As with young Irish gun Kenneth Branagh, whose Dead Again is the summer’s most stunning achievement and a fully successful resurrection of the Muscle-bound Hollywood Romance, the truth about Ethan and Joel Coen lies in the past. But while countless critical search parties aimlessly spelunk for the Coens’ source-stream in…
In concert, James Brown may croon “Georgia on My Mind” or punch out “Kansas City,” but the Hardest Working Man in Show Business has a special place in his heart for Miami. Since he escaped from the watchful eye of King Records president Sid Nathan to cut the dance hit…
Voyeurism is an amazingly supple subject for films. The whole cinematic process reeks of it – sitting alone in a darkened room, watching the actions of characters unaware of you, prying into their personal lives and innermost secrets. And many acclaimed films have explored it overtly: Rear Window, for instance,…
When an anonymous reader sent us a photocopy of a Miami Beach Police Offense Incident Report, we treated it with the care and attention we give to all unsolicited submissions. Later on, though, we looked at it, and something about the report struck us as not quite right. By all…
What Eric Bogosian does isn’t hard to explain. In fact it’s almost too easy. For almost a decade, the 37-year-old New Yorker — a Woburn, Massachusetts native who arrived in New York by way of Oberlin College — has captivated audiences and turned critics’ heads by taking to the stage…
Alone on the sidewalk in front of her house, a little girl (Natalie Morse) jumps rope, counting – and naming – the stars in the night sky. Her hoop skirt juts out alarmingly from her hips; her shadow is huge on the white wall behind her. From corner to corner,…
Filmmaker Scott Dittrich probably hates Patrick Swayze. If he doesn’t, he should reconsider. A former UCLA economics grad student, Dittrich (what? – you thought it was going to be Swayze?) has spent the past seventeen years as one of the nation’s foremost practitioners of the surf movie. In their pure…
The next time you go walking on one of South Florida’s lovely beaches, your shadow shying from the neon-peach of the sunset, the shrills of gulls filling the dusk, twist your toes in the sand and take a deep breath of salt air. Then continue your walk, marveling at the…
In the galaxy of young directors, there’s a short list of the brightest stars that critics recite like a litany: Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, the Coen brothers, Kenneth Branagh, Jane Campion. Every season, another auteur – John Singleton, John McNaughton, Richard Linklater, Tony Spiridakis, even Kevin Costner – twinkles briefly…
The white supremacists that populate Blood in the Face, a bracing, entertaining documentary about the far tip of the right wing, work hard to mass assassinate the characters of other ethnic groups. Jews, of course, are power hungry and corrupt. Hispanics reproduce mindlessly. Blacks, or “mud people” are subhuman brutes…
Juries are supposed to decide a case on the relevant facts. Is there reasonable doubt with regard to the charge at hand? Has the prosecution proved its arguments? In short, did he or didn’t he? Unfortunately, justice isn’t always blind when it comes to fashion matters. If you show up…
Sure, there was shit smearing and fork stabbing, but the most horrifying aspect of Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover was not the violence, the sadism, or the scatology, but rather the obsessive sense of order. In the maelstrom of rapes and beatings and trucks…
Maybe the fact that Metro-Dade County buys bottled water for its employees doesn’t surprise anybody. Maybe it should. Granted, there are some legitimate uses for bottled water. Rehabilitative Services, a division of the Human Resources Department, needs distilled water to mix addiction-treatment drugs. The Metro-Dade Transit Agency has mechanical considerations…
In the late Thirties, William “Tallahassee” Dranes, an obscure Panhandle blues singer, sat awake in a shotgun shack and mused about the weather. It was so hot that summer that birds fell out of the sky completely cooked. So hot that parking lots melted and poured down streets, carrying children…
In the peculiar garden party that opens John Greyson’s Urinal, it’s June 1937, and some of the leading cultural figures of the decade have been assembled in a modest Toronto house. Harlem renaissance poet Langston Hughes is there, as are Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, Japanese author Yukio Mishima, and Mexican…
The latest in a series of pathetic American movies that baldly rip off foreign films, Pure Luck – based on the misadventure comedy Le Chevre (The Goat) – proves that international trade regulators should set aside important issues and get right down to the trivia. These French missed connections, which…
The time has passed when the only relief from bad fast food was Alka-Seltzer. Burger King, the Miami-based restaurant giant, has designed a program to show – or at least pretend – that it cares for its customers. The toll-free consumer-relations hotline (1-800-YES-1-800) is exactly what it sounds like -…
The age-old question “Is there a doctor in the house?” is answered in duplicate this week with The Doctor and Doc Hollywood. In the wake of a bombs-away July in which Hollywood hardly showed a pulse, these early-August offerings, both about physicians, both based on books written by physicians, have…
While New York theater percolates with high-profile projects, marquee-caliber stars, and the thrill of premieres, Miami often must be content with Broadway Lite, Andrew Lloyd Weber slapping together a touring company to extract a few more cents from Phantom. New York probably thinks that’s the way it should be. After…
Chuck Workman’s Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol goes heavy on the times and light on the life. Warhol, the celebrated pop artist who died unexpectedly in 1987 after minor gallbladder surgery, was a bizarre character. Sickly despite the vigor of his art, seemingly anesthetized despite the sensual…
The thirtyish black man who stands outside the door of the Cash Dome purses his lips distractedly, idly rubbing the videocassette recorder he holds under one arm. Beside him, his wife clasps and unclasps her hands. Inside the Cutler Ridge pawnshop – a lurid pink double-hemisphere that looks like a…
On a sunny Tuesday morning last week, just hours before the Heat hosted the Los Angeles Lakers, Alan Ogg – speaking from his new Miami Beach apartment – offered a rare glimpse inside the private life of a public phenomenon. Age: 23 Birthday: July 5, 1967 Birthstone: Ruby Zodiac Sign:…
