When the beautiful entomologist rips open the chest cavity of a huge bloodthirsty insect in the sci-fi nightmare Mimic, it turns into Thoracic Park. This movie, like Spielberg’s, features evolution gone haywire and dramaturgy gone to hell. In the prologue, the heroine — the reckless and courageous (or foolhardy and…
Looking for something different, I turned to the movie listings. Bad idea. Speed 2, Batman and Robin, George of the Jungle: a bevy of tired sequels and spinoffs that sent me fleeing back to the theater capsules, where I opted for Shakespeare. Ahhhh, why bother with Hollywood hacks when the…
Ann Lorraine Labriola’s sculpture Stargazer sits on the ocean floor five miles southeast of Key West in eighteen feet of water. On a brilliantly sunny Saturday afternoon recently, a light breeze wrinkled the surface as the artist and her boyfriend approached the site in his fishing boat. After the boat…
thursday august 14 Video Rewind: Anchors Away!: The New Times offices are located not far from the WPLG-TV (Channel 10) studios, and occasionally our “Calendar” personnel spot some of that station’s on-air personalities at local lunch joints. We gawk, we attempt to eavesdrop, we try to remember exactly which Diane…
The cops in Cop Land carry on like a bunch of goombahs. On the take from the Mob, they mimic the Mob. The fuzzy line dividing cops and crooks is the subject of many a strong police movie, but Cop Land goes a step further — it says there is…
In the not-so-brave new world of independent filmmaking, low-budget movies premiere at Sundance or Cannes and win plaudits from over-psyched audiences, publicity from desperate feature writers, and distribution from boutiques that are usually subsidiaries of major studios. Right now Tarantino-style thrillers are out; crazy-clan stories and upstairs-downstairs tales are in…
In the Company of Men is about Chad (Aaron Eckhart) and Harold (Matt Malloy), two thirtysomething white-collar execs who have recently been passed up for promotions and rejected by their girlfriends. En route to a six-week business trip to the home office, Chad, the bristlier and wilier of the two,…
With an ad in the New York Times that reads “Never out of style … but heading out of town,” Full Gallop is just one of the Big Apple’s current hits now packing its trunk for a road tour that will include a stop in South Florida. During a recent…
thursday august 7 Quartetto Gelato: The Coral Gables Congregational Church (3010 DeSoto Blvd., Coral Gables) continues its summer concert series with some sophisticated eclecticism. Toronto-based classical-crossover group Quartetto Gelato — made up of tenor-violinist-mandolin player Peter De Sotto, oboe and English horn player Cynthia Steljes, violist and accordion player Claudio…
Jerry Fletcher, the hero of Conspiracy Theory, is a comic, glamorous variation on Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Like Travis, he’s a New York cabbie obsessed with protecting a woman from the world’s hidden malignancies. Unlike Travis, Jerry snaps when he achieves sanity. Mel Gibson has been almost too willing…
For decades, when theater folk used the word angels, they were referring to those rare investors who could miraculously save productions with their financial backing, but whose good will proved to be as difficult to attain as divine providence. In 1993, Angels with a capital a became the theatrical buzzword,…
Local residents often lament Miami’s lack of culture: no stellar museum collections, a dearth of first-run, first-rate theater, frequent snubs by rock and pop stars who bypass us on their U.S. tours, and so on. But while many sit and bitch about our relative poverty in the fine arts as…
thursday july 31 Florida Marlins: Someday they will talk with reverence about the Atlanta Braves. Extraordinary. Dynastic. Unbelievable. Dominant. When the historians look back on organized baseball in the Nineties, they will look at Atlanta. In the past eight years the Braves have won a World Series championship and four…
187, a number favored by adolescent thugs, is the California state penal code for homicide — and a harsh sentence for all involved in this hopeless, hapless movie. The gifted Samuel L. Jackson stars as a high school teacher who cracks under the constant threat of rabid teen machismo and…
In Picture Perfect Jennifer Aniston tells a whopper of a lie partially to win the attentions of a guy who has heretofore ignored her, interrupts a wedding, and humiliates another guy at his workplace. This follows on the heels of My Best Friend’s Wedding, which finds Julia Roberts trying to…
In a variation on the St. Patrick’s Day saying about the Irish, in South Florida theater these days there are two types of shows: those that are Jewish and those that wish they were. Eager to reach the vast numbers of ticket buyers among the region’s sizable Jewish population, producers…
At first glance, the new Japanese comedy Shall We Dance? appears to be an Asian remake of the Australian hit Strictly Ballroom. But in fact the similarities are only surface-deep, and just barely that. Part of the difference is rooted in the cultural gap between the two nations, but wider…
Mrs. Brown (a Cannes hit and Miramax release) is dignified to the dead max — brownish-gray in mood and look and spirit. It’s based on the true story of the platonic but controversial bond between Queen Victoria (Judi Dench) and a Highlander named John Brown (Billy Connolly), who had been…
Not satisfied with the president you have? Here’s Harrison Ford’s James Marshall in Air Force One: Vietnam war hero, straight as a ramrod, devoted husband and father. We first see him delivering a speech before a roomful of Russian dignitaries. Departing from the prepared, wishy-washy text, Mr. President fire-breathes his…
It’s been said that all you need to create theater is two planks and a passion. With its basic platform stage, South Beach’s EDGE/Theatre comes raggedly close to meeting the first criterion. As for the second, Jim Tommaney, the company’s artistic director and general manager, supplies the requisite passion in…
In a painting on paper that hangs just inside the door of Miami-Dade Community College’s InterAmerican Gallery on SW 27th Avenue, a man screams. The cartoonish figure’s mouth is wide open, his beady eyes popping, conveying a darkly comic sense of slow-burning distress. Joseph Oakes, the artist, a resident of…
thursday july 24 Arthur Hailey: Author of mega best sellers Hotel (which eventually became a long-running television series starring Barbra Streisand’s current honey-pie James Brolin and Connie Selleca, wife of the musical antichrist, a.k.a. John Tesh) and Airport (turned into a hit movie with a superfluity of screaming), Hailey is…
