Originally, this was to be a story about how Stan Lee, the industry icon who ran Marvel Comics for decades and co-created Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, wound up remaking archrival DC Comics’ most venerable heroes in his own image. The 12-part miniseries, Just Imagine Stan Lee Creating, was set…
The plot of David Hare’s The Blue Room might be described as “six degrees of penetration.” In the play’s opening scene, an off-duty cab driver gets it on with a prostitute. Next the cab driver seduces a French au pair, then the au pair has a sexual encounter with a…
If you’re into fresh and original events, check out Sound Art Workshops (SAW) at the new South Florida Composers Alliance venue in North Miami. SAW, an effort lead by Gustavo Matamoros, mixes both aural and visual arts for events that are truly interdisciplinary. Recently I saw Lou Mallozzi’s Usi Scrutati,…
Even more than the recent Depression-era comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the turn-of-the-century drama Songcatcher is an absolute treasure trove of old-timey, traditional folk music. Set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Appalachia in the year 1907, the film follows city-bred musicologist Dr. Lily Penleric (Janet McTeer) as she…
A ragtag group of travelers, one of whom is a violent man prone to aggressive outbursts, rides in a ramshackle transport on a journey through dark terrain. Mostly they sleep peacefully, until an error in their navigation equipment becomes apparent and their vehicle breaks down in the middle of nowhere…
Linda Richman is not feeling at all like buttah. The mother-in-law of comic actor Mike Myers, who immortalized her on Saturday Night Live as a big-haired, gaudy-clothed, yenta talk-show host with an intense Barbra Streisand fixation, is getting over the flu. But that won’t stop her from chatting about her…
The revolution will not be clothed. Instead of Glocks there will be glutes. In place of pistols, penises will prevail. Berettas will make way for breasts. Freedom fighters never will have been so … free. Until then, there’s the 26th annual Nude Recreation Week. From Monday, July 9, to Sunday,…
By his own definition, Bruce Campbell is a “midgrade, kind of hammy actor”–a B-movie star, in other words, a man whose career unfolds, like a Swedish porn loop, on Cinemax in the wee small hours of the morning. When I mentioned to a handful of people I was writing about…
A bearded man in olive drab spews out a fist-pounding diatribe. A couple gyrates brutally as if trapped in a sadistic rumba. A young man stands motionless with a black box over his head. A girl with a red scarf around her neck pulls it over her face in one…
For almost two decades, Stanley Kubrick wanted to make a film based on Brian Aldiss’s 1969 short story “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long,” about a robot child named David who wants only to be “real” so Mummy and Daddy will love him. The late director of 2001: A Space Odyssey…
The Road Home is the tenth feature from Zhang Yimou, still the mainland Chinese director best known to international audiences. (His closest competition is Chen Kaige, who made Farewell My Concubine and Temptress Moon.) His latest film has a couple of things going for it: It represents a synthesis of…
The subconscious mind is a funny thing. Especially if coaxed to the surface to play and prattle and perform onstage in front of an audience. At least that’s what comic hypnotist Flip Orley banks on at each of his shows, which are fueled by compliant volunteers. Given sold-out engagements at…
It’s the Fourth of July again, the day when everyone across the U.S.A. is supposed to puff up his chest with pride and pat himself on the back for being fortunate enough to live in the land of the free and home of the brave. Well, as free and brave…
Alan Cumming is, in no particular order, the following: an actor, a pop icon, a Renaissance man, a sex symbol, a bon viveur and the boy next door. “I am a combination of all those things,” insists the 36-year-old Scot, who punctuates every other sentence with a sly giggle that…
Ominous techno music engulfs the expectant audience at the Museum of Art Auditorium in Fort Lauderdale. The stage is barren except for a black office chair and desk. The desk is covered with a black cloth. As if the title of the play, The Penis’ Responses to the Vagina Monologues…
Robert Thiele’s exhibition at the Barbara Gillman Gallery makes me think of the end of the world. Not in a paranoid way — I’m not picturing a nuclear attack coming from the skies, or fearing an unforeseen market crash that makes capitalism obsolete. Rather Thiele’s sculptures convey the emptiness, even…
Who would have imagined that at this late date — more than half a century after the end of World War II, after The Diary of Anne Frank, Schindler’s List, Au Revoir, Les Enfants, Pierre Sauvage’s documentary Weapons of the Spirit, and Jan Kadar’s amazing The Shop on Main Street…
If internal combustion ever becomes obsolete — that is, if the auto industry ever allows internal combustion to become obsolete — whatever will movies do for heart-stopping drama? Hoof beats are dramatic, and the chug of a steam engine is suspenseful, but the roar of a gasoline-powered vehicle stirs the…
He’s a cowboy. He’s a construction worker. He’s a sailor. And a leather man. Anatomically correct — okay, he’s hung like a horse — and buff as a bodybuilder, he’s Billy the gay doll. Dreamed up by designer John McKitterick and debuted in a limited edition for a 1994 AIDS…
Bat dance, monkey dance, dance of the little horsemen. Small flutes called pitos and a giant gourd marimba. For the past decade, Grupo Cultural Uk’ux Pop Wuj (“the heart of the writings of the ancestors”), a community of Quiché Maya Indians from Chichicastenango, Guatemala, has actively sought to excavate its…
For the next five days, Richard Lewis will seldom leave his North Dallas hotel room, hidden away at the far end of the top floor with a view of overpasses, office buildings and distant dark clouds. He will venture out only to visit a couple of radio and television stations,…
Like apparitions rolling in from the sea, four rafters descend down the aisles from the back of the darkened Colony Theater toward the stage. Pedro (Luis Alberto Garcia), a soldier, crouches and peers excitedly through a telescope. Octavio (Gerardo Riveron) enters with a compass. Devoto (Jorge Hernandez), dressed as a…
