thursday july 3 Marisa Monte: Critics are hailing Marisa Monte, the new Brazilian diva whose cascade of black hair, red lips, and sexy moves qualify her to carry the torch of Gal Costa and Astrud Gilberto. Her voice might just have something to do with it, too. Best-known for rejuvenating…
Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s final film shares with the late Cuban director’s Letters from the Park (a sweetly lyrical film based on the Gabriel Garcia Marquez story about a man who ghostwrites love letters) and Strawberry and Chocolate a tone of wistful romanticism. Like a Garcia Marquez novel, Guantanamera, which screened…
One speech and one prop from Men in Black combine to sum up the movie. An alien in four-legged earthly form delivers the speech: “You humans, when’re you gonna learn that size doesn’t matter? Just ’cause something’s important doesn’t mean it’s not very, very small.” The most refreshing thing about…
Info: Rodgers and Hart Failure By Savannah Whaley With the exception of a few years in the early Thirties spent toiling in Hollywood’s movie factory, lyricist Lorenz Hart and composer Richard Rodgers held sway for nearly a quarter of a century on Broadway. Between 1919 and 1942, the pair defied…
Sculptor Florencio Gelabert — whose work is the subject of a solo show at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale — arrived in Miami in 1990, the first of several dozen Cuban artists who decamped here at the start of the decade. At the time, these young emigres caused…
thursday june 26 Laura Pausini: Less than four years ago Laura Pausini, a teenage girl from a small town near Ravenna, Italy, won the new-talent competition at the 1993 San Remo Song Festival, propelled by her tender vocal style and sincere, emotive delivery. Within the year Pausini’s career skyrocketed –…
The title of John Woo’s Face/Off is meant to be taken literally. John Travolta and Nicolas Cage play adversaries who swap faces. Here’s how: FBI agent Sean Archer (Travolta) has been single-mindedly tracking terrorist nut Castor Troy (Cage) ever since Castor’s botched assassination attempt six years earlier, in which he…
Slapstick decadence is the dominant style at the Disney studios this summer, reaching all the way from Touchstone Pictures’ action hit Con Air to the 35th Walt Disney animated feature, Hercules. It’s a moviemaking mode that weds anything-for-a-laugh to anything-for-a-jolt, leaving imagination and authenticity in the lurch. Instead of creating…
The Van is being billed as “the final chapter in the Barrytown Trilogy,” Irish author Roddy Doyle’s group of novels set in a fictional north Dublin suburb that also consists of The Commitments and The Snapper. That “final chapter” label, courtesy the production notes, gives The Van the aura of…
Despite its man-eating tigers, ferocious lions, and thundering elephants, the circus never frightens me. Not surprising, really — it’s merely theater where I can watch brave acts of skill from my comfortable seat (although I sometimes have trouble applauding with my hands glued together by cotton candy). Carnivals are another…
Producing only once a year, City Theatre sets the theatrical dog days of summer howling with Summer Shorts ’97, a festival of fifteen short plays ranging in length from two to fifteen minutes. Now at the University of Miami’s Jerry Herman Ring Theatre, the company brings more local talent to…
In Miami, summer is the best time to visit a museum. While crowds, unfortunately, are never a big problem at our local art institutions, on a weekday during the summer months a person can often have the run of the exhibition space, with only the museum guards for company. And…
British filmmaker Peter Greenaway sits near a window in the dining room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel; he indicates with his eyes a man walking along the sidewalk toward Hollywood Boulevard. In trying to explain his use of multiple imagery in his new film The Pillow Book and separating it…
To get into a good-lovin’ mood before each date, a college housemate of mine croaked along to Van Morrison’s “Tupelo Honey” while blasting it through his stereo. My fondness for the song survived. So as the end credits for Ulee’s Gold unrolled against the robust lyricism of Morrison belting out…
thursday june 19 Fred D’Aguiar: University of Miami creative writing teacher and local author Fred D’Aguiar explores history, place, and the resonance of a single image in his works. After winning the Whitbread Award for his first novel, The Longest Memory, D’Aguiar received critical praise for his latest work, Dear…
thursday june 12 International Hispanic Theatre Festival: The twelfth annual International Hispanic Theatre Festival concludes this week at Teatro Avante (235 Alcazar Ave., Coral Gables) with five final performances. Tonight and tomorrow night at 8:30 p.m., Uruguay’s Teatro del Escorpion performs Alvaro Angel Malmierca’s Bartleby el Escribiente. Argentina’s Grupo Teatral…
First the good news: Unlike most action film sequels, Speed 2: Cruise Control is not a mere retread of the original. Now the bad news: Better it had been. Director Jan De Bont made a dazzling debut with the 1994 Speed. His riveting direction of action triumphed over a hackneyed,…
I spent the Eighties on the subway, commuting from my what-I-could-afford studio apartment in Brooklyn to a series of all-we-can-offer-to-pay-you theater jobs in Manhattan. Which is how I became acquainted with the ranter. A large Jamaican woman in a pink raincoat and matching hat, she would take her customary place…
A white horse clops across the small stage in the Museum of Contemporary Art’s pavilion gallery. Steady on articulated legs made from wooden dowels and metal hooves that formerly capped the ends of chainlink fence posts, the steed carries St. Barbara, an oil-can warrior with the beatific plaster face of…
thursday june 5 New York Philharmonic: Music director Kurt Masur makes his Miami debut as he conducts the legendary New York Philharmonic tonight at 8:00 p.m. at the Jackie Gleason Theater of the Performing Arts (1700 Washington Ave., Miami Beach). The orchestra comes to South Florida for the first time…
It wouldn’t be completely fair to say that the hits produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer from 1983 through 1996 are stylistically interchangeable. But it wouldn’t be so awfully unfair, either: A homogeneous, auteurial touch runs from Flashdance (1983) through Top Gun (1986), Beverly Hills Cop II (1987), and…
Short on irony, long on wit, writer/director Greg Mottola’s The Daytrippers breaks with the pack of recent thumbsucking U.S. indie productions to fashion a funny and frolicsome feature that scrutinizes the much poked and prodded American family. Working from what seems a slight premise, The Daytrippers, through economic storytelling and…
