East-West begins in 1946, as a French woman (Sandrine Bonnaire) accompanies her physician husband (Oleg Menchikov) back to his Russian homeland, in response to Stalin’s campaign for repatriating those who fled the revolution. They immediately discover Stalin’s overtures are simply a sadistic come-on. Nearly all the returnees are executed or…
For a writer inspiration can strike from just about any source. A beautiful sunny day, a litter of fuzzy newborn kittens, wrenching public humiliation on a television game show. Make no mistake, we’re not referring to the innumerable indignities contestants have suffered at the hands of a self-righteous Regis Philbin…
Larger than life. A thoroughly worn-out expression, but how else to describe the superior athletic ability, magnetic personality, and just plain humanity of celebrated basketball player Michael Jordan? How to properly capture him in all his glory? At last the six-story-tall screen of the IMAX theater comes in handy. Michael…
The voice-mail message begins with the caller identifying himself in a clear, sharp tone: “Hey, this is Chris Thompson, executive producer of Action and Ladies Man, and I hear you’re trying to get a hold of me…” Long pause. “For some ungodly reason.” Then, in a split second, the voice…
In 1996 thirtysomething Chilean authors Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gomez wrote a manifesto that rejected magic realism as the hallmark of Latin-American literature. In place of the fantastic town Macondo found in the most famous magically real novel, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Fuguet and Gomez suggest…
The writer Willa Cather once speculated that the modern world came into existence in 1922 or thereabouts. Marisa Sistach’s El Cometa (The Comet) makes a better case for 1910. The film tells the story of two Mexican revolutions — one political, the other cultural — simultaneously evolving that year. The…
Beginning with its title — the indeterminate-sounding At Midnight and a Half — Marite Ugas and Mariana Rondon’s film cultivates a preoccupation with suspended states (a preoccupation suggested even more forcefully by the curiously circular syntax of the Spanish title, A La Media Noche y Media). Alienated lovers, lost children,…
The recently released Argentine film Yepeto has a curious timelessness about it. Although one of the characters lugs a laptop computer to the cafés and bars where she composes poetry, the central themes that drive the plot distracted Plato and Shakespeare centuries ago. Which is more beautiful: the athletic body…
Actor Juan Carlos Diaz knows an opportunity when he sees one. Following the speeches recently given by Cuban-born stars Gloria Estefan and Andy Garcia in front of the home of Lazaro Gonzalez in Little Havana, the Venezuelan actor quickly expressed his “support for Elian,” then began plugging his new film,…
In Vietnamese artist Huong’s 64-by-100-inch painting Of Her Treasure, one child cries as the other clings to their mother’s leg. Head tilted upward, face contorted in anguish, the mother clutches a bowl full of skulls and bones and screams at the heavens. They cower in a rainstorm, the sky behind…
A mildly retarded man who works in a grocery store believes he is Batman, the Dark Knight on a mission to free Gotham City from the clutches of The Joker. An actress playing the role of Wonder Woman becomes a spokeswoman, then scapegoat, for the Commie witch-hunters working for the…
When is a room not a room? When it’s a catalogue. Sound confusing? Get this: ROOM is a New York City-based catalogue created two years ago by former House & Garden style editor Amy Crain. A magazine collector and inveterate shopper frustrated by the lack of chic and affordable offerings,…
In the rich mythology of The New Yorker, a periodical renowned for the quality of its writing and the quirks of its writers, no legend carries more weight than that of Joseph Mitchell. On the occasion of the magazine’s 75th anniversary, it is currently great sport among the literati to…
Although its themes are about as revelatory as those of the average Cathy comic strip (clothes don’t fit, job too busy, male not clairvoyant, AACK!), there’s something irrefutably charming about Philippa “Pip” Karmel’s debut feature, Me Myself I. The editor of Academy darling Shine has scripted a laundry list of…
It seems incredible that an oxymoron such as heroin chic ever entered our lexicon. But the film Black Tar Heroin: The Dark End of the Street should kill all appeal for that skinny, skanky look. It may even make people glad that cocaine remains the drug of choice in South…
The film trans, which was lauded at the Sundance and Berlin film festivals, finally has an American distributor. Some say it wasn’t picked up sooner because the hard-to-describe indie doesn’t fit into a neat category. And yet there is an apt description: a languid road movie. Shot in southwest Florida…
Something Cloudy, Something Clear
We’ve been seeing some interesting stuff happening at the New Gallery, the only art gallery on the University of Miami campus. In the past the exhibition hall was used mainly to showcase students and faculty. Then, in November 1999, the art department, to provide a much needed direction and curatorial…
The world’s population of frogs, toads, and other amphibians is disappearing, according to a study released two weeks ago in the journal Nature. Although wart-haters might breathe a sigh of relief, the decline of our slimy friends could signal disaster for us all. Scientists claim herptile health is a good…
Even if you have devoured every word about the cinematic adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis´ 1991 novel American Psycho, about a Wall Street yuppie obsessed with using skin-care products and devouring the entrails of prostitutes, you have not read this one particular fact. And it is a fact. No one…
In 1615 John Donne did something that changed the course of his life, and four hundred years later, the life of Vivian Bearing Ph.D.: He became an Anglican priest. Donne dedicated his life to writing religious prose and poetry. As a priest and poet he explored the barriers of mortality…
It’s quite possible that American Psycho is a brilliant movie. It’s also quite possible that it’s a dreary, obvious chop-’em-up dressed in Alan Flusser suits and Ralph Lauren boxers, drenched in Pour Hommes after-shave, all to disguise it as bracing satire on the greed-is-good Eighties. The option audiences choose to…
