The strife between the lead characters in Caldwell Theatre’s production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane goes way beyond the typical mother-daughter friction. Early in the play, while Maureen Folan (Cary Anne Spear) slams cabinet doors and slings pans around the kitchen of their little cottage, her aged mother, Mag…
In his latest film, Spectres of the Spectrum, filmmaker/archivist/pack rat Craig Baldwin creates common ground for his postmodern bricolage somewhere between the hazy vision of a corrupted techno future and the rose-colored modernism of the postwar American media. It’s not nearly as much of a stretch as you might think…
Van Gogh was a lunatic who cut off his ear. Picasso was a self-absorbed cur who abused women. Warhol turned out to be a weird, desperate loner, Basquiat a doomed junkie. Try as he might, shriveled little Toulouse-Lautrec failed miserably at romance. As for El Greco’s explosive affair with that…
Director John Herzfeld’s 1996 feature, the droll and underrated 2 Days in the Valley, was a more than adequate counterbalance to the catastrophe of his first feature, Two of a Kind, a 1983 John Travolta vehicle (which, together with Moment by Moment, put its star on the fast track from…
“Everywhere else death is an end. Death comes, and they draw the curtains. Not in Spain. In Spain they open them.” Writer Federico Garcia Lorca — probably most famous for his tragic trilogy that includes the play Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding) and his poetry collection Romancero Gitano (Gypsy Ballads)…
Diving into Dumpsters to retrieve discarded footage is another day at the office for experimental filmmaker Craig Baldwin, who makes what he refers to as “collage essays.” Known among the arthouse crowd for his films Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1992), a satiric take on xenophobia and CIA covert…
One can only imagine the pitch meeting at which comedian-turned-film actor Denis Leary told ABC programming execs he wanted to write and star in a show about a pill-popping, Scotch-swilling, chain-smoking, adulterous New York City cop who utters obscenities as casually as he exhales. It’ll be a 30-minute show, Leary…
Sam Hamm is, relatively speaking, a successful Hollywood screenwriter, meaning he earns his keep penning screenplays without having to subsidize his income by tending bar or waiting tables. He has to his credit a handful of films, some little known (1983’s Never Cry Wolf, his debut), some enormously profitable (1989’s…
Legend has it Robert Johnson became a blues guitar master in an amazingly short time; hence the myth that he made a deal with the Devil. Johnson didn’t achieve fame during his lifetime, but his signature sound and lexicon of powerful tunes have lived on through the work of rock…
The very notion of “modern” in art rests on a historical fallacy. At the height of European colonialism, the movements of fauvism and Cubism adapted the “primitive” as an emblem of artistic liberation from bourgeois academic clichés. The primitive set them free, but they supplied the iconic stereotypes. One example…
Read Part 1, Festival of Might Featuring a cast of outstanding young actors and a pack of symbol-laden dogs, first-time director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu’s urban portrait captures the daily desperation and persistent hopes of an ensemble of characters in millennial Mexico City. Economic class and personal histories clash when parallel…
There are many striking aspects to Patrice Leconte’s vivid, powerful film The Widow of St. Pierre, which screens this week at the Miami Film Festival, but the most unusual is the central relationship between a French army officer and his wife — a marriage based on passion, admiration, intimacy, and…
The festival closes as it began with an adaptation of an early twentieth-century novel by Vladimir Nabokov, The Luzhin Defence, a disappointing finale to what has been a very strong program overall. The film follows an obsessed Russian chess master, Alexander Luzhin (John Turturro), who in the late 1920s arrives…
“The greatness of a film is out there at a point beyond the lines,” says novelist and sometime screenwriter Robert Stone. “It’s really how those lines are made to play in terms of photography, in terms of so many other elements. Writing for the movies, I think, is something relatively…
Brazil’s colonial roots date back to the year 1500 when the Portuguese came to town, wreaked havoc on the vast area’s millions of indigenous residents, then began importing slaves in droves from West Africa to labor on plantations. Centuries later, one byproduct of those dishonorable intentions is the fascinating intermingling…
It was to have been a routine stop on a routine press tour, yet another town in which the actress was to show up, chit and chat with the local media about her movie, then move on–the traveling salesman getting the word out, moving The Product. Denver, Dallas, San Francisco,…
If translation is treason, as Argentine author Jorge Borges said, then adaptation might be considered assassination — especially when it comes to reviving a Tennessee Williams work, which more often than not results in catastrophe. Not in the case of the attempt by Cuban-born director Rolando Moreno, whose sensitivity to…
Winter Shorts 2001: Best of the Fest! is a collection of the best scripts from the festival of one-acts that began in 1996 and is reproduced in a two-hour performance that is both lively and entertaining. City Theatre has found its niche and a strong troupe of actors to carry…
On Golden PonderingLet us now praise famous filmmakers, specifically the lauded team of director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant, whose latest film, The Golden Bowl, headlines the Miami Film Festival. In forty years and seventeen theatrical productions, this team has compiled a superlative record of finely wrought films, almost…
With In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-wai solidifies his stature as the subtlest and most idiosyncratic of Hong Kong directors. In an industry best known for its accessible, crowd-pleasing comedies and action films, Wong has turned out a series of increasingly risky dramas that make little or no concession…
Brazilian cinema has to be one of the most underrated sources in today’s movie industry, at least from an American perspective. While Hollywood troglodytes are only now waking up to the pleasures of Latin filmmaking, studio-level attention largely is focused on Spain and stories that can be considered “crossover.” One…
The most important thing to remember while watching La Virgen de los Sicarios (Our Lady of the Assassins) is that this is not a documentary. Because Colombia usually is represented in international cinema as the den of drug lords, it is easy to take offense at this portrayal as yet…
