American filmmakers born during the baby boom have been trying — and failing — for decades to make a really great rock and roll movie. A few have gotten close — This Is Spinal Tap and Backbeat pop into mind. But more often such films tend to fall back on…
Too many thrillers start out like gangbusters only to fall apart in the final act. When one finally happens along that ends more cleverly than it opens, the temptation arises to praise it on that basis alone. The Rich Man’s Wife is such a film. The sad truth is, however,…
Most of the theater productions I’ve seen in South Florida over the years, from Palm Beach to South Dade, can be classified as “pleasant.” Bearable to sit through, they didn’t offend, irritate, or prompt me to leave during intermission. They proffered moments of dramatic tension, provided the occasional insight, featured…
Journalists and movie stars circle each other warily, in an uneasy dance born of need and skepticism. On one level, they are interdependent: Stars rely on journalists to promote them, while journalists use celebrity escapades as story fodder. On another level, they never know how much to trust one another:…
Five shows scheduled for Dade and Broward exhibition spaces this season focus on the art of Haiti, both sacred and profane. This is mostly a coincidence, and a pleasing one, that reflects a current international interest in Haitian culture and the fact that South Florida is home to both a…
For a musician, Tom Petty is one shrewd son-of-a-gun. He knows that movie soundtracks these days frequently become more popular than the movies they accompany. A motion picture can be a total box-office dog, but the barrage of media hype preceding its release is sure to emphasize the flick’s signature…
David Mamet’s 1975 play American Buffalo shocked audiences with its profanity and its unsparing examination of what Mamet characterized as “the American Dream gone bad.” Mamet garnered the New York Drama Critics Circle Award with his bleak tale of a pair of lowlife schemers and their half-baked plot to rip…
thursday september 12 Meat Beat Manifesto: Hip-hop, noise, house, techno, industrial elements, and human voice snippets form an amalgam of information, social criticism, and utterly danceable rhythms in the music of Meat Beat Manifesto. With former MBM vocalist and core member Jonny Stephens, programmer and musical conceptualist Jack Dangers created…
thursday september 5 Boukman Eksperyans: Get ready to sweat. Haitian roots supergroup Boukman Eksperyans brings its revolutionary spirit to Rezurrection Hall at Club Nu (245 22nd St., Miami Beach) tonight at 9:00. Boukman, Vodou music’s answer to the Rolling Stones, is currently on a world tour in support of its…
Massive power crash. Phones down. No TV, no radio, no computers. Chaos and lawlessness ensue. Suburban proto-yuppies Matt and his wife Annie panic; they have a screaming baby with an ear infection. They can’t get the medicine they need to cure the infant because the pediatrician can’t call in the…
I can’t believe that with all the money they spent on casting (Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer don’t come cheap), the geniuses who remade H.G. Wells’s sci-fi classic The Island of Dr. Moreau couldn’t spring for some semi-realistic man-beast effects. This is the third and least satisfying Hollywood retelling of…
From the moment Richard Jay-Alexander saw his first musical he was hooked. “When I was in the fourth grade my dad took me to see Bye Bye Birdie, and I went nuts,” recalls the executive producer and associate director of the long-running Broadway mega-hit Les Miserables. “It was a bad…
As anyone who has relied on canine companionship to get through a difficult time can attest, a faithful dog more than deserves the moniker “man’s best friend.” Few species on Earth offer such undying devotion, unconditional love, reliable warmth, cuddly coats to snuggle up to, and homing instincts for returning…
Miami is often audaciously referred to as the Latin American art capital, a title that Coral Gables dealer Gary Nader has even claimed as a trademark for his annual Latin American art auction. In a city in which the majority of the population is Hispanic, with inextricable ties to Cuba,…
Fans of Zhang Yimou’s haunting and visually striking epic Raise the Red Lantern may want to check out Li Shaohong’s new film Blush, a lush adaption of a novel by Su Tong, who also wrote the book upon which Raise the Red Lantern was based. Like Yimou’s film, Shaohong’s provides…
Multiple Oscar-winner Nick Park’s name is well-known in his native England but remains relatively unfamiliar here in the U.S. More Americans have probably witnessed Park’s Plasticine magic in the video for the Peter Gabriel song “Sledgehammer” than in any of his other projects, despite the fact that he has walked…
thursday august 29 Steve Gunderson: Among the many, many fascinating headlines and sound bites that came out of this month’s Republican National Convention were interviews with Congressman Steve Gunderson, the only openly gay Republican congressman in U.S. history. His partner, architect Rob Morris, not only shares his life but has…
thursday august 22 Sweet Mickey: The Haitian sounds of compas ring through Rezurrection Hall at Club Nu (245 22nd St., Miami Beach) tonight as Sweet Mickey and King Posse take the stage. Sweet Mickey swings compas from nice to naughty and back again on the group’s most recent disc, Toutse…
You won’t see a more damning testimony to the mindlessness of war than the final scene of Vukovar. It’s a sweeping panorama of burned-out rubble where once stood the town of Vukovar, a breathtakingly picturesque jewel of a city in the former Yugoslavia. It took three months for director Boro…
If Jean-Michel Basquiat had chosen rock music rather than painting as his metier, his life story would seem so familiar as to border on cliche: gifted young artist rockets from obscurity to fame, makes buckets of money, begins to believe his own press clippings, and ultimately succumbs to the too-much-too-soon…
Set against the backdrops of ghostly castles, lonely heaths, magical forests, and islands inhabited by spirits, the plays of William Shakespeare have been offering us insights into the human condition for four hundred years. Complex characters, from Hamlet to Lear to Prospero, from Lady Macbeth to Desdemona to Cleopatra, have…
Emma viewers may need reassurance that they haven’t just wandered into a screening of last year’s acclaimed Jane Austen adaption, Sense and Sensibility. The two films share a wealth of connections with a real-life Emma — Thompson, that is. Although she isn’t starring in this current film, the distinguished English…
