As acts of conjuring go, God’s universe-in-seven-days gig was none too shabby. But George Merrick’s siring of Coral Gables, conceived with a flash of genius and realized with all the precision of divine foresight, is almost enough to make the Big Guy jealous. Coral Gables: The City Beautiful, the latest…
thursday february 18 Curious about the complex roots of Santeria and the colorful beads employed in rituals? Then attend this event sponsored by the Tribal Arts Society at the Lowe Art Museum (1301 Stanford Dr., Coral Gables). John Mason, student of Yoruba culture in the Americas and West Africa, diviner…
“Architecture reflects the way humans live in different time periods. The time for this building expired.” Architect Norman Giller is dryly referring to the former eight-story Singapore hotel in Bal Harbour, which he designed and which was recently torn down in favor of a towering new condominium development. Still vital…
After the priest has cut out the tongue of the Marquis de Sade, he presents the meaty organ, encased in a black box, to the asylum’s caretaker. Handing it over he comments, “It was so long and serpentlike that I had to wrap it around a dowel.” Well, I bet…
For film buffs it’s two weeks of sheer pleasure: the sixteenth annual Miami Film Festival, featuring 31 pictures from fifteen countries. Naturally Spanish-language features abound, from opening-night dance-fest Tango, courtesy of Argentine director Carlos Saura, to the kinky Spanish thriller Between Your Legs. There are also intimate looks at Cuban…
thursday february 11 In the real world, erstwhile supermodel Kate Moss (for those of you living in a cave, hello, the whole supermodel thing is over) spent a month recuperating from exhaustion in a London clinic. In the imaginary world of author Bret Easton Ellis (Less Than Zero, American Psycho)…
Barron Sherer sounds about as atypically Miami as you can get. Deliberate instead of manic. Laconic instead of motor-mouthed. Considerate instead of rude. So it comes as no great cosmic slap upside the head to learn that he runs the city’s only true repertory film series, an endeavor that, in…
Lounging around the lobby of London’s Art Deco-inspired Savoy Hotel soaking up the 1920s atmosphere fit for a Fred Astaire movie isn’t part of most ordinary jobs. But for Mary Cleere Haran that kind of drudge work goes along with the glamorous territory of being one of New York City’s…
In The Eel, which won the Palme d’Or at the 1997 Cannes International Film Festival, director Shohei Imamura once again demonstrates his empathy for the outsiders and aliens of Japanese society. In this case he muses on the tormented relationship between a paroled wife-murderer who is struggling with his past…
The worst thing about French director Manuel Poirier’s Western, which was nominated for multiple Cesar Awards (the French equivalent of the Oscars) and won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, is its title. Despite the strained attempts of the movie’s production notes to convince us of…
Short of nuclear holocaust, a major sale at Kmart, or a confirmed Clint Eastwood sighting in rural Iowa, there’s probably no way to keep the movie version of Message in a Bottle from overwhelming the tender emotions of the hearts-and-flowers crowd. After all, this relentless assault on the tear ducts…
This is the season during which British playwright David Hare is printing his own currency on Broadway. In April the much ballyhooed The Blue Room, starring a naked Nicole Kidman, will be joined by a New York production of Amy’s View, featuring theater luminary Judi Dench. Soon after that Hare…
thursday february 4 We’ll forgive rockers Eve 6 for bellowing lyrics such as “Satan’s in the living room choking me with apathy” because the members of this Los Angeles-area trio, which recalls Green Day, are young — really young. In fact no one in the band is older than age…
Until an effective time machine is invented, posters (plus a touch of imagination) might be the best medium through which to visit bygone eras. Unlike fine art, posters tend to be populist rather than elitist. The International Vintage Poster Fair, an exhibition arriving in Miami Beach this weekend, will fill…
Don’t get an American Brahma bull pissed off. Brahmas may have smaller horns than your average Latin bullring toro, but they’re much bigger and definitely meaner. Unlike their counterparts they keep their eyes wide open when they charge, so it’s rare that they miss their target. How do they get…
The new Mel Gibson vehicle Payback is arguably the first major-studio release this year to have even a modicum of aesthetic ambition. For his directorial debut, Brian Helgeland — who won an Oscar for his 1997 L.A. Confidential screenplay (cowritten with director Curtis Hanson) — has chosen to adapt The…
Jimmy Cagney brought the same electric physicality to gangsters that he did to song-and-dance men. He gave a bright-eyed mug like his character in Public Enemy extraordinary powers of attraction and repulsion. In The General, Brendan Gleeson enacts the part of a real-life criminal chieftain — Dublin’s notorious Martin Cahill…
A woman in Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile makes this comment about the famous painter: “He says that occasionally there is a ‘Picasso’ and he is him.” You can substitute the word genius for Picasso and get the sense of what this phrase means. The comedy appears to…
thursday january 28 Fans of offbeat independent cinema take note. John Waters, the man who brought you the wonderfully heartwarming flicks Ping Flamingos, Polyester, Lust in the Dust, Hairspray, Cry-Baby, Serial Mom, and most recently, Pecker, is the subject of a documentary to be broadcast on cable’s Independent Film Channel…
There’s only one spot in South Florida where on any weekend from January to mid-March you can catch acts such as Cheap Trick, Air Supply, or Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, and it’s not the Button South. It’s the unlikely locale of Gulfstream Park. “We’re selling a day of entertainment,”…
Ellie Schneiderman surveys her sanctuary, which sprawls across the third floor of one of South Florida’s most aberrantly designed malls and proclaims that “architecture is the mother of all art.” In this scenario it should be added that paradox is the mother of all human endeavor. The black-clad, black-haired artist…
Between the current nostalgia for platform shoes and the epidemic of midlife crisis that has so many baby boomers in its grip, director Brian Gibson’s Still Crazy just might be able to find an audience among the disturbed, the deafened, and the disenchanted. It is, after all, the comic tale…
