Back in the early Seventies, when John Waters made his first splash with low-budget gross-outs such as Pink Flamingos and Multiple Maniacs, who would have guessed that someday he’d be making a Hollywood film as benevolent as Pecker? In retrospect, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. If any director has ever…
Adapted from a memoir of the same title, which was written by a guy named Jerry Stahl, it’s a guided tour through the Los Angeles television studios by day, various drug dens by night, and its protagonist’s troubled skull all of the time. To hear him tell it, Stahl was…
Music, as a theater insider once put it, is the food of love. Opera, on the other hand, is a series of naughty sexual escapades, repeatedly slammed doors, and horny bellhops. At least, those are the elements that drive Lend Me a Tenor, Ken Ludwig’s 1989 Tony Award-winning farce about…
Of all the things your mother specifically told you not to do — talk with your mouth full, go out with married men — chances are she didn’t mention the following: running off into the snow in your wedding dress. But if you did happen to desert your fiance at…
Slums of Beverly Hills is the first feature by the young writer-director Tamara Jenkins, and it has its mild amusements. It’s one of those movies that get bonus points for being “personal,” bopping along from episode to episode as if the filmmaker were discovering her subject as she proceeded. Jenkins…
One True Thing, directed by Carl Franklin, is trying to be the Terms of Endearment of the Nineties. Scripted by Karen Croner from the 1995 Anna Quindlen novel of the same name, One True Thing pushes the same high-gloss homilies about making peace with your family, and it caps everything…
Jackie Chan’s American fans (and I include myself among them) have suffered through a nervous 1998 so far. The momentum the star earned with the 1996 release of Rumble in the Bronx has seemed to dissipate steadily: An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, the first American production to employ…
Pedro Pablo Pena, founder and artistic director of the Miami Hispanic Ballet, likes to think of Miami as the door to the Americas. And so we might consider the three-year-old International Ballet Festival of Miami, another Pena creation, as one of the many entryways to cultural exchange. Pena, a former…
thursday september 17 Pssst, did you hear? The Miami Art Museum (101 W. Flagler St.) has cut back its evening hours to one Thursday per month. Not good — especially for us art lovers who spend countless hours chained to our desks and who enjoy the little breather that a…
The People with AIDS Coalition (PWAC) is known for helping provide counseling, housing, and health care to people infected with HIV. Recently the not-for-profit group, also known for its feisty leadership, has branched out to include a different type of therapy — comic relief. Last fall, under the guidance of…
The Biltmore Hotel, known for its stunning Spanish architecture, its gargantuan pool, and its famous guests, is also renowned for something else: its ghosts. Since the hotel’s early days, visitors and employees claim to have witnessed ghosts and unexplainable occurrences. No wonder: During the Prohibition era, the thirteenth floor housed…
When you think of Hamlet, Argentina probably doesn’t come to mind. That’s why the folks who include it as part of Inroads: The Americas believe you’ll be surprised when you see the moody, grief-stricken prince transformed, courtesy of the Argentine troupe Teatro del Sur, into the son of a suburban…
thursday september 10 The Bass Museum (2121 Park Ave., Miami Beach) reopens its doors after a six-week hiatus for renovations with the exhibition Crosscurrents: Contemporary Painting from Panama, 1968-1998. On display are works by fourteen Panamanian artists, including Brooke Alfaro, Isabel de Obaldia, Alfredo Sinclair, David Solis, and Haydee Victoria…
The opening credits of Simon Birch assert that it was “suggested” by John Irving’s popular 1989 novel A Prayer for Owen Meany. Actually, it’s a thin but relatively faithful adaptation of the first few chapters of Irving’s comic ramble through the nature of religious faith, predestination, and heroism. Screenwriter Mark…
Matt Damon, the blond matinee idol, has apparently become Hollywood’s idea of a deep thinker. After playing a math whiz in last year’s Good Will Hunting, he has now been reinvented as a poker genius in John Dahl’s Rounders. So anybody who had doubts about the second coming of Albert…
Men don’t get it. Moms don’t get it. Sometimes even your roommate or best friend doesn’t get it. But if you bray and carp and vent long enough, someone will listen, someone will begin to understand the precious particulars of a young woman’s sexuality. Whether they’re interested or not. That’s…
Of all the people you might encounter in a solo drama, John Hinckley is not likely to be anyone’s first choice. Chances are the would-be Reagan assassin won’t be serving tea in the cozy manner of Emily Dickinson in The Belle of Amherst or experiencing high-volume sexual liberation along the…
thursday september 3 Bristol, England’s trip-hoppers Massive Attack plug their latest album, the mesmerizing Mezzanine, tonight at 8:00 at the Cameo Theatre, 1445 Washington Ave., Miami Beach. Opening act is DJ Lewis Parker, who was the first act Massive Attack signed to its new Melankolic label (see “Music,” page 81)…
“Unlike other parks, which are wonderful places to go and recreate, this is a place to go and contemplate. It’s more for education, preservation, and serenity than it is a place to throw a Frisbee — but if you wanted to throw a Frisbee, you could!” So says Terry Coulliette…
You look in any direction and encounter a stillness, a quiet placidity that makes vistas in this chunk of Florida appear much like photographs, beautiful and moving ones. In fact, you are looking at a drenched hotbed of fertility. Bugs and birds, snakes and gators, flowers and weeds. “This place…
Shane, the teenage hero of Mark Christopher’s 54, wears the petulant expression of a Raphaelite cherub, and he comes complete with a halo of thick blond hair. He’s played by a pretty newcomer with the exotic name Ryan Phillippe, but there’s nothing exotic about the voice that comes out of…
On the continuum of tragic black musicians, Frankie Lymon can’t hold a votive candle to, say, Charlie Parker or Billie Holiday. But now, like that pair, the late doo-wopper has his own movie — or, rather, he has his own space in a movie that, for better or worse, is…
