The Blair Witch Project, the bone-chilling indie by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, is easily the scariest horror picture of the ’90s, a movie that can take a place among the most potent and inexorable of modern shockers, like Night of the Living Dead or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Three…
Eyes Wide Shut, the final motion picture from the late, great Stanley Kubrick, is easily the most anticipated adult film of the year. It’s The Phantom Menace for grownups. Any film by the notoriously painstaking auteur would have achieved this status. Kubrick made only thirteen features in his 46-year career,…
Tommy, Hansen, Duncan, Dot, Carrie, Graham, Lily, Alice. Sounds like the latest list of fashionable names for kids. But actually those monikers identify just a fraction of the more than 150 different types of Florida mangoes. Fragrant, juicy, exotic, even “sexy,” according to chef Robbin Haas, the tropical fruit (whose…
In flamenco dancing there’s what you see onstage, and then there’s what happens after the show. Flamenco choreographer Ilisa Rosal says that following performances, dancers enjoy hanging out. But they don’t go to a quiet pub somewhere to cool off over refreshments. They go to a club, where they can…
It’s about time we had a talk. Yeah, you know, that talk. The one about how uncomfortable and strange it is to be a young human male, how raging and unforgiving the hormones, how fragile the ego, how mysterious the female form. You see, well, how do I say this?…
This is the third year the Consul General of France is putting on a film festival showcasing movies each coproduced by France and a Spanish-speaking nation. This time around the festival features eight films, two of which co-originate from Mexico, one from Argentina, and two from Spain — all in…
Do you feel snug and secure in your cozy suburban life? Are you happy with your picture-perfect home, your carefully manicured lawn, your kids and their soccer games, and your barbecues? Do you feel safe? Well, the creators of Arlington Road, the ponderous new thriller starring Jeff Bridges and Tim…
It’s almost always funnier when men dress up as women than the other way around. Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli are drag standbys in theaters and cabarets around the world. Elizabeth Dole and Hillary Clinton are routinely skewered on Saturday Night Live and in improv clubs. But where are the…
thursday july 8 New Orleans’s swingingest ensemble, Los Hombres Calientes, brings its jazzy Afro-Cuban stylings to the summer concert series at Coral Gables Congregational Church (3010 De Soto Blvd., Coral Gables) tonight at 8:00. The band, whose name translates as “the hot men,” counts among its members percussionist Bill Summers,…
Three years ago a quintet of optimists combined their ingenuity, contacts, and resources to create Songwriters in the Round, a relaxed evening featuring an open-mike session for local musicians followed by a few established songwriters showcasing their tunes. It’s organized by music impresaria Chrystal Hartigan, Warner/Chappell Latin division executive Ellen…
thursday july 1 You may recall working with beads from your halcyon days in summer camp. Sure you created a few gorgeous bracelets, necklaces, and key chains, but that was kid stuff. Beads are a sophisticated medium for a sophisticated art form. To wit: Donald Pierce’s intricate necklaces; Ken Tisa’s…
Run Lola Run is proof that the influence of MTV on feature filmmaking hasn’t been all bad. The jagged stylistic excess that dominates short-form music videos can be exhausting and irritating when drawn out to feature length: Michael Bay (The Rock, Armageddon) may be the worst offender, though far from…
To hear Spike Lee tell it, Summer of Sam means to be a panoramic view of the summer of 1977 in New York City, when temperatures shot into the high 90s and power blackouts set nerves on edge; when the party agenda included snorting coke at Studio 54 and copulating…
The animated TV show South Park was the big sensation of the 1997-98 season — or at least as big a hit as a cable channel like Comedy Central can manage. It was almost inevitable that creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone would take their batch of foul-mouthed eight-year-olds to…
They served flan. As far as we know, no other theater in Miami, let alone many Cuban restaurants, offers flan. And it was good flan, too. That’s one of the many positive things people will say after the Absinthe House Cinematheque shuts off its immense 1939 Supersimplex projector for the…
Playwright John Patrick Shanley once told the New York Times that he bought a copy of Krafft-Ebing’s nineteenth-century textbook Psychopathia Sexualis because “I have an unhealthy interest in sex and eccentric German people.” (Well, who doesn’t?) It might stand to reason then that he named his 1997 comedy Psychopathia Sexualis…
These days they can be used to buy drinks and dinner at any Club Med. Once they were used to purchase real estate, namely the island of Manhattan. With us for the past 40,000 years, they are beads, first formed from animal teeth, bone, and stone, and later made of…
Give Paul S. George three hours and he’ll give you Biscayne Bay in all its sparkling beauty and fascinating history. As the sun sets this Sunday, George, a nationally recognized local historian, will conduct a boat tour from Bayside to Key Biscayne and back. He’ll spin the rich lore of…
thursday june 24 Yearning for the days when drunk South Beach pioneers gyrated on restaurant tables to the speed-flamenco strains of “Bamboleo?” Take heart: The Gipsy Kings will reprise their endless repertoire of Eurotrash party anthems tonight at the Jackie Gleason Theater (1700 Washington Ave., Miami Beach). Since they exploded…
Woe to the scribbler who presumes to rewrite a master, unless he is so deft that his invasion of privacy produces something new and exciting. Enter British writer-director Oliver Parker. He has the nerve to meddle with Oscar Wilde’s sublime farce An Ideal Husband and the skill to pull it…
Anthology films are an odd-duck genre: While at one time books of short stories were published almost as frequently as novels were, their cinematic equivalent has never amounted to even one percent of the fictional films released. You could argue that Pulp Fiction counts as an anthology, but its stories…
The new Adam Sandler comedy Big Daddy isn’t just the funniest movie of the summer; it’s also the most improbable feel-good movie of the season. It’s improbable because practically everything about Adam Sandler seems so unlikely, so strangely back-assward. His whole phenomenal career (from Billy Madison to Happy Gilmore, from…
