“You don’t see a lot of it, not even in Egypt,” admits Jihan Jamal. “They think of it as a dying art.” Dressed in a black leotard with a long scarf-like affair tied at the waist, Jamal (her professional name) could be any dance instructor in any mirror-lined dance studio…
thursday may 14 Since 1985 the folks at Louis Wolfson II Media History Center have been collecting, preserving, cataloguing, and making the public aware of film and video materials about Florida’s history and culture. The center has grown into one of the largest and most active institutions of its kind…
Most disaster movies would be a lot better if they featured more disaster and less human drama. In Deep Impact the impending obliteration of much of the Earth by a pair of comets is merely the sideshow. The main event is a lot of goopy human-interest stuff: the daughter who…
The Horse Whisperer, the latest from Robert Redford — and the first of his directorial efforts in which he also stars — could almost serve as a compendium of Redford’s best and worst filmmaking tendencies. It features his eye for gorgeous, pictorial vistas, his straightforward narrative approach, and, most important,…
Of the potentially kooky types of people that could be dumped into a play — lawyers, clairvoyants, fast-food servers, and dying parents — the most unwieldy are the clairvoyants. Even if an audience buys the notion of second sight, the playwright is still stuck with a peculiar problem: how to…
If you sat through three hours of the Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning, mega-publicity-hyped musical that promised to change the face of Broadway forever only to wonder, “Is that all there is?” — read on. If you heard about the ballyhoo last week at Miami Beach’s Jackie Gleason Theater of…
Henry Jaglom offers everything that Americans hate about French cinema — the foppish characters, the glacial pace — but with little of their philosophical depth or visual daring. Additionally, he regurgitates the annoying qualities of Woody Allen’s films — the self-absorption, the feigned feminism, the pretentiousness — without remotely approaching…
The flimsiest hustle in movie promotion today is that independent films are starved for mainstream attention. The truth is that such films often have an open field when it comes to big-city media. Major studios are usually unable to deliver a finished print of a would-be blockbuster until two or…
In the production notes for Spike Lee’s new He Got Game, the filmmaker is quoted as saying, “I don’t think I’ve ever done a film that is just about one thing….” That’s true: Usually he’s able to cram in two or three things. In He Got Game, for example, there…
For more than a century, her adherents and admirers have characterized her as being ahead of her time. Way ahead. Light-years ahead. Maybe. She was certainly of her time. Studied extensively with Tibetan monks. Tramped all over the Far East, Middle East, Europe, and what was still considered the New…
thursday may 7 Pre-Millennium Tension, the most recent release from Tricky, is classic trip-hop: cut-and-paste soundscapes made up of elements borrowed from dance music, rock, electronica, and hip-hop — all of it suffused with haunting angst. In truth, Tricky virtually birthed trip-hop in the late Eighties with Massive Attack and…
As a singer and keyboard player with the folk-pop band Legacy, Ellen Bukstel Segal learned long ago how to work a room. Unfortunately most of the rooms in which her band performed were not exactly conducive to listening to music — even playing it, for that matter. They were cramped,…
Just what we need: another film festival. As if we weren’t already drowning in them. Miami Film Festival. South Beach Film Festival. Latin American Film Festival. Italian Film Festival. Brazilian Film Festival. Anti Film Festival. And the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival, which runs for approximately seventeen weeks, being international…
“Miami is kind of considered a cultural wasteland. But there really is a lot of culture here — it’s just so spread out. There is no unity within the different cultures. That is what we want to create.” So declares Mehndi (henna tattoos) body artist Fiona Troope, speaking for herself…
thursday april 30 In the 1930s art dealer Ambroise Vollard and Pablo Picasso struck a bargain. Picasso would create 100 engravings for Vollard; in exchange the dealer would return to Picasso a clutch of the artist’s paintings. Vollard got a good deal, as evidenced by Picasso: The Vollard Suite, now…
Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel Les Miserables, which he began in 1845, runs to around 1500 pages in most editions. The most recent film version — there have been five other adaptations for movies or television — runs a bit under two and a half hours. It’s an expert piece of…
With I Love You, Don’t Touch Me!, first-time filmmaker Julie Davis has made a low-budget movie about love and abstinence among under-30s that takes its cues less from the work of her generational peers — Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming (1995) or Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy (1997), for instance –…
Antisemitropolis is the city Hitler never built. Blame that on playwright Dan Kagan, who imagines it as the name the Nazis gave their section of Heaven — “a place with only people like them,” explains Jerry, a character in Kagan’s spirited black comedy Antisemitropolis, now getting its world premiere at…
“She was able to really find a vocabulary that clearly communicated her ideas.” FIU dance professor Andrea Mantell-Seidel is talking about American dance enfant terrible Isadora Duncan. “She believed in the Greek ideal of developing the body, spirit, mind, and emotions — one not sacrificed to the other. The spirit…
They will not spot a roadrunner. Nope. No way. Forget it. No roadrunners. Okay, maybe through a miracle, the world’s most wayward roadrunner will take a very sharp right-hand turn in Flagstaff, Arizona, and somehow, a la the animals in The Incredible Journey, show up in the midst of the…
thursday april 23 Who needs Michael Flatley? Certainly not the cast of Riverdance, the Irish jig fest that has continued to stomp successfully despite the 1995 defection of its star/choreographer. Flatley, an American born to Irish parents, went on to create Lord of the Dance, his own sensational Celtic extravaganza,…
Gwyneth Paltrow gets another chance to show off her letter-perfect English accent in Sliding Doors, an engaging romantic comedy that employs a rather novel narrative device: After introducing the main characters and setting up the basic story, the film splits into two separate but parallel plot lines. It’s a twist…
