There’s no surer sign that a franchise is in trouble than when it blasts into outer space. So you were right to be nervous when Nintendo announced its plans to follow up the subpar game Super Mario Sunshine with something called Super Mario Galaxy, which promised to launch the mustached…
Hot Rod(Paramount)Andy Samberg, best known for stuffing his dick in a box on Saturday Night Live, is Rod Kimble, a wannabe stuntman with very little “man” in him. He lives with his mom (Sissy Spacek, not kidding) and a stepdad (Ian McShane), who needs a new heart at a “conveniently…
Bratz (Lionsgate) Drunken Angel: The Criterion Collection (Criterion) Elvis: Blue Suede Collection (Warner Bros.) ESPNU Honor Roll: The Best of College Football Vol. 3 (ESPN) Happy Days: The Third Season (Paramount) Hot Fuzz: 3-Disc Collector’s Edition (Universal) The Land Before Time: The Wisdom of Friends (Universal) Laverne & Shirley: The…
I’m Not There is the movie of the year — but to whom does Todd Haynes’s Bob Dylan biopic actually belong, and when was it really made? The great attention-grabber of last month’s New York Film Festival, I’m Not There is as notable for its stunt casting as its elusive…
La Cage Aux Folles is a big, splashy musical with lots of big, splashy numbers. But unlike most such musicals, it’s also got heart, humor and a good story to tell. Beyond all that, in a time of intense mean-spiritedness and prejudice in the political arena, this show carries a…
When he was a student at Yale in 1974, Walton Jones created The 1940’s Radio Hour, a tuneful, low-key Christmas charmer. Jones went on to a career in writing, directing and teaching, eventually taking over the theater division at Colorado State University. There he wrote a sequel: The 1940’s Radio…
The Diary of Anne Frank. The Denver Center Theatre Company has mounted Wendy Kesselman’s rewritten version of The Diary of Anne Frank, the 1955 play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett that not only sugarcoated the horror that drove Anne into hiding and eventually destroyed her, but — in deference to…
I’m wary of art with political subtexts, because it’s usually pretty bad, and the shows that feature it are often long on explanatory text and documentary videos and short on artistic content. So when I walked into the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art to view the enormous eco-themed Weather Report:…
The Dairy Center for the Arts (2590 Walnut Street, Boulder, 303-440-7826, www.thedairy.org) is an impressive facility, but the building definitely needs some work to make it more appealing and less gloomy. Maybe now that Judy Hussie-Taylor, the former deputy director of the Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver, has taken over as…
Artisans & Kings. For its first extravaganza of the season, the Denver Art Museum has unveiled a sprawling blockbuster in the Frederic C. Hamilton Building that focuses on the royal collections from the Louvre. You don’t have to know much about art to have heard of the Louvre, so Artisans…
Forget stamp collecting: Amateur film scholarship is where it’s at these days. Get in on the action today with DPL’s Fresh City Life Cinema Club screening of Hanging Up, starting at 2 p.m. at the Central Library, 10 West 14th Avenue Parkway. To aid in your studies, the presentation includes…
When Jessica Carsten had to come up with a project for a leadership course she was taking, the assistant manager of the Boulder Planned Parenthood clinic naturally decided on a fundraiser for her employer. “I thought about what I would want to do, and my wildest dream would be a…
World AIDS Day isn’t until December 1, but tonight three chefs will offer plenty of food for thought at Cook-Off for a Cause, a benefit for the Women’s Lighthouse Project, which helps people living with AIDS/HIV. Jamie Fader of Lola, Sheila Lucero of Jax and Goose Sorensen of Solera will…
Wackos. Weirdos. Dorks. That’s what we call folks who are so into certain subjects, such as Star Wars figures or Andy Griffith Show trivia, that it makes the rest of us uncomfortable. Denver author Shari Caudron wondered what made such fanatics tick — and she set off across America to…
Dear God: I have a small complaint. Falling as it does at the whim of the Hebrew calendar, Hanukkah comes much too early this year. I’ll have barely turned the Thanksgiving turkey into a pot of soup before the eve of December 4, and it’s already time to spit-shine the…
A new show opening tonight at the Sandra Phillips Gallery will appeal directly to your animal instincts: The message of Nature. Interrupted — a three-way exhibition of works by Anna Kaye, Susan Jean Hart and Pauline Foss that explores the effects of man’s ugly footprint on the natural world —…
You could say that Dr. Jeanne Abrams, as director of the Rocky Mountain Jewish Historical Society and the University of Denver’s Beck historical archive, took advantage of her position to compile her new book, Images of America: Jewish Denver 1859-1940. But no one could possibly take her to task for…
There might still be sawdust in the air at the future Bradford Washburn American Mountaineering Museum in Golden, but in the meantime, the museum’s Base Camp gift shop is open for business at the American Mountaineering Center, 710 10th Street, just in time for the holiday season. High-country-lovin’ folks who…
Jewtopia the book is an ultimate inside joke: It takes one to know one, after all, and that’s just the kind of humor the quasi-handbook/history projects. And Jewtopia the play draws on the outer limit of Judaism — its relationship to the non-Jewish world — by telling the story of…
If you want to see an entertaining winter play — but are going to puke nutcrackers if you see A Christmas Carol one more time — head to the Denver Crossroads Theater, 2590 Washington Street, tonight for A December Suite. The musical follows the fictional Fitzenstarts sisters and their students…
As a purchaser of a pricey Vail Resorts ski pass, making sure I get the biggest bang for my buck is a constant winter worry. There’s a running tally in my head of the weekends I can make it up to the mountains, right next to the list of the…
As a Denver native, I’ve sometimes taken for granted how awesome it is to live in the shadow of what is essentially a great big playground. The Colorado Mountain Club started celebrating that fact three years ago with its annual Mountain Fest, a full day of everything that makes living…
