When we first see the character of middle-aged Australian David Helfgott (Geoffrey Rush) in Shine, he’s standing in the driving rain and tapping at the window of a wine bar after closing time. Let inside by a sympathetic waitress, he keeps up a nonstop nonsensical patter that makes him sound…
The stodgy works of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, makers of Howards End and Jefferson in Paris, have encouraged the sad notion that costume dramas must be leaden and respectable. Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility helped rehabilitate the stifled form, and now Patrice Leconte’s Ridicule ventilates it with yet more…
A famous movie composer once told me a joke: Two songwriters are sitting around and one of them says to the other, “I just saw the most amazing thing. A man fell off the roof of a building, hit a ledge, fell to the street, got winged by a bus…
In the program notes for the Pope Theatre Company’s edgy staging of the surreal comedy Below the Belt, playwright Richard Dresser is quoted as saying: “In the course of supporting myself as a writer over the past few decades, I’ve had the occasion to work at a series of jobs…
The frisky production of Ray Cooney’s 1990 comedy Out of Order currently on-stage at Coconut Grove Playhouse recalls a print advertisement from years ago. “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s rye,” ran the copy under a picture of a satisfied customer chomping into a piece of bread…
Wes Craven, creator of the Nightmare on Elm Street series and writer-director of its two best entries (the first and the last), works within whispering distance of the commercial Hollywood mainstream, just far enough away to allow for more rude wit and less comfortable resolution than most studio product. His…
Why a movie of The Crucible now? Arthur Miller’s play about the Salem witchcraft trials was first staged on Broadway in 1953, when McCarthyism was still in flower, and it was not a resounding success. Now, of course, it’s a staple of rep theaters and high school and college drama…
Early this year, in the psycho-gangster/vampire movie From Dusk Till Dawn, George Clooney of TV’s ER kept his head while all about him were losing theirs — literally. As a slick thief saddled with a lunatic brother (Quentin Tarantino) and beset by demons, Clooney demonstrated poise under duress. His professionalism…
thursday december 19 The Chocolate Nutcracker: A holiday classic gets a flavorful treatment as Buffalo Soldier Productions presents the East Coast premiere of LaVerne Reed’s Chocolate Nutcracker at the Dade County Auditorium (2901 W. Flagler St.). This version of Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece, featuring the music of Duke Ellington and starring Bianca…
thursday december 12 1997 World Gold Gymnastics Tour: The Olympics are now a not-so-distant summer memory, but the fever (or the hype) lives on. Gold medalist Kerri Strug and silver medalist Jair Lynch, along with veteran Olympians Nadia Comaneci and Bart Conner, are among the elastic gymnastics stars descending on…
Whitney Houston has had a Movie Star Moment — just not in a movie. Near the end of the “I’m Saving All My Love for You” video, she turns toward the camera with a luminous smile that wilts into heartbreak when she realizes she’s been dropped by her, um, boyfriend…
Forget Independence Day. If you really want to see Earth get it, you can’t do any better than Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! It’s a destructo orgy orchestrated without any phony-baloney sanctimony about the fellowship of man — or spaceman. Burton isn’t interested in intergalactic amity; he’s not even interested in…
Some amusing stuff about sports agentry drowns in the emotional shallows of Jerry Maguire, which stars Tom Cruise (in the title role) as a hotshot dealmaker whose first bout of conscience torpedoes his future at his firm, the monolithic Sports Management International. After visiting a hospitalized hockey player who skates…
Since his debut as a novelist in 1963, Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa has been surprising the public. Not only does he move with stylistic ease between forms (novels, short stories, criticism, journalism, essays, plays) and genres (political allegories, mysteries, erotica), he wreaks havoc with literary conventions in his fiction…
Everyone’s aware that going to a mall during the holiday season will probably make you feel sick. Still, a lot of people who know better end up there anyway, with that pre-Christmas sale-induced consumer hysteria that leads to purchasing a mountain of stuff you would probably never even look at…
thursday december 5 Orquideas a la Luz de la Luna (Orchids in the Moonlight): The 3rd Street Black Box (in the San Villa Oriental Restaurant, 230 NE Third St.) collaborates with Peru’s Jucare Theater Group to perform Carlos Fuentes’s play about two sultry Mexican film stars and the impact of…
It’s impossible to capture on the printed page the anticipatory thrill of hearing Sylvester Stallone handle rapid-fire dialogue: the rumbling basso voice, the twisted mouth valiantly trying to wrap itself around an unruly stream of words, the consonants and vowels hurling forward like a toppled barrel of oranges. Will any…
Not long into the low-key 1994 Chinese murder drama The Day the Sun Turned Cold, writer/ director/producer Yim Ho serves up a defining moment in the marriage of husband Guan Shichang (Ma Jing Wu), the school principal in a rural village, and Pu Fengying (Si Ching Gao Wa), his tofu-making…
A bare-bones synopsis of Christopher Durang’s 1987 comedy Laughing Wild would read like a magic-realist love affair in which the protagonists meet cute: A man and a woman share a brief encounter in the aisle of a Manhattan grocery store. The woman relays her version of the meeting in a…
thursday november 28 White Party Week: If you haven’t already bought those $125 tix to Sunday’s big White Party at Villa Vizcaya (3251 S. Miami Ave.), you’re outta luck. But don’t despair: A bevy of social events has been structured around the bash, turning it into a five-day party extravaganza…
In the post-Babe era, can you make a live-action movie about animals and not have them talk to each other? For me, this is the deep philosophical question raised by Disney’s new 101 Dalmatians, a live-action remake of the studio’s 1961 animated feature — in which, by the way, the…
In the golden age of Hollywood, no less than the likes of Frank Capra owned Christmas on the big screen. But if you want Proof No. 496 of how far things have fallen, consider that in the Nineties holiday cinema is a wholly owned subsidiary of Chris Columbus — hired…
