Give the hippie-dippie music fest Woodstock a Nineties spin and the result would be raves, all-night concerts catalyzed by hypnotic electronic music and mind-bending light shows and tempered by a prevailing sense of tranquillity, which is often induced and sustained by drugs. Usually held at sprawling outdoor venues whose locations…
thursday july 2 Tonight at 8:30 the Wolfsonian-FIU presents the finale of its Florida on Film series, and the closing flick is a classic: Where the Boys Are. Boys and girls alike will have a blast at the Hotel Astor (956 Washington Ave., Miami Beach), which is hosting the event…
Michael Bay is the director of Bad Boys (1995) and The Rock (1996) and the new asteroid-attack movie Armageddon, which should be called The Very Big Rock. He has, I’m afraid, perfected a new form: His movies are trailers for themselves. Every scene is all climax and no foreplay. When…
Armed again with the comedy of despair but with far more focus than the last time out (1995’s Kicking and Screaming), director Noah Baumbach takes on perhaps the most coiled and resilient of the seven deadlies in his bright comedy of manners, Mr. Jealousy. The affable Lester (Eric Stoltz) has…
Since there aren’t many coming-out stories about lesbians in Hoboken, New Jersey, it’s easy to imagine why the folks at the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville sat up and took notice in 1994 when Wendy Hammond sent in the script for Julie Johnson. What made them choose…
“The minute a man puts on a dress, something very theatrical happens. It’s funny.” So says visual artist David Rohn in explaining his latest creation: the pilot episode for the very theatrical Adora Adora, a television sitcom he wrote, directed, and in which he has a minor acting role. The…
There’s only one genuinely dramatic moment in Cloud Tectonics, but, boy, is it a doozy. A man leaves a room and re-enters it moments later. His clothes are different. He’s carrying letters written while he was away. To him, two years have unfolded in the interim. To the characters on-stage…
Think Parrot Jungle and you naturally imagine birds (and maybe bird droppings). A cockatoo riding a bicycle on a high wire, an Amazon parrot counting out loud, and other winged wonders rolling around on tiny skates. But the 62-year-old attraction contains more than just squawking technicolor avian daredevils. Two years…
thursday june 25 Launched from New York nocturnal haunts such as Save the Robots, the Palladium, and the Limelight to mixmaster-extraordinaire status, DJ Këoki lands at Groove Jet (323 23rd St., Miami Beach) tonight at 11:00 to show off his beat-heavy and hauntingly sampled brand of electronica. He’ll spin tunes…
Too many post-Woody Allen movies have been made about “sex in the head.” The smart, engaging Out of Sight is an action comedy about love in the head. The real thing ignites between bank robber Jack Foley (George Clooney) and U.S. marshal Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez) when she stumbles into…
There will always be a Britain, and very likely there will always be movies about the pluck and sacrifice demonstrated by the little people during World War II. Not Billy Barty-type little people — though surely there must have been a few of them involved — but the simple, salt-of-the-earth…
The 1967 screen musical Doctor Dolittle, which starred Rex Harrison, was a commercial disaster for its studio, 20th Century Fox. The new nonmusical Fox version, starring Eddie Murphy, isn’t in the same overblown category as the original film — its disasters are more mundane. It’s a kiddie comedy that really…
By day Rosie Gordon-Wallace is a sales representative for the G.D. Searle pharmaceutical company. By night she’s an aspiring writer and a tireless promoter working to help her comrades in art who just can’t get a break. “The artists really just want to do their work,” notes Gordon-Wallace, who speaks…
Sun, surf, sand, and classical music. Four things you don’t necessarily think of together. But Florida Philharmonic conductor James Judd doesn’t think the way most people do. For the second year in a row, the maestro has been a guiding force behind the second annual Beethoven by the Beach, a…
No matter if you’re a Christian, Buddhist, Darwinist, or one of those folks who stick a Jesus-as-fish icon on your car, you must accept the fundamental tenet that we as a species are of the ocean. Whether by God’s hand or some other primal force beyond human cognizance, the cool…
thursday june 18 Attention all you hep cats and the rest who take to heart Duke Ellington’s 1932 tune “It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got That Swing.” The band Seven Foot Politic is riding the swing-ska-rock wave, popularized by Squirrel Nut Zippers and Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, into…
The X-Files is a movie that answers questions…. No, wait a minute: The X-Files is a movie that asks questions…. All right, The X-Files is a movie that makes me wanna ask some questions, like: What the hell does “Fight the future” mean? Look, I can understand “The truth is…
Hurricane Streets comes on like a tough cookie but ends up just plain stale. First-time writer-director Morgan J. Freeman (no relation to actor Morgan Freeman) plies the kind of beat-up, trash-can naturalism that went out with Sal Mineo films like 1957’s Dino. Set in New York City’s Lower East Side,…
It’s Christmas vacation, 1958. The movie my dad has chosen for a first-grade pal and me to see is the new Disney live-action adventure Tonka, starring Sal Mineo as a young Sioux named White Bull who traps and domesticates a clear-eyed, spirited wild horse named Tonka. Having seen The King…
Imagine country-western heartthrob Clint Black inhabiting the body of Wagner’s romantic hero Siegfried and you’ll get the spirit of Das Barbecu, the Hee Haw-inspired adaptation of Wagner’s Ring cycle. Yes, that particular Ring cycle. It’s the same nineteenth-century opera series (Die Gotterdammerung, Das Rheingold, Siegfried, and Die Walkurie) that retells…
Q: How many gay men does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Two. One to screw in the bulb, and one to shriek, “Faaabulous!” Q: How many lesbian feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Not funny! Darn straight it’s not. Fortunately Miami…
thursday june 11 Even though Masterpiece Theater is on hiatus for the summer, you can still satisfy your craving for a cinematic period piece at the Alliance Cinema (927 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach) during Views of Merchant-Ivory: Three Continents, Fourteen Films. This festival, which began last week, highlights some of…
