Give Him an Inch

Times certainly have changed. Twenty years ago, a musical about an East German transsexual rock singer would have premiered in one of New York’s Off-Off Broadway theaters or cabarets, run for a couple of weeks and remained the pleasant memory of a select few. But when John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig…

Ape Escape

There are scenes in Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes redo that are so hysterical they drown out minutes’ worth of dialogue that follow, which is hardly a knock. Indeed, the film is often so comical, so ridiculous in that self-aware, wink-wink sort of way, that it plays like a…

Pumping Poetry

What will it take to win this year’s upcoming National Slam Poetry Competition? Denver’s team, nearly a carbon copy of the one that lost in Providence last year, thinks it’ll have a fighting chance when 56 squads meet in Seattle beginning on Tuesday. Spokesman and returning member Seth says last…

Fearless Mosley

“It’s hard to write mysteries,” author Walter Mosley notes, “because you have to worry about plot so much. In that way, it’s much harder than any other arm of literature. But that’s not why I stopped writing them. I stopped because I wanted to write different things — and I…

Summertime Views

Photography is unavoidably linked to the summer, because nearly everyone takes a camera along on vacation. This point was brought home to me last week when, stopped at the light at Colfax Avenue and Lincoln Street, I saw a group of Buddhist monks in traditional robes taking snapshots of one…

Artbeat

Jeanie King’s Fresh Art Gallery (208 South Broadway, 720-570-2255) is pretty crowded right now, filled to the max with The Colorists, a show featuring abstract paintings and sculptures by a quartet of Denver artists. The floors of the two small rooms that make up Fresh Art are littered with sculptures,…

Ladies First

Shakespearean companies have tried various approaches to producing the three parts of Henry VI, plays that are believed to have been written with the help of at least one collaborator. In 1963, Tantalus co-creators John Barton and Peter Hall combined the unwieldy trilogy with Richard III to make The Wars…

It Happens

Matt Stone has little time to talk. It’s Tuesday, July 17, 1 p.m. in Los Angeles, yet Stone and Trey Parker have yet to finish a television show that will debut some 30 hours from now–an episode of South Park titled “Terrance and Garfunkel,” in which the farting, fighting Canadian…

Gangster Crap

When last we spotted indie icons Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau on screen together, they were knocking back fruit-flavored martinis and chasing L.A. skirt in the inventive Gen-X hit Swingers. The goofy charm of that phenomenon now gives way, sad to report, to a labored fringes-of-the-mob comedy called Made, in…

Mob Rule

Actor “Beat” Takeshi Kitano has built an international reputation over the past decade, primarily through a series of ultra-hard-boiled crime films in which he plays either a cop or a felon. With the exception of Gonin (1995, U.S. release, 1998), which was directed by Takeshi Ishii, all of these films…

Ape Escape

There are scenes in Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes redo that are so hysterical they drown out minutes’ worth of dialogue that follow, which is hardly a knock. Indeed, the film is often so comical, so ridiculous in that self-aware, wink-wink sort of way, that it plays like a…

Gone Fishin’

Fishing has long been a man’s domain, especially in Florida, where the big boys go out on big boats to hook really big fish. Men, it seems, have something to prove as fishermen, while the girls just want to have fun. Therefore, coed angling experiences can be humiliating for members…

Game Boy

Been there, done that. There are psychologists and birdwatchers and cowboys and gourmands solving crimes in books these days, along with the tried-and-true police detectives, private gumshoes and busybodies of classic mystery lore. So can the detective fiction/thriller market possibly support yet another brand of hero? Wyoming mystery writer C.J…

It’s a Guy Thing

Flying way below the region’s art radar right now — it hasn’t even appeared in most of the city’s gallery listings — is Fetem, a thematically linked exhibit of sculptures by Bryan Andrews, a twenty-something artist who has been exhibiting locally for the last few years. The show is on…

Artbeat

In the park informally known as the Charles Heartling Sculpture Park, located northwest of the intersection of Ninth Street and Canyon Boulevard in Boulder, well-known sculptor Bill Vielehr is the subject of an outdoor exhibition titled 3-D Drawings (Search for the Mark). The exhibit, which is visible from the street,…

King for a Day

What a difference no-nonsense direction makes. Elizabeth Huddle heeds the clues in Shakespeare’s text instead of making her own mystery of them — as have many Colorado Shakespeare Festival directors before her — and the performers in her version of King Lear, led by guest artist Raye Birk’s virtuoso turn…

A Good Time

Looking for a Broadway musical that lets the brainwaves relax and the funnybone roam? Have a thing for exuberant dance numbers, exquisite costumes and an old-fashioned love story? Don’t mind overamplified voices, stand-and-sing ballads and a steady barrage of groaners? Then hie thee hither to the Arvada Center’s outdoor amphitheater,…

Klinky Sex

Robert Scott Crane insists he had no idea that people would be so fascinated with his famous father’s penis (or is that his father’s famous penis?). “We knew it would be big,” Scotty Crane says, “but we didn’t know how big.” He’s talking not about the member in question–of its…

Churl Power

Festering somewhere between an After School Special and kiddie porn lies this frank but heinously melodramatic open wound from veteran Canadian director Léa Pool (Emporte-moi). Adapted by screenwriter Judith Thompson from the novel The Wives of Bath, by Susan Swan, Lost and Delirious is about girl joy and girl sorrow,…

Laughter à la Czech

Who would have imagined that at this late date — more than half a century after the end of World War II, after The Diary of Anne Frank, Schindler’s List, Au Revoir, Les Enfants, Pierre Sauvage’s documentary Weapons of the Spirit and Jan Kadar’s amazing The Shop on Main Street…

Leapin’ Lizards!

A third Jurassic Park movie was, of course, inevitable, given that the second shattered box-office records (it also shattered the conventional notion that any movie starring Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore and a bunch of dinosaurs had to be at least somewhat interesting). But when you have one of the hottest…

Walk on the Wild Side

Crested Butte is notorious for its nude ski days, its invention of the fat-tire bicycle — and its wildflower walks. This weekend, the old mining town is just the place to stop and smell the primroses. And the columbine. And the cinquefoil. Crested Butte is known as the Wildflower Capital…