What Miami needs is a real professional sports team. The Dolphins are paper tigers; watching their playoff hopes fade doesn’t qualify as high-grade sports entertainment. The Marlins are, of course, the worst team in the major leagues and possibly in the minor leagues as well. The Heat has no players…
thursday october 15 Look out! Pope-rah, oops, that’s Oprah, as in Winfrey, strikes again. The preachy talk show host/producer/actress who wants to recast the world in her new image — fit, slim, spiritual, and well read — is starring in the movie version of Beloved, Toni Morrison’s powerful, haunting novel…
The Jonathan Demme-directed Beloved runs nearly three hours, and it’s a long slog. This adaptation of the 1987 Toni Morrison novel bursts with ambition. On one hand it tries to get inside the fevers of the African-American slave experience, but it also wants to be an epic family saga and…
The hero of The Mighty — the title character, in fact — is an eighth-grader known by the nickname Freak (Kieran Culkin). His might isn’t physical; he’s a small, frail boy who suffers from a degenerative birth defect. His spine curves painfully, and he can walk only with crutches and…
Nobody who has seen the off-Broadway version of The Fantasticks at New York City’s Sullivan Street Playhouse will recognize the set of the appealing new production at the Hollywood Playhouse. (That’s a lot of us, given the 15,000 or so performances the show has racked up since it opened on…
thursday october 8 She’s a dignified, beautiful old broad and she’s hearty too, known for weathering her share of storms. We’re not talking about your great-grandma but the city of Charleston, South Carolina. This evening at 7:30 architect Kenneth Treister (creator of Miami Beach’s Holocaust Memorial and the Mayfair House…
Whether we consider 40 years of trudging through the desert or 50 years of trying to establish a peaceful homeland in Israel, it seems the one state Jews have perpetually found themselves in is that of displacement. In 1928 Joseph Stalin attempted an experiment to give Jews in the Soviet…
The road march is the big event at a West Indian carnival, no matter where it takes place — Port-of-Spain, London, or New York. Last year in Miami, dozens of flatbed trucks fitted with huge speakers and trailed by groups of costumed, dancing revelers, young and old, circled the streets…
Every year the Montreal World Film Festival runs for ten days (through Labor Day), and the Toronto Film Festival picks up a few days later and carries on for another ten. Twin colossi of the Great White North, they unspool some 300 movies each, and, for in the past three…
In 1964, when I was five years old, my father told me that Patty Duke didn’t have a twin. Naturally I recognized this information for what it was: a bald-faced lie. Every week on The Patty Duke Show anyone could see there were two teenage girls, not one actress and…
Forty-five active members of the Miami Rugby Club, including priests, lawyers, firefighters, teachers, and ambassadors, train hard, play hard, and always greet each other with an upbeat “Cheers!” These dedicated members meet three times a week during regular season, which runs from the end of August until May, to sharpen…
thursday october 1 So you’re totally bummed about missing the WCW Monday Nitro at the Miami Arena a few weeks ago? Well, wrestling lover, you can still get your fill of pumped-up guys and gals with funky names and bizarro costumes jumping all over each other tonight at 7:30 when…
Sounds a bit like a script for a superfreaky porn flick: idol with breasts on its head; idol with breast on its belly; tube or pipe with incised decoration. But the really obscene thing about the legacy of Bolivia’s archeological past is the fact that the civilizations themselves have disappeared…
As a professional lamenter of how “they just don’t make ’em like they used to,” I am always thrilled on those rare occasions that someone even tries to make ’em that way. So I am doubly thrilled that, with The Impostors, writer-director Stanley Tucci has tried and richly succeeded. Those…
The ants in Antz show a lot of personality. The film is the best example yet of how a fully animated computer-generated feature can delineate facial movement. Toy Story (1995), the first such feature to be released, was brasher and more child-friendly, but Antz is more of a — how…
Have adultery, murder, and greed all moved to the sticks? Once firmly rooted in the big city, the seven deadly sins have taken on a distinct country-western twang in recent years, thanks to noirish, tough-minded scamfests such as John Dahl’s Red Rock West (1992) and The Last Seduction (1994), James…
Twelve years ago Lily Tomlin opened her mouth and launched a thousand monologues. The 1986 Broadway success of The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe spawned a generation of self-styled storytellers, from the cutthroat visionary portraits of Eric Bogosian and the neurotic ramblings of Spalding Gray to…
Say the word folklife and many people can’t help conjuring up visions of cross-eyed hillbillies who live in Appalachian hollows with their stills and slobbering hounds. No surprise there’s more to it than that. The folks at the Historical Museum of Southern Florida are trying to break through people’s stereotyped…
“Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self-Representation,” now at the Miami Art Museum, features paintings, photographs, sculpture, and film by some of the most notable artists of this century. Not coincidentally, they are all women. The 22 artists in the show represent three generations, from names associated with Surrealism to contemporary…
thursday september 24 Foreign correspondent Michael Z. Wise comes to the Wolfsonian-FIU (1001 Washington Ave., Miami Beach) this evening at 6:30 p.m. to talk about Germany and its search for a new national identity through architecture. Wise has been studying the controversial $12 billion redesign of the newly unified Berlin…
Leelee Sobieski is a mouthful of a name (40 years ago studio moguls would have made her change it to something short and unassuming) but get used to it because the young actress behind it is going to be getting a lot of attention. She almost single-handedly carries A Soldier’s…
As a director of action thrillers, John Frankenheimer has been a peerless stylist for nearly four decades — without leaning on a pile of glitzy special effects. What’s more, his most memorable movies, from The Manchurian Candidate (1962) to The Birdman of Alcatraz (also 1962) to 1986’s wickedly entertaining, unappreciated…
