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• What?

It's true, according to Motovo, a real estate website, and this chipper e-mail:

Hi Kirk, Ralph and [J. Adrian] Stanley! I’m Nick with Movoto, a blog that talks about real estate and city-related news.

What’s up with Colorado Springs? Apparently, your city is missing a fashion sense, as it ranked second on our list as the worst-dressed city in the country: http://www.movoto.com/blog/top-ten/worst-dressed/.

We took into account high-end clothing stores, jewelry stores and other style factors.

Interested in your feedback. Are we off? Do Colorado residents have other concerns besides style?

Thanks!
Nick

We're down there with Milwaukee, Tulsa, Albuquerque and No. 1, Wichita. As Motovo puts it, these are the places "where fashion dies."

Motovo came up with this by enlisting Yelp and reviewing how many high-end clothing, jewelry and shoe stores each city had per capita. It also looked at things like number of tailors and number of fashion schools. Somehow, this also put San Antonio on the list at No. 8. (Does La Cantera, complete with a Tiffany's and Burberry, not count? How about everyone in heels at the H.E.B.?) Naturally, New York City sits at the top of the list.

Anyway, that we're almost dead last seems kind of harsh, since, well, we can't help it no one put a Nieman Marcus here. Sure, if find yourself in a local Wal-Mart, our ranking may seem justified. But what you must remember is, people of Walmart are everywhere. Just what is it about the place that makes people think wearing dirty pajamas in public is a good idea? (Except for Lloyd, who can dress however the fuck he wants.)

But I digress. What do you think? Do we suck at this? Is this just another stupid Top 10 list (my vote)? Are we more fashionable than the metrics suggest?

Or, as one commenter on Facebook put it, "Or, 2nd least materialistic...based on the criteria use. Another win for COS!"

Most weeks, I review more DVDs than the Indy can fit into print. You can look for extra write-ups here, on the IndyBlog.

Hot off of comedy hits like Caddyshack, in 1980, Chevy Chase could do no wrong. And then 1981 happened. Under the Rainbow, at the time, was widely regarded as a huge bomb and, until Ishtar, was Hollywood’s go-to joke for overblown comedies. More than 30 years later, I just have one question to ask: Why? Under the Rainbow is actually a very solid, very funny, very clever comedy that, if anything, was a little too ahead of its time. It’s a kitchen-sink riff on the screwball comedy, with Chase playing a G-Man assigned to protect a traveling dignitary while constantly crossing paths with Carrie Fisher (the it-girl of the time, thanks to Star Wars, of course), who is an MGM casting agent in charge of rounding up a couple hundred drunken, horny little people who are to play Munchkins in the Wizard of Oz. There are also Nazis, assassination attempts, swordplay and a madcap studio dash that rivals that of Blazing Saddles. A sorely overlooked gem, Under the Rainbow is a yellow brick road to hilarity.

Looking back at The Blues Brothers, it’s kind of funny how surreal that movie really is. But, then again, whenever Belushi and Aykroyd got together, be it on film or SNL, it always presented a decidedly skewed and dark comedic view of modern life. They reached their apex of these collaborations with 1981’s Neighbors, a befuddling, bizarre look at suburbia. Belushi is Earl, a haggard businessman whose life is the epitome of routine — and, to be fair, he likes it that way, much to his long-suffering wife’s chagrin. His whole world is turned upside-down, however, when a pair of swingers (Dan Aykroyd and Cathy Moriarty) move in next-door and wreak an insane amount of havoc. Who these people are, why these people are there, and if they are even real is never explained, as we are forced to go on this ride with Earl, experiencing all of his repressed frustrations exploding as he is taken advantage of, made fun of, and ultimately destroyed in order to ambiguously rebuild him as a new man. It makes little to no sense, but to see these two together on screen for a final time is a real treat, making one wonder what else they could have accomplished if Belushi had lived. Could it have been even weirder than Neighbors?

Every movie should have a talking horse. Every. Movie. Not only do they make films better, they just seem to make life better. Unfortunately, after reaching its apex with the television series Mr. Ed, Hollywood began to quit listening to the public, and an invisible moratorium was placed on loquacious equines. That changed, thankfully, in 1988 when Bobcat Goldthwait bucked the system and starred in Hot to Trot, a hilarious comedy about a ne’er-do-well who inherits not only half of his mother’s stockbroking firm, but also a horse named Don. But Don is no ordinary horse — he’s a wisecracking stock market wizard who loves to party and is even voiced by John Candy. As Bobcat and Don fight to save their firm from the clutches of Dabney Coleman as the buck-toothed, scheming, philandering step-dad, the boys throw parties where farm animals are invited, find romance with Virginia Madsen, sing “Tutti-Frutti” in a convertible, and even win the big horse race. Oh God, do I love this movie.

Most weeks, I review more DVDs than the Indy can fit into print. You can look for extra write-ups here, on the IndyBlog.

Are you into microfinance theories and the people who support them? Then To Catch a Dollar should be like financial pornography for you. Subtitled “Muhammad Yunus Banks on America,” Dollar follows Nobel Peace Prize winner Yunus as he puts his self-described revolutionary microfinance institution Grameen Bank into actual practice. I’m naturally skeptical about the whole thing, but when you actually watch it work over the course of the documentary, hearing the stories of the first borrowers and what they’ve had to go through to create their own sustainable businesses, that skepticism starts to fade away and you begin to wonder why this hasn’t caught on with more people, especially in a country where about 46 million people are currently living below the poverty line. But then you remember who is really in charge of the American financial systems, and all that hope melts away into pure depression.

