Dread Ringers

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 movies in this area, hinted at a pervasive problem when he assessed 1992’s films in a column last Thursday. After dutifully clumping together…

French Miss

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, web-footed, aquatic amphibian whose mug was considered the opposite of a prince’s and whose legs were traditionally hacked, sauteed, and served in the taverns…

Sunset Streep

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. On the Broadway stage in 1978 (the year is important), Madeline Ashton (Meryl Streep), a waning theatrical diva, stars in a musical production adapted from Tennessee…

Vermeer to Eternity

Never having been a great admirer of Jean-Luc Godard, aging daddy of the French nouvelle vague, I was rightly suspicious with his showering praise on the little-known Jon Jost, naming the latter the current best among America’s independent directors. Given the source, it is certainly a dubious tribute, as complimentary…

Kulcha Club

First the good news: Though not by any means new, Kebab Indian Restaurant is another plum to add to Dade County’s ever-growing community of creative Indian tandoori kitchens. Located east of I-95 amidst the semi-squalor of NE 167th Street’s low-rent malls, run-down businesses, and adult bookstores, Kebab has been serving…

Price -A-Roni

“The engine which drives Enterprise is not Thrift, but Profit.” You might be tempted to attribute this contention to Ross Perot in 1992, but in fact, the words were written by John Maynard Keynes in 1930. And yet, to take Baron Keynes’s dictum further than the great British economist –…

Adam’s Crib

When it opened in 1989 — the same week as Batman — I was delighted by Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and its Lilliputian adventure set in a suburban back yard teeming with giant blades of grass, ants, puddles, bumblebees, and scorpions. “An adventure yarn in the tradition of Fantastic…

Bless This Haus

Writing in his Metamorphoses, Ovid claimed that time devours everything. He could have invented the governing motto for the restaurant industry, because it is hardly news to anyone that, as a vocation and business proposition, restaurants are dicey at best. Indeed, most financial pundits will tell you they’re about as…

Name That Toon

When Sinclair Lewis received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930, one bemused onlooker, George Bernard Shaw — a winner of the same award in 1925 — made the following observation: “I have defined the hundred percent American as ninety-nine percent an idiot.” No doubt Shaw’s scintillating wit would be…

Don’t Curry, Be Happy

One of the most exquisite architectural structures in South Beach is the Marlin Hotel on Ocean Drive, designed in 1939 by the great L. Murray Dixon — one of seven important Miami Beach projects the architect completed that year — and recently purchased and renovated by music magnate Chris Blackwell…

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

Set in a hazy, non-specific, post-apocalyptic future, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s black-hearted satirical comedy from France, Delicatessen, makes no attempt to conceal its sources of inspiration, pictorial and thematic: A predominant one is Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (which, of course, drew from wide literary sources such as Orwell’s 1984 and…

Revenge of the Birds

To separate cuisine — or culture, for that matter — by broad geographical parameters is one of society’s most tempting and nauseating tendencies. In America, this pervasive pigeonholing extends to the arts: Consider how writers as contrasted as Tennessee Williams and Eudora Welty are casually branded “Southern,” along with the…

All the Wrong Moves

One False Move is a knuckleheaded title for a diminutive detective thriller — particularly as, both in its plot and the filmmaking in general, there are about as many false moves as barbecued ribs at a wild hog jamboree. Directed by former actor Carl Franklin and written by another actor,…

Dances With Woods

Before getting to the business at hand, an announcement: New Times is looking for a permanent dining critic and food chronicler, someone with matching insights and appetite, an original, stylish writer for whom each restaurant experience is an adventure to be seized upon and savored. Let me say, by way…

Wayne’s World

“An opera – a gothic, Teutonic, thickly textured hybrid of various theatrical and cinematic conventions. To call this film Wagnerian would be understating the case, because even the Ring has its light and shade…[it] recalls the elliptical and symbolic world of Strauss-Hoffmannsthal’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, with its somber metaphysical…

Yankee Panky

As Goldie Hawn traipses through it early in Housesitter, the fictional New England town of Dobbs Mill (Concord and Cohasset, Massachusetts) is a patch of retro-colonialist Americana: star-spangled flags hang over modestly ornamented homes, the wood-panel architecture recalls the idealistic haze of Norman Rockwell’s illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post,…

Cheek to Cheek

Never having put much stock in the concept of acquired tastes, the films of Derek Jarman, for all their incidental beauties, continue to leave a bad impression on me: too much flash, too little insight is the short of it. Jarman belongs to a generation of British filmmakers who came…

Whoopi Cushion

Whoopi here, Whoopi there, Whoopi everywhere. Like a coral-bound moray eel furiously biting off more than it can chew, the ubiquitous Goldberg has been, in the main, an eyesore since she blazed on Broadway in her 1984 subcultural solo act. In one comedy spectacle after another – Jumpin’ Jack Flash,…

Slaves to the Ritmo

The partisan political waters of Miami have never been easy to predict or, for that matter, to navigate. As the 1990 snubbing of Nelson Mandela proved, there are political agendas to be addressed and Cuban-exile honchos to be appeased before a hero can receive his plaudits locally. Last week musician/poet…

Saturday Night Weaver

Don’t be misled by her sex: She’s big. She’s mean. She’s bald. In a world filled with scampering rodents calling themselves macho, she stands firmer and taller than a forest oak tree. In the solitude and vastness of outer space, she fears no evil. No challenge is too great. No…

There’s a Slacker Born Every Minute

Every moviegoing generation must contend with the fact that great directors don’t come in bunches, though, as P.T. Barnum observed long ago, suckers do. And it’s to these poor, born-every-minute souls that Slacker, a subcultural tribute to vagrancy by first-time filmmaker Richard Linklater, is unwittingly dedicated. The film is populated…

Green Acres

Now must we brace ourselves for the start of the silly season. Richard Donner’s undigestably dreadful Lethal Weapon 3 opened this past Friday, and the box-office blitzkrieg continues this Friday with the return of Sigourney Weaver’s parasite-pulverizing space mama, Ripley, in Alien 3, Encino Man (another SoCal comedy), and finally…