It’s Eric Mendelsohn’s turn in the spotlight. The 34-year-old stood behind the camera to shoot his first feature film, Judy Berlin, but the movie’s acclaim has turned the attention around. Mendelsohn is about to have his coming-out party, because Judy Berlin, after garnering him the Best Director award at last…
Sergio Giral’s documentary, Chronicle of an Ordinance, is not at all queer. The strait-laced title gives the first clue that the 50-minute video intends to tell, as simply as possible, the tale of the political struggle over the addition of “sexual orientation” to the long list of identity categories protected…
The Einstein of Sex is a historical drama of epic scope that manages to pull off the surprising trick of achieving low-budget aesthetics. Veteran German filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim (with more than 50 films to his credit) uses digital video in an entirely different way than his Dogme 95 contemporaries…
Maybe it’s something in the water. Or just the fact that they have their own confounding system of numbering streets. And a mayor who gets into fistfights with citizens at protests, skates through criminal charges like Brian Boitano at the Olympics, and persuades the powers that be they owe him…
“We realized there was nothing like it in South Florida, and we thought how perfect. It’s a unique, pretty, nice, family oriented fundraiser,” says Linda Gelinas, cofounder with her husband Rick of the nonprofit organization Little Acorns, about the International Kite Festival. For the past sixteen years, Little Acorns has…
What happens when you put Hot Lips Houlihan in yellow chiffon three sizes too tight on a roof with a ghost who looks like he could be a skinny second cousin of Elvis Presley? Paste this scene against a Technicolor blue sky reminiscent of those you see in toilet paper…
It’s 9:00 on a breezy night in early spring, and the sounds of live music and people chatting announce this first studio crawl, a way to acquaint the public with the 6street visual arts collective. They make up a quarter-block of artists’ studios off South Twelfth Avenue that stand alone…
In this corner: a fabulously falling-apart Art Deco structure, all curving walls, porthole windows, and terrazzo floors. Should it be squashed like a bug, or should the building and its environs be respected? This is the perennial dilemma of the developer and the residents of Miami Beach. In the far…
You’re a homemaker weary of whipping up boring old chicken dishes every day for your family. Your culinary repertoire needs some variety, so you head to the library to check out some African, Mexican, and Asian cookbooks. There you come across the same astonishing information over and over again: Africa…
Gay-theme programming has made a rapid rise to general acceptance in the movie and television industries, and on the public stage as a whole. In the last month Boys Don’t Cry, an arthouse feature based on the true story of a Nebraska teen, snagged a Best Actress Oscar for Hilary…
Pretty and popular Megan (Natasha Lyonne) tromps through what she assumes is the life of a normal high school teen, while her parents secretly pray for her over dinner and plot an intervention with her friends. Quicker than you can say, “Two, four, six, eight. God is good. God is…
For a film exploring the uncharted territory of the black gay experience in West Hollywood, Punks staggers in shallow water. The film is a kind of gay male Waiting to Exhale about a couple of brothers trying to wade through the singles scene. This ensemble comedy features characters whose lives…
Even while opening night looms for this year’s festival, director Robert Rosenberg is making plans for the future. Big plans. “This festival is only two years old, and we have a lot of room to grow,” says Rosenberg, a lanky, energetic ex-New Yorker whose own film experience (he’s an Emmy…
Los Angeles dramatist David Rambo (his real name) describes his discovery of a televangelist’s audio technician as the missing link in his three-character play this way: “The Heavens opened, so to speak. I realized I had a trinity: the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost!” But in his play God’s…
In his award-winning memoir of life in the Middle East, journalist Thomas L. Friedman compares Beirut to a Skinner box, the maze apparatus mice are forced to navigate in psychology experiments. For Friedman, Beirut (the capital of Old World disorder) possessed a particular and brutal capacity for conditioning its inhabitants…
From its opening moments, The Road to El Dorado looks and sounds oddly out of time, as though it were removed only yesterday from a time capsule sealed and buried in 1972. With its Peter Max visuals and Elton John vocals, it’s a decidedly unhip piece of work — Starlight…
Grass director Ron Mann’s archival history of weed, Mary Jane, skunk, boo, mezz — you name it, we’ll smoke it — is damn entertaining, to a point. See, perhaps we made the mistake of actually watching it stoned, which seemed a good idea at the time; I believe the words…
“Men know that once they know how to lead, any woman they want is theirs,” says Randy Atlas, making a statement that might apply to the political or business arenas, but actually refers to the world of dance. It’s a realm he knows well. The light-on-his-feet Atlas, in an odd…
“You dance the epoch you live,” says choreographer Jeanguy Saintus. The popular Haitian saying serves as a motto for his dance company, Artcho Danse Répertoire. Founded in 1987 by Saintus and co-director, Jean-Rene Delsoin, Artcho presents traditional Haitian dance in a brand-new form. “I wasn’t born in 1804,” explains Saintus,…
The digital revolution has radically altered the way we perceive art. Since the arrival of the Web, art has changed in form, content, and delivery. Electronic bits are sent over telephone lines, by microwave relay or satellites, through a scanner hooked into a Sony 700VW-Betacam video camera, and end up…
It’s a brave thief who reveals his booty to the man from whom he stole it. But Jim Jarmusch could not resist showing his film, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai to Seijun Suzuki, the 76-year-old Japanese director whose 1967 film Branded to Kill is echoed throughout Ghost Dog…
The gun is a coward’s weapon — always has been, always will be. Likening it to the sword is like equating rape with romance. For reasons that can only be attributed to collective insanity, however, Hollywood absolutely loves to romanticize the gun, serving as an adjunct advertising agency for the…
