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…
Only a couple of months ago, it looked as though Donald Miller had a publishing home run on his hands–a thoughtful, exhilarating, inclusive book about World War II scheduled to hit stores just as Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks’ Band of Brothers was finishing its critically lauded run on HBO…
It takes a nimble mind to mix light and dark, to wed humor with treachery, and in Novocaine newcomer David Atkins is not always up to the task. Neither is Steve Martin, who wants to be taken seriously while reserving the right to produce the occasional sick yuk. If you…
As those of us forced to fashion a clear, convincing, and even entertaining story out of a scant 400 or so words know well, it’s damn tough! Imagine then writing an entire play — comedy, drama, musical — that lasts less than twenty minutes. Can’t be done, you scoff? Tell…
A rocket blasts off, leaving a thick white cloud of smoke in its wake. A small private plane ascends from a faceless runway. “The Twentieth Century has produced a new man. A man on the move, curious, alert, with his eyes on the stars and his feet solidly on the…
The heroine of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s bold and bracing new comedy, Amelie, is Amélie Poulain, a doe-eyed crusader with the face of a porcelain doll and a sleek helmet of jet-black hair. From her high perch in Montmartre, where she works as a café waitress, Amélie secretly resolves to emancipate all…
Joel and Ethan Coen’s periodic genuflections to classic Hollywood are inevitably accompanied by a knowing wink from one brother and a wry smile from the other. These devoted movie buffs’ versions of vintage gangster pictures (Miller’s Crossing) or the populist comedies of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges (The Hudsucker Proxy)…
“I look at history as a current event, and everyone fulfills a historical role,” offers Heru, named for the terrible redeemer, the hawklike watcher of his ancient Egyptian ancestry. “What interests people is not necessarily what they’re hearing at the moment, it’s the possibility of what they might hear in…
