“Hasta la vista, buggies!” boldly declares pixilated pixie Phig (voiced by annoyingly perky TV sitcom star Jenna Elfman), who’s part Tank Girl, part Judy Jetson. She’s literally referring to computer bugs in the Galleria Animatica software, version 3.0, the program she’s supposed to demonstrate for viewers in the IMAX 3-D…
A cold breeze blows through an open window, and a football game silently unfolds on the television screen. The old man sitting on the couch regards the game with mild interest, though not long ago, football was his passion, a way of pocketing a little scratch during those long stretches…
Five Southern women, some hard liquor, and about two and a half bolts of lilac-color taffeta. If we threw in Julia Roberts and a walk-on by Tommy Lee Jones, would we have another Steel Magnolias? Happily, no. Where that film drowned in a cloying syrup of bathos and fake accents,…
Richard Gere, as Dallas gynecologist Sullivan Travis, has never been more likable onscreen, perhaps because he’s never been more human, more vulnerable, more there. After so many years of so many duds, after so many years of playing ladies’ man to little girls (and the recent Autumn in New York…
Somewhere near the halfway mark of The Broken-Hearts Club, the latest gay romantic comedy (they really seem to be piling up these days) comes a not-unexpected scene where a rock-solidly avuncular older man (John Mahoney) tells a tremulously insecure younger one (Ben Weber) the “message” that’s at this film’s core:…
The setting of Stephen Daldry’s uplifting comedy Billy Elliot, which is about a working-class boy who wants to be a ballet dancer, is a beleaguered coal-mining town in the north of England, circa 1984. A coat of grime covers the squat brick row houses, drying laundry flaps sadly in the…
The folks at the Women’s Professional Football League (WPFL) repeatedly use words like tackle and full contact in their press releases. They want you to know their players — Olympians, weightlifters, and other athletic types — “have the desire to hit.” They want you to know this is no girlie…
Charo Oquet wants you to know there is more to Dominican music than the beeper dance, no matter how much fun the rump-shaking rhythm of merengue might be. For five years now, Oquet has organized the annual Dominican Youth Arts Festival to make Miamians aware of the cultural wealth of…
John Wesley Hall believes justice is a myth taught in classrooms, a fable found in law books, as imaginary as the unicorn and the mermaid. The Arkansas attorney mentions case after case in which he represented an innocent who wound up imprisoned or, worse, executed; in the course of a…
Junior officers quickly become disoriented in the Orient,” navy wife Julia Anderson warns newly arrived officer “Sparky” Watts in A.R. Gurney’s play Far East. Indeed the New Theatre’s production of this work seems to offer a heady brew of scandal, sex, and unrequited love, promising to leave the audience pleasantly…
With the long hot summer almost a muggy memory, Miami gets to turn its attention to cooler pursuits, such as a revved-up arts scene. The pace of activities already has quickened, and — good news — the quality of exhibitions has improved. This was evident on a Saturday night in…
Meet the Parents has just enough class to make for Prestige Pop: Robert De Niro as star, Randy Newman as composer, Blythe Danner as wallpaper, Ben Stiller as schmuck. It has just enough “comedy” to qualify as a crowd pleaser: sight gags (Stiller chasing a cat across a roof before…
The video camera and the chaos of the modern world have given Lars von Trier the opportunity to make us all seasick while self-indulgently flogging our emotions with a great big ham bone. Nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in the celebrated Danish director’s new abomination, the insanely sloppy…
Joel Schumacher goes to Vietnam: What else does one really have to know about Tigerland? Schumacher, for those readers fortunate enough not to have their brains cluttered with the sort of Hollywood detritus that afflicts some of us as an occupational hazard, is the auteur behind commercial confections such as…
A Coconut Grove psychiatrist named Dr. Camote visits his past life and learns he was once the idealistic Don Quixote. That’s the plot of the zany theater production The Adventures of Don Quixote in Miami. Not the handiwork of regression specialist Brian Weiss on a comedic bent, the play is…
According to gallery-owner Brook Dorsch, artist Kerry Ware paints because “he loves the way paint looks.” Dorsch must love the way Ware paints, because “whence,” Ware’s fourth solo installation at the Dorsch Gallery in about as many years, opened two weeks ago. The bold collection of oversize, three-dimensional pieces shows…
The literary canon is spinning, the hyphen that binds so-called multicultural fiction — Asian-American, Hispanic-American, African-American fiction — will not hold. Nor should it. Any thought-provoking work on ethnic identity must offer audiences a real look at the themes young playwrights are likely to undertake. In its inaugural performance, Miami’s…
According to Patrice Leconte, women live to be vulnerable, men thrive when they are in command, and the two genders can only find happy fusion once they’ve tasted one another’s fates … unless they capriciously kill each other. At least, this seems to be the director’s thesis in Girl on…
It takes a special kind of mindset to celebrate castration, and audiences confusing feminine empowerment with the crude hacking off of seemingly oppressive huevos are certain to get a bang out of Girlfight, the gritty debut feature from writer-director Karyn Kusama. Metaphoric or otherwise, there’s already a movie about deballing…
“I don’t understand why people keep asking me that, as if I should be embarrassed to be associated with benefiting people,” laments Marlon Moore, drummer for world-jazz ensemble Mantra. Moore refers to the many queries he’s received about his next gig, a daylong concert devoted to amassing a fund that…
The toaster in which you toast your toast. The computer keyboard on which you type. The toilet on which you sit. Design affects us in myriad ways we don’t even notice. A flawed kitchen appliance can yield a burned breakfast. A poorly assembled keyboard can contribute to a nasty case…
At first, you don’t want to admit it, because it seems somehow wrong–just too easy. After all, the woman on the other end of the phone line is not that woman seen every Sunday night on HBO, lamenting the sad, sorry state of her love affairs. She’s not an actress…
