“Please hold for Tammy Faye.” The few seconds between those words and those that follow, uttered by the woman who once haunted pay-to-pray TV like a mascara-ed harlequin, are interminable. Until a month ago, the notion of talking to Tammy Faye Bakker-Messner, once the most adored and reviled figure in…
The forms of entertainment competing with live theater seem to grow every year, from IMAXes to e-books to women’s basketball. And now there’s even a new form onstage. “The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction,” wrote Jean Cocteau, and South Florida, being the capital of contradiction and fertile…
The issue of Latin-American art — what it is and if our city is a center for it — comes up in Miami art circles almost daily. For many artists Miami, for better or worse, feels like a Latin-American city within the United States. Language and cultural ties make this…
If there ever was a hell created just for intellectuals, it would surely be Miami in July and August. The heat is relentless, the beaches shimmer, the traffic on the 836 is gelatinous, and the prettiest people tend to wear the least clothing in the most distracting places. In the…
Imagine being given a do-over, a free pass to correct yesterday’s mistakes and missteps. Perhaps you’d choose a different job, a different lover, a different life; perhaps you’d reinvent yourself altogether, since you have the gift of hindsight. You know where you went wrong last time; tomorrow, that magical new…
In a perfect world, any documentary about televangelists narrated by RuPaul and a couple of sock puppets would be hailed as the unquestionable conceptual masterpiece of the year. Alas, those stodgy Academy voters just don’t understand cross-dressers, religious broadcasting, or foot-warmers made to look like dogs. And so the best…
Everyone is important but everyone may not be indispensable. That’s what Here We Are Waiting for You clearly imparts on a melancholy journey through the Twentieth Century that focuses on its most and least transcendental people. The film follows their lives and their roles in history as a matter of…
Miami a hip fashion center? New York, Paris, Milan, and London definitely, but our capital of sun and fun has been known over the years for little more than sun and fun. Sure emaciated human hangers have been turning heads on South Beach for the last decade or so, but…
Fans of sleek buildings and furniture have always considered designers Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, and Le Corbusier as the main men of Modernism. Few realize that women were often behind the work of these successful men. Lily Reich helped Mies develop furniture and upholstery. Charlotte Perriand collaborated with…
I am Vlad the Impaler, Joe Eszterhas’ penis. You know Joe, right? Bigfoot-looking son of a bitch, like Jerry Garcia after he swallowed Brian Wilson on an Acapulco Gold high? The guy who wrote Basic Instinct and Showgirls and Flashdance and a whole lotta crap for which he was paid…
As the house lights go up at the end of Brief Encounters, the Lake Worth Playhouse’s second annual one-act festival, the cast shuffles onstage, folding chairs in tow. Each Friday night of the three-week festival, audience members can stick around to ask questions and chat with the cast. The actors…
It’s a pleasure to say that Clint Eastwood reverses his recent downward slide –A Perfect World (1993), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Absolute Power (1997), and True Crime (1999), each of which has seemed less satisfying than its predecessor — with Space Cowboys, his latest. It isn’t an especially…
There are many, many productive paths a bright, ambitious young fellow can pursue in America. He can, for instance, start a mediocre rock band and try to make music for beer commercials. He also can design a Website to advertise Websites about Websites. Or there’s always the war on drugs,…
You’d think a couple of film festivals with overlapping content would be at odds, but the six-year-old Asian Pacific Film Festival of Florida (APFFF) has coexisted peacefully as part of the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival (FLIFF) while hosting its own periodic screenings of movies by Pacific Rim filmmakers. In…
“I am not seeking to be a star on Earth but rather a star in the universe,” once said the living legend of Colombian cumbia, Totó la Momposina. For more than three decades, Totó’s voice has floated heavenward. A Latin Grammy nomination this year for her album Pacanto just might…
The Latin-music craze on the way out? Dead? Buried? Finished? Don’t tell Aurelio Rodriguez. He still earns a comfortable living from it. Rodriguez is not a singer but a former model, who inherited his family’s 4000-square-foot truck stop known as La Covacha following the death of his father in 1989…
It’s tempting to think there’s something twisted about her tale. After all, she was a mere 18 the first time she had sex in front of a camera–for money, small change that would soon enough blossom into a pile of cash–and did so only at the insistence of her boyfriend,…
Remember that instantly evaporating pop hit from the early Eighties, “Video Killed the Radio Star”? If ever there were a comparable anthem for the relationship of the small screen to the stage, it would be Paul Rudnick’s I Hate Hamlet. The backstage comedy that hit Broadway in 1991 pits art…
“Levity & Gravity” is the latest exhibition at the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery. It’s an extensive show with works from artists Ricci Albenda, Max Goldfarb, Jennifer Monick, and Peter Sarkisian, and Miami artists Robert Chambers, Karen Rifas, Eugenia Vargas, and Wendy Wischer. Curated by Amy Cappellazzo and Tiffany Huot, the show…
It would be the easiest thing in the world to write off But I’m a Cheerleader, the story of a teenager discovering her sexual identity through a program designed to repress it, as a Saturday Night Live sketch somewhat awkwardly inflated to feature length. But when you start looking deeper…
Only in the movies could a kid that looks and acts like Jason Biggs be called a loser. Let’s see: charming conversationalist, big smile, washboard abs? Oh yeah, those’ll make a guy unpopular, for sure. About the only thing that’s surprising about Biggs’s character in Loser is that the filmmakers…
Rather than asking if this senseless and expensive new film from wunderkind entertainer Robert Zemeckis is devoid of merit (it is), or “worth seeing” (it isn’t), we should instead take the movie’s title — What Lies Beneath — as a direct question. Indeed, what does lie beneath? Possible answers include:…
