There’s a myth that the right person saw the right starlet slinging hash at the local diner and poof! Metro Goldwyn Mayer and 20th Century Fox popped up out of nowhere. Derek Elley’s 1998 documentary, Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies, and the American Dream, debunks this myth by revealing a more fascinating…
The House, the latest in a series of alternative art spaces popping up around Miami, seems to reflect a generational trend. Martin Oppel, Bhakti Baxter, and Tao Rey are three artists just out of a serious art-brewing operation: New World School of the Arts. They rented an old house off…
With luck Yi Yi (A One and a Two), the seventh release from writer-director Edward Yang, one of Taiwan’s most respected filmmakers, will open a vein of interest in Taiwan’s cinema, but it will be an uphill struggle. While it’s a rich and rewarding film, its pace is more leisurely…
The somber figure of Ingmar Bergman no longer looms over the film world like a guilty conscience, but the great Swedish director has spawned enough artistic descendents to keep us supplied with thorny philosophical and ethical questions for decades to come. Faithless, the second film that actress Liv Ullmann has…
To keep it simple, Enemy at the Gates plays like a cross between the PlayStation game Medal of Honor, a World War II Nazi-shoot-’em-up viewed through a sniper’s scope, and a Harlequin Romance novel. It’s history lesson as video game, video game as soap opera, soap opera as highbrow drama,…
Okay, in terms of history Miami is not exactly New England. No Pilgrims landed on any famous rocks here in the 1600s. No people burned each other at the stake. Aside from Indians whom outsiders almost eliminated, youthful Miami lacks droves of natives. Most residents have moved here from somewhere…
Butterfly Mystique is not a fancy overpriced attraction but a family-operated farm with an ever-blooming crop of scaly winged creatures and other insects. Owners Matt Bielecki and his mother, Renee, began raising butterflies for pleasure; as the hobby and their friends’ interest in it took flight, they decided to set…
The strife between the lead characters in Caldwell Theatre’s production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane goes way beyond the typical mother-daughter friction. Early in the play, while Maureen Folan (Cary Anne Spear) slams cabinet doors and slings pans around the kitchen of their little cottage, her aged mother, Mag…
In his latest film, Spectres of the Spectrum, filmmaker/archivist/pack rat Craig Baldwin creates common ground for his postmodern bricolage somewhere between the hazy vision of a corrupted techno future and the rose-colored modernism of the postwar American media. It’s not nearly as much of a stretch as you might think…
Van Gogh was a lunatic who cut off his ear. Picasso was a self-absorbed cur who abused women. Warhol turned out to be a weird, desperate loner, Basquiat a doomed junkie. Try as he might, shriveled little Toulouse-Lautrec failed miserably at romance. As for El Greco’s explosive affair with that…
Director John Herzfeld’s 1996 feature, the droll and underrated 2 Days in the Valley, was a more than adequate counterbalance to the catastrophe of his first feature, Two of a Kind, a 1983 John Travolta vehicle (which, together with Moment by Moment, put its star on the fast track from…
“Everywhere else death is an end. Death comes, and they draw the curtains. Not in Spain. In Spain they open them.” Writer Federico Garcia Lorca — probably most famous for his tragic trilogy that includes the play Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding) and his poetry collection Romancero Gitano (Gypsy Ballads)…
Diving into Dumpsters to retrieve discarded footage is another day at the office for experimental filmmaker Craig Baldwin, who makes what he refers to as “collage essays.” Known among the arthouse crowd for his films Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1992), a satiric take on xenophobia and CIA covert…
One can only imagine the pitch meeting at which comedian-turned-film actor Denis Leary told ABC programming execs he wanted to write and star in a show about a pill-popping, Scotch-swilling, chain-smoking, adulterous New York City cop who utters obscenities as casually as he exhales. It’ll be a 30-minute show, Leary…
Sam Hamm is, relatively speaking, a successful Hollywood screenwriter, meaning he earns his keep penning screenplays without having to subsidize his income by tending bar or waiting tables. He has to his credit a handful of films, some little known (1983’s Never Cry Wolf, his debut), some enormously profitable (1989’s…
Legend has it Robert Johnson became a blues guitar master in an amazingly short time; hence the myth that he made a deal with the Devil. Johnson didn’t achieve fame during his lifetime, but his signature sound and lexicon of powerful tunes have lived on through the work of rock…
The very notion of “modern” in art rests on a historical fallacy. At the height of European colonialism, the movements of fauvism and Cubism adapted the “primitive” as an emblem of artistic liberation from bourgeois academic clichés. The primitive set them free, but they supplied the iconic stereotypes. One example…
Read Part 1, Festival of Might Featuring a cast of outstanding young actors and a pack of symbol-laden dogs, first-time director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu’s urban portrait captures the daily desperation and persistent hopes of an ensemble of characters in millennial Mexico City. Economic class and personal histories clash when parallel…
There are many striking aspects to Patrice Leconte’s vivid, powerful film The Widow of St. Pierre, which screens this week at the Miami Film Festival, but the most unusual is the central relationship between a French army officer and his wife — a marriage based on passion, admiration, intimacy, and…
The festival closes as it began with an adaptation of an early twentieth-century novel by Vladimir Nabokov, The Luzhin Defence, a disappointing finale to what has been a very strong program overall. The film follows an obsessed Russian chess master, Alexander Luzhin (John Turturro), who in the late 1920s arrives…
“The greatness of a film is out there at a point beyond the lines,” says novelist and sometime screenwriter Robert Stone. “It’s really how those lines are made to play in terms of photography, in terms of so many other elements. Writing for the movies, I think, is something relatively…
Brazil’s colonial roots date back to the year 1500 when the Portuguese came to town, wreaked havoc on the vast area’s millions of indigenous residents, then began importing slaves in droves from West Africa to labor on plantations. Centuries later, one byproduct of those dishonorable intentions is the fascinating intermingling…
