Email Author Rafael Navarro

1992 Stories by Rafael Navarro

• The Loan Ranger

  published October 28, 1992

  Night and the City is a movie about bruisers and losers. Robert De Niro plays Harry Fabian, a perennially hopeful ambulance-chasing attorney... More >>

• Porn Loser

  published October 28, 1992

  Long before film critic Michael Medved became the insipid defender of family values and de facto darling of the Quayle campaign he is today, he... More >>

• The Catcher in the Fly

  published October 21, 1992

  Never having been particularly enamored of fly fishing, male bonding, or Presbyterianism, I did not read Norman Maclean's autobiographical... More >>

• Holy Ship

  published October 14, 1992

  To enter Ridley's Scott's 1492: Conquest of Paradise and its phantasmagoric fifteenth-century world, you will need to check your piddling... More >>

• Here's Looking at Jah

  published October 14, 1992

  I had the privilege of attending two Bob Marley concerts in my life. Both were in the Seventies and in England, an island not as far removed from... More >>

• Swede Dreams

  published October 7, 1992

  "Ingmar Bergman is, in my most carefully considered opinion, the greatest filmmaker the world has seen so far." (The italics are mine.) Those... More >>

• Games People Pay

  published October 7, 1992

  Pulitzer or no Pulitzer, David Mamet's 1984 play Glengarry Glen Ross is not a masterpiece. Its salient metaphor, the ritualistic hard selling of... More >>

• Mann Trouble

  published September 30, 1992

  With one Eighties-chic, progressively atmospheric TV series on his resume (Miami Vice), another (Crime Story) applying the music-video aesthetic... More >>

• The Gulp of Mexico

  published September 30, 1992

  I don't believe I'm sticking my neck too far into the guillotine by contending that children don't often make good restaurant critics. Their... More >>

• All the Candidate's Men

  published September 23, 1992

  The under-the-table political ethic of LBJ, Richard Nixon, and Watergate, the ascent of the Gipper in 1980 preaching the gospel of "morning in... More >>

• 8 Million Ways To Fry

  published September 23, 1992

  The name refers to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Works Project Administration, the bureaucratic engine set up in 1935 to undertake extensive... More >>

• Just Say Nose

  published September 16, 1992

  Woody Allen has spent the past fifteen years since Annie Hall prolifically staking a claim for cinematic greatness. Hardly a year has gone by... More >>

• Custard's Last Stand

  published September 16, 1992

  Three years ago, when I sang the praises of the original Casa Larios on NW Second Street near the Mall of the Americas, I deemed its Cuban cuisine... More >>

• The Sorrow and The City

  published September 9, 1992

  If I were forced to pick my favorite literary turn on food criticism, I'd have to go with T. Coraghessan Boyle's short story "Sorry Fugu" from his... More >>

• My Part Belongs to Daddy

  published September 2, 1992

  The fictional hamlet of Lumbertown in Blue Velvet, with its "sound of the falling tree" radio jingle, Eisenhower-era veneer of community values,... More >>

• All That Live Must Dine

  published September 2, 1992

  Some notable and rather macabre exceptions notwithstanding, it is not the general purpose of this column to survey tragedies, catastrophes, or... More >>

• To Pee or Not To Pee

  published August 26, 1992

  Made in 1980 on a shoestring budget -- and looking every bit as dirt-cheap as John Waters's deliciously trashy Baltimore chronicles of the early... More >>

• April In Paradise

  published August 26, 1992

  Many ignorant critics have lately waxed enthusiastic over what remains a questionable kinship between E.M. Forster's "Italian" novels -- the early... More >>

• Totem and Tabbouleh

  published August 26, 1992

  With the recent closing down of Coral Gables's El Cenador de la Villa -- an upscale Spanish restaurant that, until its last dying breath, vied... More >>

• The Eclectic Horseman

  published August 19, 1992

  There is a stateliness and repose, a stillness even, in the shots of the land in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven that persuasively evoke the pervasive... More >>

• Mex Education

  published August 19, 1992

  Notwithstanding some peculiar (and inaccurate) ad hominems directed at yours truly in the letters section this past week, I'm gratified that the... More >>

• Dread Ringers

  published August 12, 1992

  Bill Cosford of the Miami Herald, a dependable critic who has had to sit through his share of turkeys over the course of a long tenure covering... More >>

• China Beach

  published August 12, 1992

  One of the greatest ever stories of multicultural misconduct was related by Peter Ustinov some years ago on The Tonight Show. A delightful... More >>

• Sunset Streep

  published August 5, 1992

  The title sequence of Robert Zemeckis's Death Becomes Her promises a much funnier and more adept black comedy than what eventually comes to pass.... More >>

• French Miss

  published August 5, 1992

  Not to raise a nasty terminological conundrum, but the last time I pondered the matter, a frog was most often one of two things: a salientian,... More >>