons (Weinstein) Care Bears: Hearts at Sea (Family Home Ent.) Dennis Miller: All In (HBO) Dolla Morte (Grimoire) The Dudesons Movie (Rhino) The Ellen Show: The Complete Series (Sony) ER: The Complete Fifth Season (Warner…
“You’ve paid your debt/Get up, you wreck/ And crawl out through the door/Love will return.” Elegant, gay, acerbic, pensive and hilarious, Ray Davies has always been an unlikely yet perfect rock star, a relic from the days when kids like me listened to Davies and the Kinks blast the inanely…
Denver comics Anthony “AD” Demmer and Akwame D say comedy is one of the oldest art forms in black history. For hundreds of years, laughter’s been a tool for healing and commenting on society. Just like the legendary Richard Pryor, the best comics are those willing to tell the truth…
Today at 11 a.m., anywhere from fifty to a hundred local toddlers, tweens and teens will gather at Aurora’s Fletcher Plaza, 9898 East Colfax Avenue, to compete in Colorado’s cutest sober-karaoke contest. They will wear special costumes and Sunday dresses, sunglasses and colored hats, spit-shined sneakers and brand-new shirts, and…
Generations of gene-swapping has rendered most of us ethnic mutts. Still, we all saw how those “Everyone Loves an Irish Girl” shirts at Urban Outfitters sold like last month’s Maxim, so we know you proud Gaelic lassies exist. Grab that special laddie and embrace your ancestry at the twelfth annual…
The fact that 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was such a hit had much to do with viewers’ pre-launch expectations, which were approximately none. Who could have been blamed for thinking a Gore Verbinski-directed, Jerry Bruckheimer-produced movie based on a theme-park ride would proffer…
Just in time for its U.S. release, Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’s fierce docudrama, The Road to Guantanamo, received a giant shot of free publicity with the news in early June that three Arab inmates at the infamous detention center in Cuba — none of whom had officially been charged…
The ultra-violent Hong Kong cult classic The Story of Ricky has lost none of its appeal since being released in 1992. If anything, the fighting exploits of a vengeance-seeking young prison inmate named Ricky Ho (Louis Fan) have begun to intrigue a new generation of fans. After all, who can…
Cydney Payton’s name has been on the tip of everyone’s tongue because of the roster of 72 artists that she included in Decades of Influence: Colorado 1985 — Present, the over-the-top spectacular currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art (“Home Run,” June 22), the Center for Visual Art…
It seems like everyone has their own list of who should be in Decades of Influence: Colorado 1985 — Present at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Center for Visual Art, the Gates Sculpture Triangle and the Carol Keller Project Space. I’ve even done my own roster, “Extra Innings,” on…
The Armory Group. In a summer art calendar that’s uncharacteristically filled with significant exhibitions, The Armory Group: 40 Years has got to be one of the most important of them all. The story begins back in 1966 in Boulder — specifically, in the fine-arts department at the University of Colorado…
