While Angel City, Sam Shepard’s slice of life at the Hotel California A that La Brea tar pit of decadence, megalomania, and self-destruction you can check out of but can never leave A isn’t one of the playwright’s better-known plays, and hardly constitutes the definitive take on the soul-sucking movie…
I’m writing a screenplay. The first and second acts are finished, but I’m not sure how to end it yet. Help me out. FADE IN INTERIOR — MOVIE PRODUCER’S OFFICE — DAY A fat, cigar-chomping MOVIE PRODUCER sits behind an opulent desk. He rises to greet MEL GIBSON as the…
The topic of political asylum has generated much heated debate in recent weeks. When should you grant it? When should you say no? Politicians will ultimately decide the issue when, if you ask me, the job would be better left to experienced professionals. I’m thinking, of course, of those masters…
Does Mario Ernesto Sanchez ever sleep? During the 1994-95 theater season, the Cuban-born producing artistic director of Teatro Avante and the International Hispanic Theatre Festival (IHTF) presented two full-length dramas and three short plays at El Carrusel Theatre in Coral Gables, as well as traveling to the Festival de Teatro…
At the May 20 opening for The New Collection — I, the Cuban Museum’s current exhibition of recent permanent acquisitions, Ermita Fuentes, visiting from New York City, stands by the back door, chiding guests who attempt to carry their cocktails from the Bacardi tent (set up in the museum’s small…
“We’ll always have Paris.” Those immortal words, uttered by Humphrey Bogart to Ingrid Bergman in the suspense-filled final moments of Casablanca, endure to this day as one of the most unabashedly romantic farewells of all time. Director Billy Crystal’s Forget Paris, as its title — a riff on the classic…
It’s hard to imagine Pulp Fiction without the key performances of Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson. Yet the two actors never actually played a scene together (although their respective characters briefly crossed paths). Willis and Jackson more than make up for that oversight in the mildly disappointing actioner Die…
Supermarket tabloids have accomplished a clever, two-tiered assault on the privacy of Americans, simultaneously invading the personal lives of celebrities while disrupting the tranquillity of a working person’s trip to the grocery store, drugstore, or 7-Eleven. Who among us, for example, would not bring the shopping cart to a screeching…
Nothing in writer-director Christopher Monger’s filmography provides a clue that he was capable of spinning a yarn as enchanting as The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain. Prior to this release, the high point of Monger’s career was 1990’s diffuse comedy Waiting for the Light,…
Well, at least those idiots at the Motion Picture Academy (MPA) got this one right. Last month Nikita Mikhalkov’s Burnt by the Sun copped the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. It’s a damn good film — I still prefer Before the Rain, but why quibble? And yet I swore…
For sheer escapism and the shiver of vicarious thrills, nothing satisfies in quite the same way as a psychological thriller or an intricately plotted murder mystery. Unfortunately, if you’ve never experienced the pleasures of the genre, don’t expect to be converted by the current production of Nick Hall’s Dead Wrong,…
“I’m basically interested in the big ones,” Andres Serrano tells a group of local artists gathered to meet him at the South Florida Art Center on Lincoln Road. “Life, death, and everything in between.” Serrano visited Miami recently to attend the opening of a ten-year retrospective of his work at…
Like The Perez Family, Steven Soderbergh’s new film, The Underneath, ultimately underachieves despite flashes of brilliance. Soderbergh tries his hand at film noir with disappointing results, largely because all the clever editing, time-frame juggling, droll dialogue, and unconventional camerawork cannot conceal a pencil-thin narrative that boils down to this: A…
It probably won’t do any good to preface this review with a disclaimer, but here goes: I wanted to like The Perez Family. I really did. May has been a sad month for movies about Latin Americans with the word family in the title. Last week I panned director Gregory…
Like the character Timothy in Neil’s Garden, an exceptionally well-acted, well-directed world premiere now at Area Stage on Miami Beach, I am not reasonable about death. Just the mention of it causes me to knock on wood. Death is not to be thought about now, but rather something to be…
I don’t know how I’d go about making the ultimate film about the Chicano experience in the U.S. without resorting to cliches and stereotypes. But I don’t feel so bad; Gregory Nava didn’t have a clue, either, and somebody gave him a pile of money to tackle the job. In…
Gerard Depardieu may well be the greatest actor in the world, but you can’t blame American moviegoers for doubting the veracity of that claim if their only familiarity with Depardieu’s work stems from his three strikes at cross-Atlantic stardom: Green Card (1990), 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), and My Father,…
Lily Tomlin has done it. John Leguizamo, Sherry Glaser, Danny Hoch, Eric Bogosian, Claudia Shear, and a host of other names I could drop may be doing it even as you read this: that is, presenting an evening of theater by embodying an array of characters. Currently in our own…
The 1994-95 exhibition season has offered a number of group shows of works by local artists. These demonstrations of support have called upon a handful of artists who seem, for the moment at least, to top every curator’s list. With all due respect to those artists, a spectator’s sense of…
I hope all the hue and cry over David Caruso’s decision to bolt from TV’s NYPD Blue to pursue a career as a leading man in Hollywood does not muffle the bang made by Nicolas Cage in Caruso’s first film since the split. Cage is in peak form in Kiss…
Any credibility the film version of Jim Carroll’s raw, seditious, autobiographical 1978 book The Basketball Diaries may have hoped to establish flies right out the window the first time you see Carroll’s Hollywood surrogate, Leonardo DiCaprio, attempt to dribble a basketball. In the literary Diaries, Carroll lives for the game…
South Florida is not a region that takes many theatrical risks. A quick study of the current season’s lineup for theaters from Palm Beach to Miami makes one thing perfectly clear: Reluctant to strain audience loyalty by introducing what hasn’t passed a viewer test somewhere else, most artistic directors tend…
