Crybaby

THURS, 6/10 These days, you’re as likely to come across George Lopez on ABC as you are on HBO or Univision. His smiling face is everywhere: on stages across the country, on his hit weekly sitcom George Lopez, in films, on late-night talk shows, even on Inside the NFL. The…

Women on the Verge

TUES, 6/15 Menopause The Musical ain’t your daughter’s Vagina Monologues. Currently heating up theaters in eleven cities, the saucy show, set in a Bloomingdale’s department store, follows four forty-something women as they bond over their change-of-life experiences and a Bloomie’s black-lace bra. The score includes 26 popular baby-boomer tunes; audience…

Unseasonably Hot

Is it just me, or does it seem like the art world is the midst of high season? Nearly everywhere there’s some exhibit that’s worth taking in — and that’s really weird because the season should be shutting down for the summer. Ordinarily, June, July and August are the least…

Artbeat

Currently, there’s a touching two-part exhibit at the Edge Gallery (3658 Navajo Street, 303-477-7173) that honors Roger M. Beltrami, a long-time co-op member who died earlier this year. The show, birds of a feather, has two parts: In the front space is a memorial presentation featuring Beltrami’s own work, and…

Now Showing

Aaron Karp, Sushe Felix, Delos Van Earl, Lynn Heitler. There are four single-artist shows at the William Havu Gallery: Aaron Karp, Sushe Felix, Delos Van Earl and Lynn Heitler. The first is Aaron Karp, mostly made up of large paintings that illustrate the New Mexico artist’s classic style. Karp’s paintings…

Off-the-Cuff Stuff

I guess basements and comedy go together like beer and nuts or toddlers and sandboxes. The cellar of the Wynkoop Brewing Co., where Impulse Theater performs, is crowded, loud and energetic. Impulse does no prepared skits, nothing but pure improv — which means that what you see changes every night,…

Rock On

Some people think of critics as the artistic equivalent of meat inspectors; they see our job as going from place to place stamping performances as prime, choice, select or — heaven forbid — cutter. We’re the arbiters of taste who will tell them what to miss and what’s worth attending…

Encore

Alarms & Excursions. Alarms & Excursions is minor Michael Frayn, but it can’t help bearing the master’s stamp. A group of eight playlets examines the role of technology in our lives and its impact on human communication. In the first, a friendly dinner is interrupted by a series of sounds:…

The Unlikely Lambs

Movie-goers familiar with the tides of recent Brazilian history will probably get more from Hector Babenco’s new prison movie, Carandiru, than the rest of us, because the filmmaker tells us so little about the society beyond the walls that helped shape the violent yet carefully ordered world within them. On…

Harry Gets Scary

As much of the civilized world now knows, the latest Harry Potter director is Alfonso Cuarón, best known for the explicit teen-sexual-awakening movie Y Tu Mam´ También. So it may come as little surprise that his Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban begins with the teenage wizard-in-training hiding under…

The Weirdest Movie in the World

Ah, the peculiar genius that is Guy Maddin. Who else but the morose Canadian director, born and raised in one of the coldest cities in the world, would marry silent film, 1930s movie musicals, Prohibition, family melodrama, monster-movie gore and a critique of capitalist zeal in a surreal montage about…

Flick Pick

Now in its seventh incarnation, the Aurora Asian Film Festival is a showcase for the burgeoning cinematic talents of China, Japan, Thailand, Cambodia, Taiwan and Bhutan. This year’s four-day festival will feature more than a dozen new films from Asia and the Pacific Rim, beginning Thursday, June 3, with a…

Pole Cats

“A miserable yellow melancholy stream” was how Mark Twain described the South Platte River. Fortunately, the Greenway Foundation — established thirty years ago to transform the Platte from a dumping ground into an urban amenity — chose the riverway less traveled by when it first floated a boat past Confluence…

This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks

Thursday, June 3 It’s just the start of a whole spool of fiber-art exhibits about to unwind along the Front Range this month in conjunction with the upcoming Handweavers Guild of America conference in Denver, but it’s an auspicious beginning. The Metro State Center for the Visual Arts, 1734 Wazee…

Road Warriors

We love our cars — that’s a fact. They’re our homes away from home, the canned personification of whatever freedoms we have left to enjoy in these uptight times. But automobiles also reflect popular culture in a seasonal blueprint of design, color schemes and technology that rewrites itself annually. Cars…

Yard Artists

FRI, 6/4 The relationship between people and their gardens is an ancient one, primeval as a redwood, humanity’s link to its own natural beginnings. And not only do we love gardens for their beauty, but also for the creativity they inspire. That’s how it is for Boulder artist Cha Cha…

Crown Jewel

THURS, 6/3 Beginning today, weekend warriors can jump on the adventure-race bandwagon at the Teva Mountain Games in Vail, the largest extreme-sports festival in the country. “This is the crown jewel of the outdoor industry,” says Joel Heath, president of Untraditional Marketing, organizers of the event. “There is just so…

Cardboard Communion

FRI, 6/4 Local event engineer Ben Popken might possibly be mad. “For many months, I have been obsessed with the idea of a cardboard party. In my mind, I see a topographical landscape built from cardboard, with cardboard furniture, a cardboard stage and cardboard props. Inhabiting this land, of course,…

Teen Spirit Rocks

SAT, 6/5 Three years ago, a group of teens approached Douglas County Libraries community-relations specialist Aspen Butterfield with an interesting proposal. “They saw that the library had children’s performers coming through, and they wanted to know if they could play music there, too,” Butterfield explains. But before flocks of nebbish…

Change and Continuity

The story had been circulating for months: Fresh Art Gallery was closing for good, and the newish +Zeile/Judish would be moving into the sharp-looking spot at Ninth Avenue and Santa Fe Drive. And it was lots more than a rumor. Not only had the tale been spread around by Jeanie…

Artbeat

Walker Fine Art (300 West 11th Avenue, 303-355-8955) is currently presenting a three-artist group show with the meaningless and universally applicable title Contemplation. The exhibit brings together the work of Boulder sculptor Anne Shutan and Denver painters Eric Michael Corrigan and Angela Larson — or does it? All three artists…

Now Showing

Abstractions on Paper. The current show at the Emil Nelson Gallery, is a fascinating group endeavor put together by director Hugo Anderson. The exhibit combines historic and contemporary works in the forms of watercolors, prints, drawings and photos by more than two dozen artists. The mood is classic modernist with…