A living actor portrays a dead actor who, while he was alive, was a gay man pretending to be straight who made a movie wherein he played a straight man who seduced a woman by pretending to be gay. Confused? Imagine how Rock Hudson felt. Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, opening…
Audiences are incredibly tolerant when it comes to romantic comedies. Inane dialogue, contrived plots, transparent sentimentality A all is forgiven if the filmmaker is able to create the illusion of even the remotest strain of chemistry between the principals. That goes double for movies that revolve around the matchmaking of…
The term “unsung hero” usually applies to volunteer firemen or people who tend to the sick without compensation or publicity. But there is another unsung figure of import: the artistic hero who lives and dies in obscurity, who skips the occasional family dinner to wander down to the beach and…
Back in 1980, writer-directors David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams teamed up to create Airplane!, the landmark send-up of one of the most cliche-ridden, typecast, overwrought melodramas of all time, Airport. Airplane! was silly, schmaltzy shtick that worked because it dared to be stupid at a time when it…
The venerable director of Ju Dou (1990) and Raise the Red Lantern (1991), the first Chinese films ever nominated for Academy Awards (in spite of the fact that they have yet to be released in the country where they were shot), was sixteen years old when Mao and the Red…
When we found out that I might not grow to be taller than five feet, my family took to reminding me that “good things come in small packages.” This overused aphorism came to mind as I sat in the Miami Actor’s Studio A which holds no more than 50 people…
It could have been a disaster. The cardinal rules of good party throwing were broken. Anticipating a crowd of 300, the organizers of the Premiere Night Gala Screening Program of the first annual Make-A-Film Competition were not prepared for the nearly 500 folks who showed up. The caterer ran out…
The good news is that Karina Lombard is great in bed. The bad news is that the novice thespian’s acting skills drop off precipitously the further she ventures from the boudoir. Luckily Wide Sargasso Sea, the cinematic adaptation of Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel, calls for Antoinette (the tragic heroine played…
In the time I’ve occupied this position, I’ve seen dozens of shows A some good, a few excellent, and many fair, poor, or simply awful. However, I’ve only twice found it necessary for the maintenance of my sanity to leave at intermission after experiencing just one of two acts: first…
Before heading to see the newly formed Florida Playwright’s Theatre present a penny-dreadfully fine rendition of Charles Ludlam’s 1984 classic camp parody, The Mystery of Irma Vep, implant three words firmly in your mind: courage, ambition, facetiousness. The first two refer to the company, which boldly takes on a brash…
“The dog ate the part we didn’t like” — from Panama, by Thomas McGuane You probably don’t have to hate George Bush or his presidential predecessor, Ronald Reagan, to appreciate The Panama Deception (opening Friday at the Alliance on Lincoln Road), this year’s Academy Award winner for Best Documentary Feature…
Lesbians have feelings too. That’s the earth-shattering revelation at the core of three of hearts. (What is it with lower-case titles these days? bodies, rest & motion, the night we never met A am i the only one who finds the trend precious?) For the first twenty minutes or so,…
A body at rest tends to remain at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. bodies, rest & motion is proof positive of the veracity of that Newtonian law of physics. This is an insufferable, pretentious, existential character drama that starts out at rest and stays there. Nick, played…
Occasionally I’ll have a few nighttime beers in a bar on South Beach. It’s a place filled mostly with locals and European tourists, the large majority of them men. Every once in a while a tall, Spandex-wrapped blonde will jiggle her way through the crowd, and all eyes turn toward…
After watching Robert De Niro sleepwalk through Mad Dog and Glory, it was a relief to see that someone had awakened the venerable actor in time for his next performance as an abusive stepfather in This Boy’s Life. Unfortunately, whoever roused the sleeping Dog for the film adaptation of Tobias…
Lampooning middle-class neuroses has long been a staple of television sitcoms. From the Bundys to the Simpsons, some of our most popular TV families are paragons of bourgeois dysfunction. But the big screen has been another story; mainstream Hollywood hasn’t really gotten suburban angst right since The Graduate. But not…
The truest comment made by a politician in recent history was uttered by Jimmy Carter, when he stated flatly, “Life is not fair.” Indeed. Take the case of the ACME Acting Company, struggling through scores of financial difficulties, versus the Coconut Grove Playhouse, with its multimillion-dollar annual budget. The state…
It happens every spring with numbing predictability. The crush of Christmas blockbusters and Oscar contenders peters out sometime in mid-January, and with one or two exceptions the pickings A at least in terms of first-run domestic theatrical releases A remain slim until the advance guard of the big summer films…
That creaky adage about writing A 10 percent inspiration, 90 percent perspiration A should be heeded carefully by would-be authors. Students eagerly approach writing instructors with what they believe is the key to any novel, play, or short story: THE IDEA. Surely, once they know what they want to say…
Gombo, the ingenuous hero of Close to Eden, wields a mean urga. The preferred tool of the Mongolian rancher, the gadget resembles a long fishing rod with a noose at the end of it and is one handy piece of equipment for a guy trying to scratch out a living…
In the annals of American cinema, has there ever been an actor whose first name so accurately critiqued his performances as Woody Harrelson? In Doc Hollywood he was Woody the lovestruck hick; in White Men Can’t Jump he was Woody the street-hustling ballplayer; Indecent Proposal offers us Woody the architect…
One of the major brain twisters of the current decade has got to be sexuality: should you do it, with whom, and which sex. Whereas in the past sexual peccadilloes and debates largely remained confined to straightforward scandals A pre- or extramarital dalliances A in the Nineties the carnal issue…
