While previous summers have given comedy fans a handful of semi-decent shows to look forward to, this August is so packed with top-shelf talent that it’s difficult to limit a list of the highlights to just ten shows. In the month ahead we have two female comedy duos, two local…
A little bit Warhol and a little bit outlaw, Dunn the Signtologist (aka Dan Ericson) uses street signs as his canvases, painting graffiti-style portraits on their angular and reflective surfaces. How he gets the signs in the first place is better not discussed, and the underground aura of this work…
Catalyst. The beautiful grounds of the Denver Botanic Gardens are the ideal place to mount an outdoor sculpture show, and over the past few years, there has been one such presentation after another. This year, the theme is contemporary sculptors in Colorado. The pieces are picturesquely sited throughout in clearings…
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged). The Colorado Shakespeare Festival staged a pretty good version of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged)five years ago, so we’re not sure why the CSF decided to bring it back this season. The show, written in 1987 by Adam Long, Daniel Singer…
Galleries seem to be opening at a breakneck pace lately, with Mai Wyn Fine Art on Santa Fe Drive being the latest. The new venue combines a handsome exhibition space with a studio for owner — and painter — Mai Wyn Schantz. Occupying the former home of the Sandra Phillips…
All that Canadian farmer Craig Morrison (James Cromwell), age 87, wants to do is build a little house, on his own land, without having to ask anyone’s permission. In the pitch-perfect, deeply affecting Still Mine, writer-director Michael McGowan tells the true story of what happened when Craig’s determination to build…
All you need for a movie are two guys and two guns. Unless that movie is 2 Guns, in which case you probably need a good deal more. The problem with so many current action movies, this one included, is that once you’ve seen one, you can’t help feeling you’ve…
John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves, first produced in 1971, is satiric, poignant, farcical, highly metaphorical and filled with poetic flights of language, strange juxtapositions and dream descriptions; it’s smart but falls apart in the second act; and it’s theatrical-realistic and original, but very much in line with the…
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even…
Porn re-inserts itself into the art house with this week’s The Canyons, co-starring adult-industry stud James Deen, and next week’s Lovelace, a biopic of the Deep Throat star — two highly publicized releases that reconfirm the hopelessness of going hardcore in mainstream movies. Whether it’s works that inject un-simulated sex…
The lauded golden age of television just makes Vince Gilligan sad. Let’s get specific: “The sadness for me at the heart of it is that television now makes stories for grownups that Hollywood movies don’t allow filmmakers to make,” the Breaking Bad creator/writer/director/producer said Sunday at New York’s Museum of…
This article contains major spoilers. A white suburban teen, urged on by friends, makes the decision to finally get laid, maybe by the end of summer. That’s the premise of Sixteen Candles, American Pie, Superbad, and now The To Do List. Comedy pin-up Aubrey Plaza gives a characteristically low-wattage performance…
It’s like American Idol, only…good. Tonight marks the start of the first annual PlayOffs, an elimination-style weekly playwriting competition in which hand-picked playwrights produce new work based on top-secret prompts designed to “push them to create their best work at a breakneck speed,” says Michael Emmitt, co-founder with Sean Paul…
Human blood is an unusual artistic medium. Who better, then, to explore the possibilities of blood work than Andrew Novick, a man whose name is synonymous with weird art — from his time in the infamous Warlock Pinchers band to his work with Peeps? In Blood Lustre, Novick uses the…
“We’re just trying to infuse more and more of the laid-back, fun-loving energy of Brazil into what we do every year,” says Francisco Marques, one of the organizers of Colorado Brazil Fest, “because we know the good it does for us, and we’re trying to spread it wherever we can.”…
With an overdose of effects-laden, 3-D blockbuster movies filling almost every screen, a quiet little film might just be the antidote we need. A film like Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu’s 1953 classic, Tokyo Story, which subtly hits home through smart dialogue, excellent performances and somber cinematography. The story of an…
In less than two years, writer Joan Didion dealt with the deaths of both her husband and her daughter. One of the greatest living American writers, Didion translated her tragedies into The Year of Magical Thinking, a book and subsequent play that muses on the way we deal with grief…
“The Monkees — they were a major influence on the Beatles,” Jim Carrey asserts in Dumb & Dumber, delivering one of the funniest declarations in rock history, since the Monkees were an attempt to package a squeaky-clean, cookie-cutter version of the Beatles for family TV audiences. Even the Monkees themselves…
If you only see one vampire Western in your lifetime, make sure it’s Near Dark, the final film in this year’s Cruel Summer lineup at Crash 45. Starring a good chunk of the cast of Aliens and directed by future superstar Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty, Point Break), Near Dark…
The idea of the “exquisite corpse,” a blind collaboration between artists, has roots among the early-twentieth-century surrealists: folks like Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and Yves Tanguy, who would each contribute a portion of a drawing in the hidden panels of a folded piece of paper. The whole of their efforts…
For her newest work, visionary poet Anne Waldman was inspired by the urgency of preserving art. The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, which Waldman co-founded, and where she now teaches, is in the process of transferring its vast collection of fragile tapes featuring the work of…
When Michael Hancock was campaigning for mayor in 2011, the same topic kept coming up. “He was meeting with neighbors throughout the city, and there was a recurring theme: People did want to get to know their neighbors, but they didn’t necessarily have the vehicle to do so,” says Rachel…
