A long time ago in a galaxy not so far away, a couple of dudes spent months camped out on a Seattle street waiting for the opening of the new Star Wars movie, Episode Two — Attack of the Clones. You might remember these losers and all the hoopla the…
Notes from a network executive’s forthcoming biography, pilfered from the desk of an editor at a major publishing house. This was hard to read, as it was scribbled in crayon on the back of a copy of Highlights taken from a pediatrician’s office. From page 412: “Last week, I met…
Theater has always had a rabble-rousing role at the margins of society. Plato mistrusted poets and art in general. Aeschylus got himself exiled when his plays criticized the Athenian politicos. The Puritans tried to ban the Elizabethan theaters, and Hitler burned down a number of them. Henry Fielding, the great…
Maid in Manhattan, in which Jennifer Lopez goes from pauper to princess, comes not from a screenplay but from a handful of self-help books and fairy tales and fashion magazines cut and pasted together in a glossy montage committed to celluloid. Characters, made from the highest-grade cardboard and resplendent in…
The first image most of us had of music and the Third Reich was watching each von Trapp tyke sing “auf Wiedersehen, good night,” bow off the stage, slip into the night, surmount a few low hurdles, and climb a couple of mountains to freedom. Loosely based on a true…
Of all the movies you could be spending your December with — and there are many good choices, from Oscar-bait to better-than-expected sequels like The Santa Clause 2 — why would you want to end up at Drumline? “Hey dear, wanna go see the new Scorsese flick, or maybe one…
Three songs into Night Time!, Dan Zanes’s new album for kids, the former Del Fuegos frontman teams with Father Goose (West Indies emcee Rankin’ Don) to trade lines and duet on a cover of the buddies-forever chestnut “Side by Side.” In the final minute, shucking and jiving like Bob Hope…
All throughout our childhood, those Saturday-morning Schoolhouse Rock jingles assured us that three was the magic number. Journalist and radio producer Gustavo Noguera likes the number nine, particularly the bracing Ninth Symphony written by Romantic-era composer Ludwig van Beethoven. No matter that the German kicked the bucket 175 years ago…
The long arm of our faltering economy has reached out and touched this New Year’s Eve. But don’t worry — you’ll be the beneficiary. Most clubs and restaurants on South Beach, even big names like crobar, Level, and the Forge, are lowering New Year’s party prices from last year. That…
The two faces of theater, as most everyone knows, are the masks of tragedy and comedy. But perhaps a better bifurcation would be between the theater of challenge and that of tradition. The theater of tradition promotes cultural assumptions. The best of this celebrates enduring values and communities, the worst…
What is it about the theater that attracts so many filmmakers? The actor’s paradoxical task — to tell the truth while pretending to be someone else — is usually at the heart of this fascination. Not a year goes by without a movie about actors and live performance, from big-studio…
In this age of celebrity and relentless hype, it’s hard to recall a time when dedicated, internationally renowned artists often lived and worked apart from the media’s gaze. That certainly was the case of Maya Deren, an influential filmmaker whose dreams had a profound influence on experimental cinema in the…
“It’s smart, sassy, very Jewish, and rings true in a lot of ways,” says Florence Kaufman, not about the Miami Jewish Film Festival, which she founded six years ago under the umbrella of the Center for the Advancement of Jewish Education, but about Amy’s Orgasm, one of the 30 movies…
After more than twenty years, one of Miami’s original b-boys, Richard “Speedy Legs” Fernandez, is beginning to feel the toll of the countless contortions he’s performed while break dancing. At 36 years old, the local dance guru admits he has trouble with his ligaments and his lower extremities may not…
Broadway musicals and rodeo bull riding are more similar than you might think. Trying to ride a rodeo bull basically means two things. First, you have to stay on for eight full seconds to succeed, with no second chance. Second, the bull doesn’t care whether you’re a pro or a…
In the past three years Miami has experienced a remarkable development in the arts, which brings new challenges for art education. New Times decided to take the pulse of academia by sitting down with Michael Carlebach and Carol Damian, chairs from the art departments at the University of Miami and…
The smart sci-fi fan knows that, technically speaking, Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris is not a remake of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film at all, but rather a newly filmed interpretation of a Polish novel penned by Stanislaw Lem. Nonetheless the new film stands in a mighty big shadow. If someone attempted to make…
“Can somebody pinch me,” requests director Wilkenson Bruna, nervously speaking moments before his first feature film, Wind of Desire, premieres at the Intracoastal Theater in North Miami Beach. “I’m still dreaming.” Before him, the seats are packed with the movers and shakers of Miami’s Haitian community dressed in their finest…
Ten thousand years ago, when mastodon, woolly mammoths, and a fifteen-foot creature known as the dire wolf roamed the land, what we know as Biscayne Bay was a grassy valley about ten miles away from the Atlantic Ocean. A tribe of people known as Paleo Indians wandered here, hunting and…
When Catalan artist Luis Vidal last showed here, his work — wallpaper patterned with drawings of pedophilic acts — was the sensation of Art Miami 2002, drawing not only collectors and curious spectators but prompting visits from Miami Beach police. Vidal, who says the work is meant to inspire reflections…
Christ is sexy. There, got your attention. But honestly, think about it: nice guy, pretty hair, carpentry skills, puts loaves (and fishes) on the table. Plus all that doing miracles and rising from the dead and being the Son of God business. Heck, he’d be a prime catch for any…
Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Hello, Mr. Hundert. If we can judge by the new Kevin Kline vehicle, The Emperor’s Club, the notions remain alive (if not particularly well) that a self-sacrificing boarding school teacher can enrich the lives of his students while subsisting in relative emotional misery himself — and that…
