Success is relative in Hollywood, like a third cousin twice-removed who doesn’t recognize you at family reunions, and doesn’t care to. Fame is so fleeting it has a month-by-month lease. Six years ago, Christopher McQuarrie was as famous as any screenwriter on the backlot known as Los Angeles. He had…
Paper elephants and donkeys; red, white, and blue banners; and two video screens — one posted in each of the far corners of the space — set the scene for George and Ira Gershwin’s Of Thee I Sing, one of Broadway’s first political satires. We are quickly reminded that successful…
Turns out that when goodfellas don’t die (when they don’t get shot or blown up in a car or beaten to death with a baseball bat) they move to South Beach. They drive tour buses for the elderly, take orders at Burger King, give dime-a-dance lessons to old women in…
I’m not the celebrity type,” says Vincent D’Onofrio, and he does not lie. His is a household name in very few neighborhoods; it appears in film credits buried just beneath those of actors more famous, or just luckier. Rare is the filmgoer who utters the words, “Dude, let’s go check…
Too often baseball players are reduced to statistics, hollow numbers that resonate with the fetishist who drifts off to sleep counting home runs and career batting averages. Baseball demands such precision: It’s a team sport, yes, but ultimately it’s man against man, record against record, history against history. Look no…
All the things you’ve been told to seek in the perfect guy: sparkling sense of humor, sonorous voice, spiffy shoes. Trash ’em, says author Beverley East. The proof of the person is in the way he writes. Kingston, Jamaica, native East should know. As a professional handwriting analyst or graphologist,…
This weekend the biggest African-American business in the United States also is the best show in town. Detroit entrepreneur David Humphries, better known in the beauty world as Hump the Grinder, presents in Miami for the second year in a row what he calls “a showcase of hair entertainment.” At…
Be cool, get chicks.” While that’s paraphrased and boiled down, it’s nonetheless the essential creed of Dex (Donal Logue), the corpulent connoisseur of carnality who lumbers through this debut feature from Jenniphr Goodman as if he’s Paul Bunyan and every woman in sight is a tree. Overweight and underemployed, Dex…
The bloodletting begins even before the opening credits: A wild-eyed, butcher-knife-wielding man hovers menacingly over a full-figure girl immersed in a bubble bath. Suddenly he plunges in for the kill, first gouging out her left eye, next hacking off her left leg, and then carefully packing the viscous body parts…
A café in Mexico City where artists, writers, and political radicals gathered in the early 1900s, Café Tacuba also is the name of a band as committed to preserving Mexican history and culture as it is to turning the common places of its homeland upside down. “It’s a game that…
“I’m not the celebrity type,” says Vincent D’Onofrio, and he does not lie. His is a household name in very few neighborhoods; it appears in film credits buried just beneath those of actors more famous, or just luckier. Rare is the filmgoer who utters the words, “Dude, let’s go check…
I was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning. — Stevie Smith In Douglas Carter Beane’s As Bees in Honey Drown, Evan Wyler (played by Mark Heimann) learns a little something about the facts of life and even more about life’s fictions. After nine years of…
Since the beginning of modern times, artists have embraced art as a vehicle for social change. Modern art often has been used as an instrument of critique against the injustices of the status quo. Yet it also can be a valuable commodity to the same establishment art seeks to fight…
This just in: Religious fundamentalism can be oppressive to women! That’s the less than startling message in the Israeli film Kadosh, which manages to draw out its obvious point for nearly three hours of monotony. Despite some solid performances and lovely visuals, Amos Gitai’s latest effort can’t overcome its static,…
When John Waters is at his best, as he is in his latest, Cecil B. Demented, he can drive you in in a way few filmmakers have ever managed to do. But recognizing that fact can sometimes be difficult in today’s market-driven context. In fact for the first half-hour or…
I have never read The Odyssey, A Tale of Two Cities, Pride and Prejudice, or, for that matter, the Bible. But I have read, from cover to cover, Occupation: Skateboarder, the just-published autobiography from Tony Hawk. I have never seen most of the films of Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, or…
It’s no myth that one of the first constitutional rights U.S. settlers fought for after freedom of speech, was the right to bear arms. Americans have an undeniable fascination (indeed, love affair) with the gun as phallus — an insatiable attraction to the romance of the Bonnie and Clyde rampage…
As any Klump family member can tell you, this has been a hot summer for black comedians. New movies starring Martin Lawrence, the Wayans brothers, and Eddie Murphy have already pulled down more than $300 million at the box office, and by the time Chris Rock’s remake of Heaven Can…
There’s no explicable reason for the existence of The Replacements, which is to the football-film genre what Major League was to the baseball movie: sports rendered as sitcom (or Police Academy sequel). The Replacements, which takes its cue from the 1987 National Football League players’ strike, is stocked with every…
Irish charm and British eccentricity are hot properties on this side of the pond, especially among U.S. moviegoers. Witness the phenomenal success here of The Secret of Roan Inish, in which a ten-year-old Irish girl finds her lost brother living among seals off her country’s rugged western coast, or of…
Dolphins are the “creatures we might have been if we had lived in the sea,” declares soft-spoken narrator Pierce Brosnan in the IMAX film Dolphins. The movie explores the mystique of these feisty, flirty, gregarious, intelligent, and mysterious mammals, of which there are 40 species. And they are the stars…
Zoom along Southwest 66th Street off 99th Avenue too quickly in your car and Palm Hammock Orchid Estate just may elude you. Slow down, though, look carefully, and you’ll be astonished to find the lushly landscaped nursery. Plunked down in 1973 on the site of a once-agricultural area, the Estate…
