Humorist Russell Baker once wrote that he wished he could travel through time whenever he slogs through a Henry James novel — that way he could determine if the book offered any plot development that would make it worth finishing. Having waded through several of James’s 112 short stories and…
If you’re hankering to see a movie that sends up swinging Sixties London and Carnaby Street and vintage James Bond movies, don’t bother to check out Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. What the movie mostly sends up is its star and screenwriter, Mike Myers. That’s not all bad: Myers…
On the savvy festival-and-promo tour that helped the necrophiliac Kissed net advance praise everywhere from the Atlantic Monthly to Newsweek, writer-director Lynne Stopkewich said she thought independent films should be judged on their ingenuity and daring rather than on the size of their budgets. As arts-world stump speeches go, it’s…
The title track of Jimmy Buffett’s 1980 Coconut Telegraph album busts gossips who “can’t keep nothin’ under their hat/You can hear ’em on the coconut telegraph sayin’ who did dis and dat.” Last September when Coconut Grove Playhouse producing artistic director Arnold Mittelman announced that he would present a world…
On a postcard from Tel Aviv, bathers wade at a crowded Mediterranean beach shadowed by a stretch of resort hotels and condo towers. Artist Hilla Lulu Lin has blown up and manipulated this typical shot of Israel’s modern secular attractions, replacing the perfect blue sky with a slab of marbled…
thursday may 1 New World Symphony: Artistic director Michael Tilson Thomas leads the New World Symphony in a season finale weekend of concerts. The music begins tonight at the Gusman Center for the Performing Arts (174 E. Flagler St.) with a “Baton Night.” Conductor Felipe Iscaray leads a preconcert conducting…
New-to-movies subjects are hard to come by, but Traveller has one: the inbred world of Irish grifters living in the backwoods of the American rural South. Clannish con artists descended from the Irish Tinkers, they fan out across the countryside pulling bogus home-repair jobs on unsuspecting, mostly elderly, folk and…
thursday april 24 Chris Smither: As both a rough-voiced singer of his own evocative songs and an interpreter of others’ works, Chris Smither makes the A-list of traveling troubadours currently finding an audience among disenfranchised rockers and country fans looking for something a little more complex than the garden-variety Nashville…
No one has exploited the historical-epic form better than David Lean. At his peak he used its spaciousness and breadth to develop characters with conflicting points of view, so that audiences could feel viscerally swept away, emotionally engaged, and mentally sharpened, all at once. With the help of inspired actors…
John Woo has often cited the films of Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-1973) as among his greatest influences — particularly 1967’s Le Samourai — and it’s easy to see the connection. Even in France, Melville spent most of his career as a cult director: His series of gangster films, starting in 1956…
When I was a teenager, my widowed grandmother left Vermont to live with my family in Florida, where, separated from her friends and other family, she turned to television for companionship. Unfathomable to me, her favorite hour each week was spent watching Lawrence Welk and his clean-cut cast stroll down…
Volcano is set in Los Angeles, and for L.A. haters, it could prove a peak experience. You don’t even have to hate L.A. to enjoy it — love/hate will do. That’s why the film closes with Randy Newman’s mock-anthem “I Love L.A.” (which, of course, makes it L.A.’s true anthem)…
thursday april 17 Arturo Sandoval/FIU Jazz Festival: Trumpet great Arturo Sandoval teams up with the FIU Jazz Band tonight at 8:00 p.m. to perform an evening of jazz classics benefiting the Fellowship House for the mentally ill. Tickets cost $35 and $100. The event kicks off the seventh annual FIU…
Kevin Smith is an impassioned jokester. The young writer-director double-whammies the audience by filling in his stick figures with thick brushstrokes. His first film, Clerks, was a no-budget goof featuring an entire miniature universe of slacker goons, but its main protagonist was a sweetly jerky lovelorn convenience store employee who…
Remember this joke? Question: Want to lose ten pounds of ugly fat? Answer: Cut off your head. Well, according to the press kit for 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag, the average human head — dead and drained of blood — weighs 4.4 pounds. I can’t imagine that the heads…
From P.T. Barnum hustling naive ticket holders out of his New York City museum with exit signs that promised “This Way to the Egress” to trailers for upcoming summer movies, misrepresentation stands as one of show business’s few enduring traditions. Proud of their command of illusion, theater folk have been…
Joseph Cornell would have been delighted to observe the scene at the Norton Museum of Art on a recent Sunday afternoon, when children ran excitedly about the gallery in which the artist’s work is on display. Engaged in a treasure hunt organized by the museum, they each held a list…
thursday april 10 The Maroon Experience: The Historical Museum of Southern Florida (101 W. Flagler St.) continues its Thursday night lecture series in conjunction with its current exhibition, “A Slave Ship Speaks: The Wreck of the Henrietta Marie,” tonight at 6:00 p.m. with a screening of Sergio Giral’s Maluala. Giral,…
There are way too many movies about hit men, but that shouldn’t dissuade you from seeing Grosse Pointe Blank. It’s not quite like any other movie, let alone one about a hit man. That may be because it’s a hit-man movie crossed with a high-school-reunion comedy, and the two genres…
Not long after the MGM lion roars, the camera pans over a group of young Broadway hopefuls. Sure of their talent, these would-be stars nonetheless worry they’ll never get their big break. “Gosh, if they’d just give us a chance,” one begins, only to be drowned out by the swelling…
thursday april 3 Madcap Martini Party: Join the heppest cats in town for the grooviest martini party since Sammy, Dino, and Frank ruled the roost. Tara “Queen of the Night” Solomon and Micky Wolfson host this fundraiser for the exhibitions fund of the Wolfsonian (1001 Washington Ave., Miami Beach), complete…
Film actors are generally said to have good chemistry or no chemistry. But bad chemistry in movies does exist, and a sleep inducer called Inventing the Abbotts is a case in point. In ascending order of age, Liv Tyler, Jennifer Connelly, and Joanna Going play Pamela, Eleanor, and Alice Abbott,…
