Renowned video artist Nam June Paik describes his first Miami artistic encounter with good humor. Back in 1987 he was invited to create an installation for Miami International Airport. Unfortunately his televisions took wing: “They stole half of my TVs,” he laughs. Eastern Airlines, the project’s original location, crashed financially,…
Eddie Izzard knows precisely why he wanted to become a performer, be it an actor or stand-up comedian or, for that matter, a street performer entertaining passers-by for spare change. When he was 6 years old, Izzard was living in South Wales with his parents and older brother. Before that,…
Most modern dramas about marriage and infidelity dwell on the clandestine nature of extramarital affairs and the havoc they wreak on everyone involved. Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing picks up where most such tales leave off, delving into what happens after the cheaters have sloughed off their former spouses and…
Beauty, once one of the most desired terms in the art lexicon, might be on the verge of extinction. We don’t describe things as beautiful anymore. Our evaluations tend toward fleeting states of mind, reflecting habits, places, even casual encounters. Saying “fun” or “cool” does the job when we want…
Watching this film is like watching a donkey being beaten for 90 minutes, so egregiously is the titular character treated and so powerless does she appear against her offenders. That the abuse is treated in a comedic fashion for a good part of the film makes it even more unacceptable…
Have you heard? Beauty’s only skin deep. Pay attention now: When it comes to love, experience is the best teacher. And just in case you didn’t know: Youth is wasted on the young. Such are the banalities director Tonie Marshall dispenses, more or less, in Venus Beauty Institute, a French…
Outside avant-garde or experimental showcases, short dramatic films used to be little more than a means to an end — a risky route to an uncertain mainstream future. Getting one made usually was easy enough, as these things go. The hard part was getting it shown, especially if you were…
Aside from relentless rain or bitter cold, what could possibly deter throngs of tourists from traipsing all over Ocean Drive on any given weekend? Chalk, that’s what. The bittersweet reminder of endless childhood days spent in the classroom nevertheless will attempt to attract visitors no longer haunted by sneeze-inducing dust…
Just because Miami, at a little more than 100 years old, is so young, doesn’t mean its history is any easier to figure out than that of an older town. Our callow condition notwithstanding, misconceptions abound. Ask any Miami buff what purpose was served by the small limestone and wood…
How can you not be leery of a play staged in an attic? The ominous mahogany furniture, the curled yellowed pages of old newspapers and photo albums, and the inevitable sepia-tone photos hark back to a time only remarkable to the people who own the clutter. Most attic settings are…
The Green Door Gallery used to be a derelict construction spot among a monotonous row of secondhand stores on North Miami Avenue. It came to life when Gary Fonseca and Mino Gerges (both students at the New World School of the Arts) decided to change things around. These young men…
Quick, what gonzo visionary is a prime inspiration for many American directors, including Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, and Julie Taymor? The answer is Jan Svankmajer, an obscure Czech puppet master and filmmaker whose latest feature, Otesánek, makes its Florida premiere (and second U.S. screening) at the Mercury Theatre on Saturday,…
That anyone should consider making a film of Reinaldo Arenas’s memoir Before Night Falls is curious. That the person to do it should be painter-turned-film director Julian Schnabel truly is unusual. And that the results should be as good as they are is most remarkable of all. But it would…
The doomed often are a remarkably energetic and productive lot, especially when it comes to creating portraits of their personal horrors. Themes vary in intensity between slow self-destruction and grand devastation, but in vampirism the full spectrum of ghastliness may be covered, because the imbalance represents so much to so…
When Cristina Delgado, founding director of alternative arts organization Miami Arts Project, invited Stalker (an interdisciplinary architectural group from Rome) to explore the Miami River on foot as part of its biannual contemporary arts in urban spaces program, the result was an installation conceived beyond the walls of a gallery…
How does the thought of dinner with a horse grab you? Not dinner made from a horse but eating your meal, drinking your drinks, right next to an enormous whinnying animal. If you’re appalled by that idea and think of yourself as more of an ecology-minded type, then how about…
For 17 years, Dorothy Swanson has waged the loneliest battle: keeping good shows on television, a medium that exists as if only to taunt her. You can hear in her voice the toll such a struggle has taken on her. Her voice breaks and softens when she speaks about the…
The small-town setting of The Laramie Project has been compared to Thornton Wilder’s Grover’s Corners in the classic play Our Town, and rightfully so. Both plays forage the archetypal American town and uncover truths that are disturbing, moving, and in the case of the more recent work, brutal. The bare…
Israeli writer-director Amos Gitai’s last film, Kadosh, was a claustrophobic tale of two sisters living in an ultra-Orthodox religious community in Jerusalem. The 1999 picture moved at a snail’s pace and turned an already rigid, divisive belief system into a completely alienating experience. In contrast the director’s most recent work,…
With the canon of Jane Austen all but exhausted, literary filmmakers continue their assault on Edith Wharton, another sharply observant writer of yore with something timeless to say about the plight of women. Terence Davies’ The House of Mirth, from Wharton’s beautifully detailed, ironically titled 1905 novel about a mannerly…
If M. Night Shyamalan makes movies to be seen twice, then Joel and Ethan Coen make films to be pawed over a dozen times. O Brother, Where Art Thou?, an opulent and often slapstick updating of Homer’s The Odyssey by way of Preston Sturges, Robert Johnson, and Clark Gable, sneaks…
“I’ve been on my knees for days!” admits designer Juan Carlos Arcila-Duque. Coproprietor of the Design District showroom called ROOM and soon owner of a-d furniture interiors, Arcila-Duque hasn’t taken on a new position as a presidential intern. He’s just adding the job of curator to his résumé, since he’s…
