The moods of Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me are so artfully mingled that it’s difficult to get a fix on this highly personal independent feature. Set in a quiet little town in upstate New York’s lovely Catskill Mountains, it is at once a drama about the unresolved traumas…
For many people the month of December signifies a time to celebrate. Jews have Hanukkah. Christians have Christmas. Blacks of all religions have Kwanzaa. But make no mistake, Kwanzaa is a holiday, not a holy day. Created in 1966 by California State University professor/activist Maulana Karenga, the seven-day observance, which…
About the time your eggnog buzz wears off, so does the negligible charm of your houseguests. So like any gracious host, you smile and say, “Hey, let’s go for a ride!” You then drive for miles into the Everglades and ditch them. (Martha Stewart would understand.) But when they escape…
Contained within a care package sent by C.D. Payne is a self-penned press release introducing the author as “the Rodney Dangerfield of comic novelists,” complete with a picture of the bug-eyed comedian and his shopworn catchphrase “I can’t get no respect.” As it turns out, this is the letter Payne…
The word juggernaut means “an overpowering force,” and appropriately the artistic director of Juggerknot Theatre Company, Tanya Bravo, is tapping into the powerful force of theater by pushing limits — both artistic and geographic. On the 67th block of Biscayne Boulevard, there’s more than one craft being fine-tuned: The area…
Ramon Alejandro’s “Baralanube,” at José Alonso Fine Arts, makes us see how tradition still can find its way into a novel production. “Baralanube” includes most of Alejandro’s original drawings; collaborations with contemporary exile Cuban writers such as Nestor Diaz de Villegas, Antonio José Ponte, Felix Lizarraga; and even that infamous…
Fair warning: Enough time has passed that it’s OK to discuss the ending of writer-director M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable. Those who have not yet seen the film and intend to might want to keep on moving. Or perhaps not: To reveal the ending, all 180 or so seconds of it,…
In a starkly furnished Paris apartment, spectator Marc (Judd Hirsch) circles a white canvas with the wary step of a big-game hunter while Serge (Cotter Smith) looks on expectantly; we can’t help but wonder if it is the art, or his best friend, that Marc is about ready to attack…
Assessing the merits of Quills, the lusty new feature by director Philip Kaufman (Henry and June), it’s tempting to seek correlative characters from popular movies to illustrate just how radical this business is not. In Kaufman’s film — affectionately constructed upon a screenplay by Doug Wright, who adapts his award-winning…
What Women Want could be the first movie to win a Clio Award for Advertisement of the Year. No fewer than two dozen products receive prominent placement in the film, from Federal Express to Foster’s Lager to Cutty Sark to L’eggs panty hose to US Airways. After a while you…
For the longest time you’ve sported the black-turtleneck-and-narrow-pant uniform worn by Mike Myers’s German beatnik character Dieter. Yet you’ve never understood what compelled you to adopt such a somber-hued wardrobe. You live in sunny Miami, not dreary Berlin. You’re a computer programmer, not an avant-garde performance artist. You’re often seen…
Magda Watts cuts two slits in a clay head and nudges them open. White plastic eyeballs eerily appear; the vague blob is no longer blind. With another tool she sculpts a deep wedge, forming a mouth through which a voice, a song, a scream can escape. Carefully she tends to…
Christmastime is here, but for the first time, Charlie Brown’s father will not be around to watch his depressed, round-headed child celebrate the holiday. He will not be in front of the television next week to watch his little boy seek psychiatric help from a nickel-grubbing girl who diagnoses her…
Works that penetrate the façade of normalcy in marriage are nothing new to American theater audiences. In the 1938 classic Our Town, Thornton Wilder pioneered what we now call “relationship drama” when he placed a young couple on the altar and allowed the audience to listen in on their innermost…
There’s bound to be a philosopher somewhere who has offered the opinion that banality, if marketed well enough, becomes the model of success. Given the spew of mediocrity that’s hyped in the media, that theory is a reasonable assumption. But there’s a corollary that’s worse. If it hasn’t been hyped,…
Documentaries have been out of fashion in the film world, though exactly what a documentary is remains debatable, at least in Hollywood circles. (Roger and Me and The Thin Blue Line did not qualify for Oscar consideration, according to the rules.) Whatever you want to call these offerings from the…
About halfway through the megabudget mountain climbing adventure Vertical Limit, even the most rugged, thrill-hungry fans of disaster movies may find themselves going numb. Not from the howling weather on the icy face of K2, in the Himalayas, where the action supposedly takes place. Not from oxygen deprivation. Not even…
In 1950 Rex Artist Supplies was just another business on Coral Gables’ Miracle Mile. Purveyors of house paint, wallpaper, frames, and, of course, art supplies, the store was cofounded by artist E. Rex Gerlach and housepainter Joseph Platt. By the mid-Fifties, Rex had evolved into a reliable outlet for artists…
Dreams of a white Christmas remain unfulfilled year after year for most of us in this land of vitality and vice. Except for what emanates from our beloved air conditioner and the occasional chilly day, cold weather doesn’t exist here. Sitting inside by the fire would be silly. Sledding is…
Some would say it’s a guy thing: crushed cans of Schlitz strewn across the floor of a Motel 6 room, belching as an alternative to conversation, and the inevitable discussion about the undeniably rhetorical question, “How could you be my best friend and screw the love of my life?” Such…
Karel Teige was born in 1900. He was a modern man but not just because of his birthday. The Czech critic, designer, poet, theorist, graphic artist, and agitator showed symptoms, through his work and politics, of that twentieth-century malaise, the condition of constant crisis, guilt, and cynicism that colored the…
To create a real change we must strive not for revolution, but for evolution,” says painter Rafael Lopez Ramos, who looks to Asian mystics for wisdom. “Revolution is an imposed change. Evolution takes longer, but it’s long lasting.” The Cuban painter has lived both the censure and repression resulting from…
