Go window-shopping along the sidewalks of Little Havana this weekend, and what might you see? Pastelitos baked to flaky perfection, spiritual self-help paperbacks and Castro conspiracy hardcovers, plastic Catholic saints next to black Santería candles, stylish guayaberas and Panama hats, big-screen TVs tuned to Telemundo, dude lying in bed. Wait…
“A meal was brought/With blood, and each sate sullenly apart/Gorging himself in gloom: No love was left;/All Earth was but one thought — and that was death.” — George Gordon, Lord Byron from “Darkness” In Unsheathed: A Gothic Tale, an original story and work by choreographer Esaias Johnson, it’s not…
Praying with the Enemy
This was to be a column extolling the daring and inventiveness of a very groovy Sci Fi Network television show called good vs. evil, in which two dead men — a ‘fro-sporting, cool-spouting brutha and his pale-faced partner — try to save the souls of those who have made Faustian…
Digital video is poised to become a major factor in commercial filmmaking, and Time Code, the new feature from Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas) could be used as a commercial for the process, which is its greatest point of interest. The movie is not so much an intriguing story as…
Why is it that foreign directors master the coming-of-age story much better than Americans? Maybe it’s because subtlety seems very unchildlike in this nation’s eyes, but subtlety is exactly what this genre needs, and what foreign films often give it. Case in point: the 1999 French-Canadian film Set Me Free…
When Werner Herzog was still a teenager, he found himself living in an apartment with several other boarders — one of them a maniacal, uncontrollable actor named Klaus Kinski. Fifteen years later, he cast Kinski as the lead in Aguirre, Wrath of God, the German director’s first (relatively) big-budget film…
The way Lisa Fittipaldi recounts it, she had little choice but to become the only blind watercolor artist in the world. Her husband made her. “He had just had emergency surgery, and he told me he couldn’t live with me like this, that one of us had to be functional,”…
Every year summer in Miami brings to mind a few things: thighs searing on boiling car seats, steamy daily afternoon rain dousings, nostril-burning 90-degree temperatures, the looming threat of the latest hurricane, and, of course, no relief until at least mid-November. Sad sacks unable to escape the horror that is…
Peter Becker is the most important man in the movie business, even though you have no idea who he is. Becker himself would not cop to such a description; he, like few else in the business called show, does not put himself before the work. To describe what he does…
Immigration is a physical act. A body of water is crossed; a mountain range grows smaller and smaller until it appears to be the knuckles of a hand resting on the earth. A dissonant jumble of consonants and vowels seeps into our thoughts until our dreams are flooded. We fall…
Andy Warhol’s art encapsulated the presumed banality of late twentieth-century American culture. He also exemplified the aesthetic ideal of the dandy: Life and work became one. Self-indulgent and reticent, Warhol, toward the end of his life, constructed for himself a quasi-autistic persona. Either praised or vilified, with Andy there was…
You’ve got to feel sorry for the Scottish Board of Tourism. First the Loch Ness monster is exposed as a fake, and then their nation’s film industry starts to pick up. Normally a successful film industry would be great for a country’s image, but in the case of Scotland, it…
Despite the titleEast Is East, the big message of this flavorful domestic memoir is really that West is West. In the tug of war between East and West for a soul, East, the film suggests, may hold out for a while through a combination of nostalgia, pride, national resentment, and…
Everybody is a princess at one point or another. Rich girls work it from birth to final crackup. Bourgeois girls play the precious-and-misunderstood game through adolescence, shifting it into ruthless ambition shortly thereafter. Poor girls can blow an entire lifetime just screwing up their hair and pretending they’re Galadriel. As…
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,…
