Among the best ways to search for oil is the seismic shoot. To make one you drill a hole about 25-feet deep, insert 2.2 pounds of dynamite, and detonate. The explosion causes vibrations in the earth that are recorded by sensitive listening equipment deployed over a large area. The data…
Back in 1993 Disney released Swing Kids, a dead-earnest portrait of rebellious German jazz fans during the Third Reich. This bizarre hybrid (a blend of Footloose and Schindler’s List, of Dead Poets Society and The Diary of Anne Frank) pitted big bands against armbands; it was a classic case of…
The “dinner party for dead people” play, in which an author gathers people who may or may not have met in real life and plops them into the same room for supper, isn’t officially recognized as a dramatic genre. But it’s so popular that maybe it ought to be. Few…
thursday march 18 Before men started marching into delivery rooms videotaping the births of their babies, before TV commercials and music videos appropriated the shaky-camera technique and quick-cut style of editing, there was the work of acclaimed avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage. He did it first. In the mid-Fifties Brakhage began…
In the late Seventies, John Epperson, a native of Hazelhurst, Mississippi, and a fan of the ballet flick The Turning Point, headed to New York City to fulfill his dream of entering showbiz. By day he worked as a rehearsal pianist for the American Ballet Theater. By night he was…
The Deep End of the Ocean starts out as a maternal horror movie and ends up as a family therapy session. Michelle Pfeiffer plays the photographer wife of a restaurateur (Treat Williams) and mother of two sons and an infant daughter. While checking into a jammed hotel for her fifteenth…
The Corruptor should come as something of a relief to fans of Hong Kong superstar Chow Yun-Fat who were mostly disappointed with last year’s The Replacement Killers, Chow’s American screen debut. Among the producers of that action thriller was John Woo, who in the Eighties and early Nineties directed five…
A picture, as the saying goes, speaks a thousand words. Sometimes the same is true of reactions to pictures, like the brief notes written in the visitors’ book at Jill Freedman’s exhibition of photographs, Resurrection City: A Look Back, currently at the Miami-Dade Public Library. “I’m very sad how whites…
At the movies the fun-loving temptress has been liberating the buttoned-up clod ever since Katharine Hepburn’s leopard made off with Cary Grant’s dinosaur bone in Bringing Up Baby, 61 years ago. Maybe even longer, if you count pioneer vamp Theda Bara’s effect on a long succession of speechless men. In…
Imagine a brainy spider battling cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn and you’ll get some idea of the shenanigans onstage in the National Actors Theatre touring production of The Gin Game, starring Julie Harris and Charles Durning. The Tony Randall-produced revival, which just left the Royal Poinciana Playhouse to take up residence…
thursday march 11 Glorifying the influence of the mass market, the machine, violence, global communication, and war were all tenets of the ahead-of-its-time Italian movement known as Futurism. As the name implies, it was an attempt to propel the then-underdeveloped country into the future. Founded in 1909 by Filippo Tommaso…
Five years ago an event known as the Winter Party was staged for the express purpose of raising funds for SAVE (Safeguarding American Values for Everyone). The mission: to defeat an anti-gay amendment to the Florida constitution that would allow discrimination based on sexual orientation. At that fete close to…
On the other end of the telephone line, Jim Mazur ponders the possibilities. A major think. Listen hard, and you can almost hear the clickety-clack of his brain at work as it rummages rapidly through the available mental data. Then after a long pause and a sighing, “Oh, geez,” he…
Immodesty becomes Guy Ritchie, the British writer-director who makes a jovial debut on a Jovian scale in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. In this wayward gangster comedy set in London’s East End, Ritchie cooks up a gleefully improbable tale using mismatched ingredients: a rigged card game, a hydroponic marijuana…
For Cruel Intentions, writer Roger Kumble’s directorial debut, he has come up with the clever idea of updating Choderlos De Laclos’s durable eighteenth-century novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses. With its focus on totally amoral protagonists who use sex as a tool to manipulate innocents, often just for the hell of it,…
In the three decades that director Ken Loach has been a steadfast champion of the British working class, his films have lost none of their sting. Whether examining a brutal Belfast police incident in Hidden Agenda (1990) or the plight of an unemployed man struggling to buy his daughter a…
Li’l Bit, the haunted protagonist of How I Learned to Drive, compares her Uncle Peck to the Flying Dutchman, the legendary figure condemned to travel the Earth until a maiden loves him of her own free will. The play, which won author Paula Vogel the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for drama,…
thursday march 4 We’ve all heard that drivel about not judging a book by its cover. Face it, an attractive cover makes a difference. As good-looking books go, Griffin & Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence is one of the prettiest. Author/illustrator Nick Bantock’s colorful and lushly illustrated 1991 volume told the…
We live in a funny place. Watching eccentric and corrupt politicians stumble through their daily duties is a major form of amusement around here, but that only goes so far. Sometimes it’s nice to know that the folks making you howl are not juicing your tax dollars, too. You’d almost…
Roses are everywhere: in nine out of ten poems ever written, in pop songs, all over TV. Ah, but those orchids. They’re more elusive, yet just as beautiful, aromatic, and symbolic as roses, and frankly, damn sexier. This weekend orchids get their due via the 54th annual Miami International Orchid…
When hit men wore hats and Cadillacs had running boards, the average Mafia don could knock off the Tattaglia brothers in midafternoon and sit down to a nice plate of chicken cacciatora that evening, content that he’d seen to the family business and blazed a path for his first-born son’s…
The independent production/distribution company The Shooting Gallery probably got more attention when Monica Lewinsky showed up in Washington, D.C., wearing a cap bearing its logo than it is likely to receive from the release of this modest, deserving film from writer-director Nancy Savoca. Savoca has made three earlier features: True…
