“Please hold for Tammy Faye.” The few seconds between those words and those that follow, uttered by the woman who once haunted pay-to-pray TV like a mascara-ed harlequin, are interminable. Until a month ago, the notion of talking to Tammy Faye Bakker-Messner, once the most adored and reviled figure in…
If there ever was a hell created just for intellectuals, it would surely be Miami in July and August. The heat is relentless, the beaches shimmer, the traffic on the 836 is gelatinous, and the prettiest people tend to wear the least clothing in the most distracting places. In the…
Imagine being given a do-over, a free pass to correct yesterday’s mistakes and missteps. Perhaps you’d choose a different job, a different lover, a different life; perhaps you’d reinvent yourself altogether, since you have the gift of hindsight. You know where you went wrong last time; tomorrow, that magical new…
In a perfect world, any documentary about televangelists narrated by RuPaul and a couple of sock puppets would be hailed as the unquestionable conceptual masterpiece of the year. Alas, those stodgy Academy voters just don’t understand cross-dressers, religious broadcasting, or foot-warmers made to look like dogs. And so the best…
Everyone is important but everyone may not be indispensable. That’s what Here We Are Waiting for You clearly imparts on a melancholy journey through the Twentieth Century that focuses on its most and least transcendental people. The film follows their lives and their roles in history as a matter of…
I am Vlad the Impaler, Joe Eszterhas’ penis. You know Joe, right? Bigfoot-looking son of a bitch, like Jerry Garcia after he swallowed Brian Wilson on an Acapulco Gold high? The guy who wrote Basic Instinct and Showgirls and Flashdance and a whole lotta crap for which he was paid…
It’s a pleasure to say that Clint Eastwood reverses his recent downward slide –A Perfect World (1993), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Absolute Power (1997), and True Crime (1999), each of which has seemed less satisfying than its predecessor — with Space Cowboys, his latest. It isn’t an especially…
There are many, many productive paths a bright, ambitious young fellow can pursue in America. He can, for instance, start a mediocre rock band and try to make music for beer commercials. He also can design a Website to advertise Websites about Websites. Or there’s always the war on drugs,…
You’d think a couple of film festivals with overlapping content would be at odds, but the six-year-old Asian Pacific Film Festival of Florida (APFFF) has coexisted peacefully as part of the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival (FLIFF) while hosting its own periodic screenings of movies by Pacific Rim filmmakers. In…
It’s tempting to think there’s something twisted about her tale. After all, she was a mere 18 the first time she had sex in front of a camera–for money, small change that would soon enough blossom into a pile of cash–and did so only at the insistence of her boyfriend,…
It would be the easiest thing in the world to write off But I’m a Cheerleader, the story of a teenager discovering her sexual identity through a program designed to repress it, as a Saturday Night Live sketch somewhat awkwardly inflated to feature length. But when you start looking deeper…
Only in the movies could a kid that looks and acts like Jason Biggs be called a loser. Let’s see: charming conversationalist, big smile, washboard abs? Oh yeah, those’ll make a guy unpopular, for sure. About the only thing that’s surprising about Biggs’s character in Loser is that the filmmakers…
Rather than asking if this senseless and expensive new film from wunderkind entertainer Robert Zemeckis is devoid of merit (it is), or “worth seeing” (it isn’t), we should instead take the movie’s title — What Lies Beneath — as a direct question. Indeed, what does lie beneath? Possible answers include:…
Murphy and Pryor. Skywalker and Kenobi. Amos and Zeppelin. Regardless of the creative universe, the maverick apprentice tends to stride off into territory beyond the edges of the master’s map. So it is with Alan Rudolph, whose career blossomed after serving as assistant director to Robert Altman on Nashville in…
Local pols like to boast of Miami as Hollywood East, and for a few days recently there was some truth behind that hype. The National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP) held its second annual convention at the Eden Roc Resort and Spa in Miami Beach, attended by 330 filmmakers…
Directed by Miguel Arteta. Screenplay by Mike White. Starring Mike White, Chris Weitz, Lupe Ontiveros, Beth Colt, and Paul Weitz.
In the course of two hours, Neil Gaiman speaks 10,000 words (or damned near, when transcribed), and it seems a shame to waste a single one, since there is not an uh or y’know among them. Even the most eloquent writer gets lost in thought every now and then…uh…y’know? But…
Bryan Singer did not read comic books as a young boy, because he couldn’t read them. As a kid, he was slightly dyslexic and, therefore, unable to follow the dialogue as it bubbled across panels and pages; quite simply, Singer says now, comic books confused him, so the Jersey boy…
In Bryan Singer’s last movie, 1998’s Apt Pupil, Ian McKellen portrayed a Nazi war criminal hiding out in the suburbs, passing himself off as an ordinary old man crouching behind drawn blinds. In Singer’s new movie, X-Men, McKellen plays Erik Magnus Lehnsherr, the son of Jews who were murdered in…
Why is this film called Disney’s The Kid? Is it really possible the studio was so concerned that someone might actually mistake the film for an update of the Chaplin classic that the brand name had to be formally incorporated into the title? Or was this an attempt to reinforce…
Canadian documentarian Ron Mann, who previously examined aspects of pop culture in Comic Book Confidential (1988) and Twist (1992), takes on a broader and more controversial subject in Grass, a history of America’s second-favorite smokable substance. As he has done before, he provides a sugarcoated crash course on a huge…
Is there a more bankrupt genre than the parody movie? So many movies nowadays are so painfully self-aware and referential anyway that there often isn’t much left to make fun of, which is especially the case for Kevin Williamson-penned films like Scream and its clones, clichéd teen slasher movies that…
