Punch-Drunk Love is a Paul Thomas Anderson film — Paul Thomas Anderson of Magnolia and Boogie Nights fame. It is also an Adam Sandler film — Adam Sandler of Little Nicky and Wedding Singer fame. In terms of story, it has far more in common with Sandler’s previous work than…
You ever notice those people? You know, the so-called “stand-up comedians”? Who are those people? What’s the deal with them? And what does that mean, anyway, “stand-up”? I mean, it’s not like we’re gonna think they’re sitting down unless they tell us otherwise!Yes, a decade or so later, it’s easy…
Believe it or not, long before Yoko Ono became Mrs. John Lennon, she did have a life and identity of her own. As an avant-garde artist over the past 40 years, she has produced a significant and influential body of work. Yes, we’re talking about that Yoko Ono. The one…
Some people are contortionists. Hugo and Ines — who make their fists, fingers, feet, and legs into saxophone players, magicians, ballerinas, and sad old men — could be considered body-part puppeteers. Their poignant and funny Short Stories, which they’ll perform this weekend courtesy of Miami-Dade Community College’s Cultura del Lobo…
I might as well just come out and say it: Spirited Away is the best movie I’ve seen all year. Though it would be a masterpiece in any language, Hayao Miyazaki’s animated spectacular (and Japan’s highest-grossing film ever) is being released by Disney simultaneously in two versions — one in…
Much like a psychic, a cinema critic must look through a movie and see the other side. In the case of the new thriller The Ring — a remake of the 1998 Japanese hit Ringu — the formative forces swim into focus without effort. There’s a DreamWorks boardroom, some executives…
Those aggressive Latin Americans. First they take over the town, and now they’re hogging public transportation. Okay, that’s just our Latin side, making us prone to exaggeration. Actually only a trio of Metrobuses are commandeered for three hours at a time on Saturdays in October (Hispanic Heritage Month to you…
Using a blank canvas and buckets of paint, Miami artist Jonas Gerard stands onstage and creates colorful works of art. He calls it “spontaneous performance-painting.” To expand the concept, he’s going to paint while interacting with others, perhaps a saxophonist, a poet, and a dancer. The ensemble’s improvisational piece called…
There has been a lot of talk lately about the so-called Law of Unintended Consequences: that any course of action will produce an array of surprise results. I can’t be certain exactly what the Actors Playhouse in Coral Gables was intending with its season-opener Comic Potential, but the results are…
One of the fascinating oddities of theater in South Florida is the offbeat locations where it turns up. Local companies are found in some of the least likely places: The Caldwell Theatre and Florida Stage are in strip malls, the Broward Stage Door sits behind an IHOP. The Mosaic is…
At a time when painting seems to be metamorphosing into myriad subcategories, few of them include direct figurative images set out of the ordinary. Christian Curiel is an exception to this contemporary rule and his exhibit at Leonard Tachmes Gallery proves it. Curiel, who usually explores clannish young male scenarios…
Roger Avary’s screenplay for The Rules of Attraction is a remarkable work of literature: the disassembly and reconstruction of an impenetrable book by Bret Easton Ellis; a simplification and amplification of the 1987 novel’s attack on the bored, beautiful, and wealthy; a streamlined and mainlined version of a story originally…
The legend of director Werner Herzog goes something like this: Raised in a remote mountain village in the Black Forest of Germany, the young director-to-be lived with no television or telephone and had few lines of communication to the world outside. At age fourteen he began traveling long distances by…
Check beneath overpasses throughout Miami during the evening and you’re sure to find more than just the homeless, assures Greynolds Park naturalist Paula Schneeburger. Making their home there as well: bats. Yes, you’re not in Transylvania anymore, Dorothy. South Florida can lay claim to a small population of the world’s…
For the members of the Bonsai Society of Miami, size matters. Rather than dwell on the large, this assortment of tree lovers think diminutive is the desired scale — at least where miniature potted trees are concerned. Nevertheless the eight-year-old group (formed when the Bonsai Club of Miami and the…
Theater in South Florida was once the realm of musicals and light comedies, with dramas mighty scarce. Now the scene features theater of all kinds — fierce as well as frothy. But what remains rare are plays with immediate, topical subjects. Despite the disturbing real-life drama in contemporary America, most…
Brad Silberling’s instincts are right about half the time, which means that, depending upon your point of view, his films are either half-empty or half-full. His last picture, 1998’s City of Angels, an American remake of Wim Wenders’s poetic Wings of Desire, tried to marry European art-house cinema with mainstream…
The catering company that provided sustenance to the cast and crew of Just a Kiss, the feature directorial debut of actor Fisher Stevens, is named Cecil B. Demeals. It’s one small detail in a list of credits that appears after most casual moviegoers have walked out of the theater. So…
In her 1993 novel In Troubled Waters, Beverly Coyle depicts tensions arising in the fictional Central Florida town of Point Breeze when Tom Glover, 91-year-old patriarch of a cracker family, hires clever black 13-year-old Ted Johnson to help the old man look after his Alzheimer’s-afflicted son-in-law. Jumping between the present…
“People don’t expect such sophisticated expression from an underdeveloped country,” observed Cuban graphic designer Félix Beltrán during the recent opening of “¡Propaganda! Cuban Political and Film Posters 1960-1990” at the New World School of the Arts Gallery. Showcasing rare works that symbolized the island’s revolutionary ethos, promoted social programs and…
The last time I dropped by the Mosaic Theatre in Plantation last season, the company was presenting Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, a three-man hostage drama, to an audience of six in a bare, uninviting auditorium. Flash-forward to this month as the Mosaic presents another three-person show, The Complete Works…
Where is the dividing line between romantic devotion and psychotic obsession? How can you know whether your romance is Titanic … or Fatal Attraction? Veteran Spanish writer-director Vicente Aranda (Lovers) uses the story of Queen Joan “the Mad” (1479-1555) — daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, mother of Charles I of…
