“This is not a contest,” Abel Klainbaum says good-naturedly. As festival director of the Alliance for Media Arts’s (Anti) Film Festival, he should know. Now in its sixth year, the fest showcases the work of local, national, and (in some instances) international avant-garde and experimental filmmakers in a hodgepodge of…
It seems the entire population of South Florida now works in the entertainment industry. If not full-time, then during the off-hours from their day jobs. And every single person is making a movie. Or already has one in the can. Or plans to make one as soon as he or…
On the other end of the telephone line, Jim Mazur ponders the possibilities. A major think. Listen hard, and you can almost hear the clickety-clack of his brain at work as it rummages rapidly through the available mental data. Then after a long pause and a sighing, “Oh, geez,” he…
Barron Sherer sounds about as atypically Miami as you can get. Deliberate instead of manic. Laconic instead of motor-mouthed. Considerate instead of rude. So it comes as no great cosmic slap upside the head to learn that he runs the city’s only true repertory film series, an endeavor that, in…
More than three years ago, when he was working as a paid production assistant on Fernando Trueba’s shot-in-Miami Two Much, Herschel Faber soaked up the moviemaking vibes while solidifying, once and for all, what he wanted to do with his life. “As I was watching the film being made,” he…
The Jesus and Mary Chain Munki (Sub Pop) After the listless, largely acoustic misfire Stoned and Dethroned, the Jesus and Mary Chain returns four years later with Munki, a near-perfect mix of Jim and William Reid’s long-standing love of gooey pop melodies, boho-chic cynicism, and shrieking, overdriven guitars. Their first…
About one-third of the way through Jean Bach’s hourlong 1995 documentary A Great Day in Harlem, the photographer Art Kane notes, with a slight air of exasperation, “To control this group was near impossible.” The group to which he refers was composed of 57 jazz musicians — some already legends,…
Lenny Kravitz 5 (Virgin) Poor, poor, pitiful Lenny Kravitz. He has spent the better part of the past ten years — and five full-length albums — carefully crafting an artistic persona that, upon close examination, amounts essentially to little more than a cartoon character: the supersensitive, superfunky, supersonic, superstudly superstar…
Writer-director Ernest Goodly laughs heartily as he ticks off his financing sources for his debut feature-length film, Love Bizarre. A grant from the National Black Programming Consortium provided the bulk of the cash. A few private investors kicked in some more. “And my credit cards are totally maxed out,” he…
Neil Finn Try Whistling This (Work) New Zealand singer/guitarist Neil Finn has probably forgotten more aching, beautiful melodies and winning musical hooks than most artists will ever write. Through his career as the angry young sparkplug of Split Enz, the gifted, conflicted leader of Crowded House, and the perpetual rival/bandmate…
Ritchie Valens Come On, Let’s Go! (Del-Fi) Whether or not listeners understand the Spanish lyrics that follow, the five-second guitar intro that kicks off “La Bamba,” the signature tune of tragic Fifties rocker Ritchie Valens, seems to affect most people the same way. Valens’s joyous reworking of the 400-year-old Mexican…
Garbage Version 2.0 (Almo Sounds) Almost three years have passed since Garbage’s self-titled debut blew a hole through the grunge-obsessed alternative gold standard, selling four million records, grabbing three Grammy nominations, and making an altrock icon of singer Shirley Manson. Garbage was heavy with crashing, burning energy and vital singles…
The Specials Guilty ‘Til Proved Innocent! (MCA) Go figure: After returning to the revivalist ska scene in 1996 with the listless Today’s Specials, the reunited Specials — the Coventry outfit that started the whole ska-punk thing back in 1979 — have rebounded with an album that recaptures much of the…
Miles Davis/Bill Laswell Panthalassa: The Music of Miles Davis 1969-1974 (Columbia) Listening to Bill Laswell remix, reconstruct, and recycle the work of trumpet legend Miles Davis on Panthalassa brings to mind Natalie Cole dueting with her long-dead father Nat King Cole at the Grammys a few years ago. Dead men,…
“You don’t see a lot of it, not even in Egypt,” admits Jihan Jamal. “They think of it as a dying art.” Dressed in a black leotard with a long scarf-like affair tied at the waist, Jamal (her professional name) could be any dance instructor in any mirror-lined dance studio…
For more than a century, her adherents and admirers have characterized her as being ahead of her time. Way ahead. Light-years ahead. Maybe. She was certainly of her time. Studied extensively with Tibetan monks. Tramped all over the Far East, Middle East, Europe, and what was still considered the New…
Just what we need: another film festival. As if we weren’t already drowning in them. Miami Film Festival. South Beach Film Festival. Latin American Film Festival. Italian Film Festival. Brazilian Film Festival. Anti Film Festival. And the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival, which runs for approximately seventeen weeks, being international…
Bob Marley The Complete Wailers 1967-1972 Part 1 (JAD/Koch International) Although it’s neither as comprehensive as Island’s Songs of Freedom (1992) or as revelatory as Rounder’s One Love (1991), JAD’s triple-disc Complete Wailers collection covers a crucial period in the rich, extensive history of Bob Marley and the Wailers –…
They will not spot a roadrunner. Nope. No way. Forget it. No roadrunners. Okay, maybe through a miracle, the world’s most wayward roadrunner will take a very sharp right-hand turn in Flagstaff, Arizona, and somehow, a la the animals in The Incredible Journey, show up in the midst of the…
For the first time during a half-hour-plus telephone conversation, Alan Sparhawk really laughs. Not that the guitarist-singer for the minimalist avant-rock trio Low is humorless or anything. Rather, it’s just that he usually punctuates his measured comments about his music, his band, and his take on the record biz with…
thursday april 16 Yellowman has overcome bouts with cancer and the prejudice related to his albinism to become one of reggae’s best-selling artists. The Jamaican started off as a DJ in the mid-Seventies, then leaped to huge popularity in the Eighties as a cornerstone of dancehall music. Long ago he…
“You ever see all the stunts that get done on-stage or in a film ? How [actors] take all those falls, kicks, punches, how they pull hair?” asks Stewart Solomon, president-owner of Creative WorkShops in Aventura. “That’s what this is.” This being an intensive two-day workshop in unarmed Combat for…
