Stealing Beauty has two things going for it: the lush, inviting beauty of the Italian countryside of Tuscany where the movie was filmed, and the lush, inviting beauty of Liv Tyler, the film’s doe-eyed, succulent-lipped, barely postadolescent star. The rest is all numbing pseudointellectual trash that would have to undergo…
If other intelligent life forms do exist in outer space, let’s hope they never catch wind of Independence Day. Director Roland Emmerich’s triumphant merger of cutting-edge computer-generated special effects with the narrative conventions of Irwin Allen-style Seventies disaster movies — a big ensemble cast of archetypical characters playing out cliched…
A pink neon sculpture of a hooker beckons from just inside the glass front doors of ART-ACT, the gallery-cum-theater tucked into a corner of the Design District. A sprawling, eclectic space, ART-ACT features a coffee bar at the far end of one side of the huge room, while folding chairs…
Jon Turteltaub’s Phenomenon wants so desperately for you to like it that you feel guilty if you don’t. In an attempt to create a Capraesque fable, screenwriter Gerald DiPego and director Turteltaub stack the deck to make the film’s main character, George Malley (John Travolta playing warm and fuzzy) the…
Striptease may not be as precious as pure platinum or solid gold, but for most of its nearly two-hour running time the film is tauter than its $12.5 million star Demi Moore’s washboard abs, and almost as funny as last year’s crime-fiction-best-seller-turned-hit-movie Get Shorty. Viewers who would rather club Madonna…
The logistics of Summer Shorts seem to require a calculator and slide rule to figure out what’s going on. An invigorating festival of eighteen one-act plays (each fifteen minutes long or less) that features a twelve-member acting company and eleven different directors, it runs through the end of this weekend…
Russian conceptual artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid were in Miami on June 12 to give a slide lecture at the Bass Museum of Art in conjunction with the museum’s current exhibition Monumental Propaganda. Komar and Melamid initiated the show in 1992 when they solicited artists’ proposals for salvaging socialist-realist…
Demi Moore continues her one-woman assault on classic literature with her appearance in Disney’s latest animated feature, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Less than a year after making critics see red by adding gratuitous nudity and a happy ending to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Moore — or at least…
Eight gay friends gather together during one summer in an idyllic spot outside New York City and learn poignant lessons about love, commitment, and terminal illness. Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion!, right? If the 1994-95 Tony Award-winning Broadway show about gay men — some of whom are HIV-positive — springs…
If his new turkey Eraser has any effect on Conan the box-office Barbarian’s future per-picture asking price, perhaps Maria Shriver’s square-jawed, stogie-toking hubby should consider trading in his Hummer for a Hyundai. Rarely does one get a better chance to witness how the “too many chefs spoil the broth” axiom…
Mark Rappaport makes funny movies. Not funny in the ha-ha, laugh-out-loud sense; rather, funny in the oddball, hard-to-categorize sense. Rappaport calls his features “fictional autobiographies.” Others have labeled 1992’s Rock Hudson’s Home Movies and 1995’s From the Journals of Jean Seberg “imaginary monologues,” “mock autobiographical documentaries,” “blends of fiction, biography,…
A little girl gets picked on. It’s amazing how Todd Solondz’s stark, painful suburban comedy Welcome to the Dollhouse takes that simple premise and twists it into a wrenching exploration of the dark side of the Wonder Years. Solondz’s eleven-year-old protagonist, an archetypically awkward, bespectacled middle school misfit named Dawn…
Rafael de Acha says he’s taking a risk. Rather than launch the eleventh season of his Coral Gables-based New Theatre with a classic from the dramatic canon, a piece of proven contemporary theater, or a crowd-pleasing musical, instead, early this month, he debuted the New Plays Project, a showcase of…
When you add it all together, the 26 visual arts majors graduating from the New World School of the Arts high school have won two and a half million dollars in scholarships to university-level art programs around the nation. New York City’s esteemed Cooper Union School of Art alone courted…
Excess shaped producer Don Simpson’s movies, just as it shaped his life. With his partner Jerry Bruckheimer, Simpson latched on to a hit-making formula that dovetailed perfectly with the entertainment expectations of a generation reared on MTV: Inundate audiences with mesmerizing visuals, throw in a hot actor or a topical…
Even before the air turns to soup, an endless summer of eclectic group shows takes over local museums and galleries. For example, the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale is currently exhibiting the works of seven artists awarded fellowships by the South Florida Cultural Consortium, a partnership of publicly funded…
It took a sick mind to find humor — even of the darkest shade — in the murderous real-life exploits of Graham Young, a brilliant but twisted young Londoner who, in the early Sixties, conducted lethal toxicological experiments on his family and schoolmates. Fortunately, writer-director Benjamin Ross and his screenwriting…
What do Anita Bryant and David Schwimmer have in common? In addition to whatever punch line you may have come up with, they also both grace this year’s Queer Flickering Light (QFL), South Florida’s lesbian, gay, and bisexual film/video festival. QFL offers local audiences an opportunity to view gay-theme works…
Rarely have I felt the urge to punch out a movie character as strongly as I wanted to deck John, the sullen protagonist of George Hickenlooper’s cheerless The Low Life. That’s probably the reaction Hickenlooper was seeking at a certain point in his movie, but probably not the one he…
On-stage a man straddles a tire covered with netting, and then ties the side of a wooden ladder to the tire with a rope. Under cover of night, accompanied only by the sound of crickets, he swiftly constructs a raft. Once, twice, he hears a sound and looks up, panic…
The plot of the new movie Mission: Impossible probably makes sense, but I wouldn’t swear to it. I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt because it was cowritten by Chinatown author Robert Towne, a veteran screenwriter with impressive credits. But to tell you the truth, the damn thing shot…
Why do we glamourize beautiful people who willfully crash and burn, especially when they choose heroin to fuel their self-immolation? It’s not as if they’re doing society a favor by testing the narcotic’s effects on the human body. It’s no secret that junkies as a rule do not enjoy long,…
