Recent hot days of December have made Miamians moan, groan, and long for a big blast of Arctic air so they can don the moth-balled sweaters and coats hidden deep in their closets. Warm-weather lovers are crying wool! So it seems impossible to fathom that winter officially arrives Friday, December…
The hills were alive with The Sound of Music in 1965. Since 1999 the halls have been alive with the sound of Sing-a-Long Sound of Music. The final musical collaboration between Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II (Oklahoma, South Pacific) began its life on Broadway in 1959 and starred Mary…
It is December 5, the day AOL Time Warner-owned DC Comics has been anxiously awaiting for almost 15 years–the day writer-illustrator Frank Miller once more dons cape and cowl to resurrect the Dark Knight, his fiercely rendered vision of an obscenely obsessed middle-aged Batman. Today, stores will finally open their…
Had The Royal Tenenbaums been made by a first-time filmmaker unburdened by acclaim or expectation, it could be heralded — and then just as easily dismissed — as a light, literary exercise in filmmaking that’s as pleasant as it is frustrating. Its tale of a dysfunctional family of geniuses torn…
“Enter at your own risk,” warns interior decorator, furniture designer, and photography curator Juan Carlos Arcila-Duque about the Design District space where he’ll show the work of controversial Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. Like many people in this unsure post-9/11 world, Arcila-Duque has scaled down recently, shuttering his large furniture showroom…
She came, she saw, she mamboed. In the middle of the Dezerland’s near-vacant lounge, two women stand tentatively behind professional dancer and instructor Jami Josephson. A few hotel guests banter at the bar. Sheathed in matching gun-metal- gray velour top and pants, with nails as dark and glossy as a…
Beneath the hazy, mystifying layers of Vanilla Sky lies a remarkable Tom Cruise performance — one that, to a large extent, takes place beneath a makeup artist’s piled-on scars and a costumer’s blank “prosthetic” mask. As David Aames, hipster publisher of Maxim-like magazines, Cruise plays a lothario so vain he…
Photography is a great medium for social documentation. Think of nineteenth-century French photographer Eugène Atget, who produced thousands of photographs of Paris with direct, novel, and poetic renditions of everything imaginable: people in the streets, shop fronts, buildings, wheeled vehicles of all kinds, decorative details, et cetera. Cuban photo documentaries…
“What we have is a hard core of revolutionaries that have infiltrated half the Hollywood guild…. Hollywood is everywhere. Every small town in the country has got a moviehouse. We’re talking the hearts and the minds of a nation.” Thus warns a zealous FBI agent in Welsh director Karl Francis’s…
The lights go down and the puzzlement begins. Ensemble cast of superstars? Check. Loose remake of amusing curiosity? Check. Built-in, prefab sense of cool? Check. A little something for wistful fans of Dino and Sammy? Check. So … wait a minute. Is this The Cannonball Run Redux? With his ambitious…
Some movies you see because you want to. Others you see because you have to. For anyone who is interested in film noir, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le Flambeur (1955) is one of the latter. Just as John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) is credited with starting the genre in the…
Watching Ann-Margret shimmy so energetically next to Elvis in kitschy movies such as Viva Las Vegas or stab people and set fire to things as an angry delinquent in 1964’s campy Kitten with a Whip so long ago, it’s hard to imagine her a senior citizen. Nevertheless the actress turned…
In the curious, peculiar little world of theater, there has always been and always will be an ongoing debate between the aficionados of art and those of entertainment. Aesthetes tend to roll their eyes at anything corny, sweet, or obvious, while fun-loving fans head for the door at the first…
“Mr. Human Rights,” they once called him, and though his was never the most famous name on the bill–that was Bono or Bruce Springsteen, Sting or Peter Gabriel–as the organizer of the Conspiracy of Hope concerts in 1986 and the Human Rights Now! world tour two years later, Jack Healey…
Is the glass half empty or half full? Thoughtful theatergoers may rue what may be missing on the South Florida stage scene — classical productions, experimental theatricality, multimedia — but none can deny the area’s strengths, chief among them plenty of entertaining, vigorously produced musical offerings. Any number of musicals…
This is the true story of seven people (Tommy! Annie! Ashley! Maria! Griffin! Carpo! And Benjamin!) picked to live in a city and have their lives changed. Find out what happens when people stop being polite, and start being real. The Real World: Sidewalks of New York. If you came…
Stop the presses! I must report that I have just seen a film that could top my personal list of the worst movies of all time. The new contender is La Cienaga (The Swamp), a recent release from Argentina that is so godawful it makes Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from…
You had no problem pounding out that first novel. In fact writing on a legal pad during your daily train commute to work, you’ve produced many more since that fateful first attempt. But getting published? That’s a different story altogether. Twenty-one — yes, twenty-one! — publishers rejected your manuscript. For…
Some towns much older than ours proudly flaunt the fact that George Washington slept there. Among youthful Miami’s many dubious claims to fame: While onstage at Coconut Grove’s Dinner Key Auditorium in 1969, a very drunk Jim Morrison, lead singer for the Doors, allegedly exposed himself. He was arrested shortly…
Oh, the weather outside is frightful. Well it isn’t really. It’s actually quite nice. Blinding sunny skies, a slight nip in the air. Nice, right? But don’t be fooled. Our balmy climate is one of the main obstacles to celebrating Christmas in South Florida. It just doesn’t feel very Christmasy…
If high drama is your cup of tea, you should find what you’re looking for at theater companies all over South Florida. Just don’t look on the playbill. The offstage news from several local theaters is as full of dire foreboding, narrow escapes, and last-minute miracles as The Perils of…
For those who find it difficult what to make of some of the art being shown today, here’s a solution: Suspend judgment. Concepts need time to grow on you. That’s why a skeptic like Marcel Duchamp believed it was better not to know what to believe, rather than believe something…