Home invasions scare the hell out of me. Sure, burglaries are scary and leave you with a total sense of violation, but when it happens when you’re at home, it takes it to a whole new level of fear. As the family in Cherry Tree Lane learns, such violations can happen even in the most peaceful of surroundings. Three kids break into the family’s home, tie them up, and threaten their every move with death. And that’s just the beginning as the family has a long 77 minutes — the film is shot in real-time — ahead of torment, torture and shocking cruelty, leading to an extremely explosive ending that give the audience a nice sense of wish-fulfillment. The film drags in many areas — the story is admitted threadbare — but not enough to really enough to destroy the overall effectiveness of this extremely taut British thriller.

Thanks to groundbreaking sequential art dissections such as The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, for superheroes to be taken seriously they have to achieve a real-world level of grittiness that does its best to tear any classic superhero trope to shreds. It’s kind of sad, really. That brings us to All Superheroes Must Die, which manages to mix the aforementioned Watchmen with the timed torture-games of the Saw franchise. Four de-powered, questionably heroic heroes find themselves in a strange town, surrounded by civilians with explosives tied to them, all as part of a revenge plot by the evil madman Rickshaw (the movie’s real bright-spot, James Remar). Director Jason Trost, whose previous film, The FP, was an irritating disaster, works hard to redeem himself here and mostly succeeds, even despite the annoyingly ambiguous ending.

When most of us over, say, 30, were bullied in school, it tended to be a non-snitching affair that usually ended with some kid either taking his lumps or finally fighting back. Times have changed, however, and especially in the post-Columbine age of pharmaceutically enhanced shotgun-wielding Goth kids and the new form of harassment known as “cyber-bullying,” kids can no longer keep quiet about it. They’ve decided to fight back using awareness and wrist-bands and homemade posters. The recent controversial documentary Bully — released in an edited, PG-13 edition for kids and families — chronicles this meaner age of bullying and how it affects a new generation of hyper-sensitive kids. As harrowing as it is heavy-handed, Bully works well as tool in the fight against fighting and should be watched by today’s youth, but the cynic in me knows that it also reeks of headline-grabbing opportunism. (Don’t hit me for saying that, please.)

With this year’s Oscars nothing more than an image getting farther and farther away in the rearview mirror, it’s starting to seem that Paul Thomas Anderson will never receive the award-form accolades he deserves for every subsequent masterpiece he writes and directs. The latest snubbing comes in the form of The Master, his kinda-but-not-really-controversial take on the early days of a Scientology-like cult and the charismatic minds behind it. But when it gets down to the meat of it, that’s not really what The Master is about at all. Homoerotic love story? Fight Club-esque battle of duality? Jesus Christ allegory? Much like the way that the founder of the cult is accused of making this all up as he goes along, so does Anderson. There is no linear story, no definitive plot, just one big acting master-class exercise after another. Joaquin Phoenix and Phillip Seymour Hoffman prove they are masters in their own right.

We’ve had many a prehistoric creature cloned and resurrected in this recent spate of on-the-cheap science-fiction disaster flicks, but plants? That’s a new one, and thank God, because the change of pace really does breathe new life into an increasingly tepid and rote sub-genre. Seeds of Destruction is about a group of kooky scientists who plant an ancient seed and watch it bloom into a destructive monster plant that threatens to take over the world. Now it’s up to a tough-as-nails G-man (Adrian Pasdar) and the world’s greatest plant expert (Stefanie von Pfetten) to bring out the napalm-dipped pruners and cut this beanstalk to pieces before we’re all at its chlorophyllic mercies. As far as cheaply CGIed, low-budgeted eco-horrors go, Seeds of Destruction is pretty captivating. I'd encourage you to just sit back and let your mind wander as the movie plants seeds of trashy entertainment in your brain.

If there is a moral to every episode of the television series Femme Fatales, it’s this: Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Like a filmed, anthology version of those sexy stories of murder and revenge ripped from the cover of 1950s pulp magazines, this show is a rollicking good time that is definitely too hot for regular TV. So of course it’s a regular series on late-night Skinemax. Hollywood starlets behind bars, hostage situations, dead male strippers, and female assassins chasing down a geek with fraudulent online personals ad — Femme Fatales has it all, with thrilling, Twilight Zone-esque twists. Hosted by the ravishingly dark Tanit Phoenix — who I’ll take over the Crypt-Keeper any day — Fatales is filled with the soft-core sex that you’ve come to know and love from Cinemax. But the best thing about this is that even if the dirty bits were edited out, it’d still be a massively entertaining series.

Earlier this winter, my boyfriend and I were at the Broadmoor for some reason or another, taking a walk around the lake. We met up with a man and a dog sharing the front seat of a golf cart. The man, Troy, introduced us to the dog, Ruger, who lazed on the seat that was just a tad too small for him.

Troy drove him along the sidewalk toward a patch of geese honking around the lake, and Ruger snapped into hound-mode and leapt after them, baying and barking.

• The Broadmoor
• Ruger, who even has his own "B"-stamped name tag.

We thought that was a hoot, but it's actually Ruger's job. He's the official "mascot/water fowl control officer" of the Broadmoor. Ruger is an eight-year-old German Shorthaired Pointer mix (probably), the hotel outlines in a recent blog post tweeted today.

Ruger came from a shelter, whose staff insisted he'd be good for the job the Broadmoor needed done, wrangling the geese and keeping them from the golf course, where they could get hurt. But let's be honest, if you're golfing there, you don't want to step in poop. Ruger also helps guests feel at "welcome and at ease."

Troy is Ruger's human, and takes him home when Ruger's done for the day. According the blog, you'll often find them together, just as we did, with Ruger in his "co-pilot" spot in the golf cart.

Awwwww .....