The mere presence of wide-eyed French gamine Audrey Tautou, star of the art-house hit Amelie, may be enough to get people into theaters to see Happenstance, which was made and released in France before the Amelie phenomenon swept the Gallic nation but is only now getting its American release. Viewers…
Never call Miami’s film festivals predictable. New ones pop up, old ones merge, long-standing ones change screening seasons, even the papa of them all — the FIU Miami International Film Festival — lost its founder and is headed in a new direction, though what that will be is not yet…
Imagine seeing a movie under the stars for a nickel or a vaudeville show. Such things could have happened indoors in Miami, especially if you were downtown at the Olympia Theater. Built in 1926 by Chicago architect John Eberson for Paramount Pictures, the Mediterranean Revival-style structure was one of many…
Actress Rita McKenzie is sitting under a hairdryer in a Sherman Oaks, California, beauty salon, but show-biz trooper that she is, she’s happily gabbing about her star turn in the off-Broadway smash, Ethel Merman’s Broadway. McKenzie, a TV, film, and musical stage veteran, has been eerily evoking Broadway belter Merman…
Now that the holidays have been dispensed with, the South Florida theater scene kicks back into gear with a flurry of openings. No fewer than twenty new productions open this month, with another truckload of shows rolling up in February. Meanwhile several intriguing productions are finishing their runs. If you…
For many people at this time of year, all of the seasonal cheer and de rigueur bonhomie can get downright depressing. If you’re among this not-so-select group, GableStage may have a holiday show for you: James Joyce’s “The Dead,” a New Musical Play, which is based on the celebrated short…
By the end of the summer, every local artist in Miami was making plans for a series of shows in conjunction with Art Basel 2001, and yes, Basel was going to be a great plug for Miami (though some of the artists’ responses seemed just too opportunistic in their want…
Normally, these year-in-TV columns are a breezy, easy write–a plea for good shows buried somewhere in an embittered litany of bad ones. In recent years, it has felt as though the proliferation of channels and choices has given us only more of the wretched and less of the watchable; satellite…
As ambitious in scope as the plot of its cunning heroine, The Affair of the Necklace functions as historical drama, costume caper, dialect pileup, and revenge reverie. It’s garish yet accessible, ideal Euro-pulp for the megaplex, carried by Hilary Swank as she swings as far as she can from her…
The tricked-up charms of James Mangold’s Kate & Leopold may be precisely what the moment demands — as long as you accept the existence of chivalry, the possibility of time travel, and the stream of bubbles emanating from Meg Ryan. Skeptics need not apply. Having toured the psychiatric ward in…
By the opening sequence of Beauty and the Beast à la IMAX, my seven-year-old niece and I are exhausted. We could spin our own adventure story worthy of Disney based on the trials we endured just to get to our seats at this “media screening”: navigating the labyrinthine Sunset Place;…
They grazed on endless trays of pigs in blankets, nibbled piles of fried mozzarella, and washed it down with all the candy-flavored asti spumante a friend of David Dermer could imbibe. As Karen Maria something-or-other belted out a karaoke version of “La Isla Bonita” at Planet Hollywood on Miami Beach,…
Serious theater? In Broward County? Don’t chuckle. You’ve been asleep if you haven’t noticed some decided cultural shifts in what used to be the Land of Laughs and Musicals. Broward stage companies have long leaned toward the sweet and silly when programming their seasons, usually top-heavy with musical reviews and…
When he first auditioned for Any Given Sunday director Oliver Stone to play quarterback Willie Beamen, an embittered bench-warmer prone to fits of vomiting before each snap, Jamie Foxx was sure he’d blown it. Stone, as subtle as an ice pick to the cornea, said as much–loud enough so Foxx,…
Love him or not love him, Lasse Hallström has done it again: the human frailty, the sorrowful past, the hopeful future, the triumph of love and family over crushing despair. Ever since he broke out in 1985 with his Swedish feature Mitt Liv Som Hund (My Life as a Dog),…
The most daunting thing for an actor is to portray a god, and when that god comes equipped with a tangle of myths and the quickest left jab in history, the actor’s job can soon verge into guesswork. To Will Smith’s credit, he has managed to get, at least partway,…
April 1999 was the last time a public peep was heard from George Sanchez — or maybe it was more like a squeal. That year the artist, who likes making big statements, mounted “monumento,” an installation commemorating the 38th anniversary of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Housed in the…
Hey, watch out! Oops! Ever get a lesson in perception — the hard way? If so, you know things aren’t always as they seem, objects in the mirror are sometimes closer than they appear, and you can’t always trust your eyes — all information that should enhance your appreciation of…
This is a busy time of the year, so let’s get to the point of this review fast. If you want to see a classic example of sitcom at its silliest, get over to Ray Cooney’s Caught in the Net at the Coconut Grove Playhouse. No, that’s not a sneer;…
David Salo’s colleagues and classmates at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have absolutely no idea how he spends his free time. It’s not that the 32-year-old linguistics grad student is ashamed of his hobby (or obsession), which has occupied him for some 26 years. They simply cannot be bothered with it…
It took Andre Dubus all of eighteen pages to communicate the grief that fills every frame of Todd Field’s two-hours-plus In the Bedroom, a wrenching bit of filmmaking based on Dubus’s short tale “Killings.” Both story and film tell the same tale in the same solemn and gripping tone, with…
Appropriately A Beautiful Mind does not offer a literal translation of the life of John Forbes Nash, Jr., the mathematician whose work on game theories won him a Nobel Prize in 1994. The film leaves out significant events, people, and places; it amalgamates central figures, disguises prominent locations and hides…
