Nobody can argue there’s something distinctly odd about New Orleans, Louisiana. There’s Mardi Gras, the yearly bacchanal possibly unrivaled around the world, where girls gone wild get captured on video in many mammary-revealing moments. There’s frightening foodie and short-lived sitcom star Emeril Lagasse. But New Orleans also is a city…
Exhibit A. Time: May 1927. Scene: Groundbreaking for a synagogue. Action: Two city managers silently mouth some presumably inspirational words to the assembled multitude — women and baby girls in bonnets, men and boys in white shirts with ties, a (mostly) solemn troop of Boy Scouts — after which beefy…
Talk long enough with any television exec over 55, and sooner or later he’ll get around to mentioning the La Brea Tar Pits, that enormous shimmering stinkhole in Los Angeles where the liquefied remains of some 660 species of organisms still burble. These old-timers, with skin light brown and pockets…
A positive sign in South Florida’s stage scene is the vitality of its fringe community, individual artists and tiny companies that create a range of intriguing, unique projects. But much of this flies under the radar of the major media and most theatergoers; searching out this kind of show takes…
Pop Art is not only not art … it is not even bad art,” wrote Barbara Rose, a well-known critic and curator, in 1965. Pop Art was never a critic’s movement, but it became the most popular art movement in American history. It happened because Pop Art showed something about…
David Poland is huddled with his cell phone, cinching the deal on one more film. The new director of the FIU Miami Film Festival thought he’d lost Chicken Rice War, a version of Romeo and Juliet set among Singapore food stands. The quirky romantic comedy won the audience award at…
Enjoying the sensual dance of a striptease artist, you’re not likely to think, What a fabulous cardiovascular and toning workout! But the folks at Crunch gyms do. With Cardio Striptease, they’ve blended flirty gestures, sexy gyrations, graceful body caresses, and a low-impact exercise routine designed to elicit the bold and…
Tammy Faye just won’t go away. And that seems just fine with us. The heavily-made-up Praise the Lord Broadcasting/Heritage U.S.A. queen who cried her way into the hearts of the American public in the Eighties as wife of wayward televangelist Jim Bakker, sometime singer, and star of the documentary The…
“In vino, veritas” goes the Latin saying: “In wine, truth” — the idea being that what may be suppressed in everyday life will come to light after a few drinks. The ancient Athenians went so far as to legalize this belief for a time: In critical votes citizens voted twice,…
Jill Waterman’s idea to photograph New Year’s celebrations began in Paris on a whim in 1984, while she was studying at the university. Since then it has evolved considerably and after nineteen years is well on its way to becoming one of the longest-running solo photo projects in the history…
It should be so easy to hate this man sitting on a couch in a high-priced hotel suite, this man sharing his bottle of Evian. He is, after all, a demon dressed head to toe (or tail?) in slate gray, the Satan of Cinema. Attacking him has long been regular…
Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, based on reporter Mark Bowden’s factual account of a 1993 U.S. Army operation gone dreadfully awry in Somalia, doesn’t just kick your ass. It pummels your entire body; it leaves you trembling. Once the premise and setting are established, this brutal combat adventure doesn’t catch…
So you won the disco-dance contest at your best friend’s bar mitzvah, you electric slide in your sleep, and you can salsa and merengue with every Hispanic around. Are you a dancing fool searching for a new groove to master? How about a little dabkeh? Dabkeh, you ask? That’s right…
Light and strong, aluminum historically has been considered one heavy metal. Abundant but lodged in the Earth’s crust and virtually unreachable, the element had to be isolated before it could be removed. This occurred around 1845, and the metal finally showed its shiny, exotic face at the Paris Exhibition of…
Who would have guessed that 31 years after M*A*S*H, the film that made Robert Altman’s reputation, he would still be turning out movies as good as his latest release, Gosford Park? Full of the director’s usual energy, powered by the sense of controlled chaos that marks all of his ensemble…
The mere presence of wide-eyed French gamine Audrey Tautou, star of the art-house hit Amelie, may be enough to get people into theaters to see Happenstance, which was made and released in France before the Amelie phenomenon swept the Gallic nation but is only now getting its American release. Viewers…
Never call Miami’s film festivals predictable. New ones pop up, old ones merge, long-standing ones change screening seasons, even the papa of them all — the FIU Miami International Film Festival — lost its founder and is headed in a new direction, though what that will be is not yet…
Imagine seeing a movie under the stars for a nickel or a vaudeville show. Such things could have happened indoors in Miami, especially if you were downtown at the Olympia Theater. Built in 1926 by Chicago architect John Eberson for Paramount Pictures, the Mediterranean Revival-style structure was one of many…
Actress Rita McKenzie is sitting under a hairdryer in a Sherman Oaks, California, beauty salon, but show-biz trooper that she is, she’s happily gabbing about her star turn in the off-Broadway smash, Ethel Merman’s Broadway. McKenzie, a TV, film, and musical stage veteran, has been eerily evoking Broadway belter Merman…
Now that the holidays have been dispensed with, the South Florida theater scene kicks back into gear with a flurry of openings. No fewer than twenty new productions open this month, with another truckload of shows rolling up in February. Meanwhile several intriguing productions are finishing their runs. If you…
For many people at this time of year, all of the seasonal cheer and de rigueur bonhomie can get downright depressing. If you’re among this not-so-select group, GableStage may have a holiday show for you: James Joyce’s “The Dead,” a New Musical Play, which is based on the celebrated short…
By the end of the summer, every local artist in Miami was making plans for a series of shows in conjunction with Art Basel 2001, and yes, Basel was going to be a great plug for Miami (though some of the artists’ responses seemed just too opportunistic in their want…
