Two weeks ago, it would have been possible to use the name of the man interviewed below; indeed, it would have been expected, as he is no mere “spokesman,” the only identifier by which he is to be referred. Two weeks ago, it would have been possible to point out…
What is pornography? If someone can give me a workable definition, I’d have a better handle on Baise-Moi (Rape Me), a new French film about two women on the run that contains extreme violence and hard-core sex. Apparently the French government was shocked by this film and banned it as…
Ask David Lynch and he will tell you apple-pie America just isn’t what it seems. People behave strangely, sometimes violently, and sometimes they even transform into different people without being polite enough to warn you first. Eerie and freaky, shot through with sporadic bursts of humor and sex, Mulholland Drive…
Amazing how some buildings can look truly hideous in the daytime, while by the light of the moon or artificial illumination they are suddenly remade into ethereal works of art. Some structures, says architect, architectural historian, and Brown University professor Dietrich Neumann, are actually designed to look especially dazzling at…
On October 3, there appeared in The New York Times an article about how movie studios are struggling to find new villains in a post-September 11 environment. Writer Rick Lyman rounded up the usual suspects: a few film producers, a couple of screenwriters and the requisite amount of film scholars,…
One of the toughest decisions in my job is choosing which show to cover. Given the amount of theatrical activity in South Florida, there just is not enough room to review every show. This week, though, the choice was easy: I was going to New York. My long-time friend and…
The Italian film Bread and Tulips is a first cousin once removed of the American comedy Home Alone. A tremendous hit in Italy (it won nine Donatello Awards last year, the Italian equivalent of the Oscars), it concerns a woman who, on a bus holiday with her family, accidentally gets…
In the new low-budget indie comedy Haiku Tunnel, former temporary office worker Josh Kornbluth plays “Josh Kornbluth,” a temporary office worker who, early in the film, faces a premature midlife crisis: whether to stay a temp or “go perm.” After great hesitation the company makes him an offer he can’t…
He was born blind in one eye. She used to be a fashion model in the swinging Sixties. Both were unlikely candidates to spend a good part of their lives behind a camera, but Albert Watson and Sarah Moon became, of all things, photographers. Looking at the world through a…
“May he rest in peace,” were the ominous words in the subject line of the e-mail North Miami art gallery owner Genaro Ambrosino sent on September 17. The “he” referred to Michael Richards, Ambrosino’s friend and one of the artists he represented. Only a week before, Richards had been sculpting…
A few weeks ago, in the wake of the unfathomable events that had unfolded in New York City, novelist Jonathan Franzen found himself with poet Maya Angelou, journalist David Halberstam, and writer Bebe Moore Campbell being interviewed by Ted Koppel on ABC television. Early in the program, the usually well-informed…
Before he was editor in chief at Marvel Comics–which, by all rights, makes him the man who tells Spider-Man what he can do with himself and the X-Men where to go–Joe Quesada illustrated a comic book titled Ash. The title did not last long; there was, perhaps, little market for…
Amid warehouses and train tracks on NE Flagler in Fort Lauderdale, the new Sol Theatre Project’s neon logo lights up the dark night like a cheery inn. The interior space is disarming. With a bookcase crammed with scripts, a large-mouthed bass mounted over a window, mismatched couches, and stuffed chairs,…
Together is the second feature from Swedish director Lukas Moodysson, whose 1998 Fucking Amal was shown here two years ago under the title Show Me Love, renamed for obvious reasons. Together is an ensemble piece — a sharp, perceptive look at a Swedish commune in a suburb of Stockholm, circa…
Ah, the backstage show-biz story. A classic movie genre. Think Bullets over Broadway, think Shakespeare in Love, think The Producers. Seen one, seen ’em all, you say? Consider this real-life scenario: A musical director from India plans to produce an Italian opera in Italy. He asks a Chinese director to…
“He doesn’t fit in anywhere,” says painter Carlos Suarez de Jesus about his Cuban-American colleague Sergio Garcia. “He’s constantly struggling with a sense of otherness.” Suarez de Jesus could very well be referring to himself, his equally creative wife Vivian Marthell, and the posse of artists who show at their…
I don’t know what motivated Rafael de Acha and his New Theatre to produce Nilo Cruz’s new play Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams. Maybe it was the topicality and locality of a South Florida production of a play about Cuban Americans searching for their roots. Cruz himself has been…
In The Medium Is the Message: An Inventory of Effects (1967), Marshall McLuhan envisioned the Global Village, a synchronized world where time and space has vanished and multimedia engulfs everyone. McLuhan thought the media would put us back in touch with ancestral emotions, from which print had divorced us. Charming…
Rene Balcer, like you and everyone you know, can’t stop talking about what we now refer to simply as The Attack. We may resume our lives, fall back into our routine until it again feels mundane and comforting, but sooner or later, The Attack becomes the only topic of conversation…
The cynic may notice only how Hearts in Atlantis plays like a Stephen King best-of compilation, a reheating of familiar stories and favorite themes. At times it feels so much like Stand By Me — with its nostalgic, flashback tale of cherubs and bullies accompanied by sad and weary narration…
Who’s afraid of the big bad building? No one, if it shows off sleek Streamline Moderne-style lines. Because for the unschooled, architecture in Miami stopped in the early Forties when houses, hotels, and public buildings looked vaguely cruise-ship-like, as if inhabitants would be suddenly cast adrift in the middle of…
“Love each other or perish” — W.H. Auden When the Jewish Museum of Florida’s current exhibition, “The Art of Hatred: Images of Intolerance in Florida Culture,” opened back in May, the institution’s founding executive director, Marcia Zerivitz, knew how important it was. What she didn’t know: how horribly prescient it…
