Am I the only viewer in America who has a problem with the recent spate of slacker movies? From Slacker to Singles to Dazed and Confused, a trend seems to be emerging, the salient characteristic of which is the romanticization of sloth and navel contemplation. Not that I have anything…
I can’t help it. It’s a reflex action. I hear the word “documentary” and some uncontrollable voice from deep within me screams, “Boring!” I realize it’s an irrational response; after all, I’ve seen plenty of entertaining documentaries. Then again, most of them have had something to do with rock music,…
Johnny is a bitter but brilliant guy with a taste for rough sex, the quintessential angry young man drifting through a London netherworld of emotional cripples. He’s got no shortage of places to go, but he’s searching for a warm place to stay. When he finally finds it, he leaves…
Truly satisfying basketball movies are rarer than celibate NBA players. From Drive, He Said to White Men Can’t Jump, Chu Chu and the Philly Flash to Hoosiers, the essence of the game has eluded Hollywood’s grasp. It’s not just the fact that removing the elements of competition and unpredictability takes…
The drug dealer with a guilty conscience — has there ever been a phonier Hollywood invention? That’s what Sugar Hill, which debuted locally at the Miami Film Festival, is all about. Wesley Snipes stars as Roemello “Ro” Skuggs, a heroin dealer who wants out. Of course, he doesn’t want out…
“Let’s stop playing the dying fag!” exhorts Lawrence Helman, producer of the controversial movie Sex Is…, which opens at the Alliance Theater on Miami Beach this Friday. “Marc [Huestis, the film’s director] and I were tired of always seeing gays portrayed in the media as monogamous or abstaining — but…
Kim Basinger has amazing nipples. It’s a bad sign when you walk out of a movie theater and the thing that most sticks in your mind is some physical quirk of one of the lead actors. I exited The Bodyguard, for example, unable to get over Kevin Costner’s haircut. It…
His wardrobe runs to flannel shirts and weathered jeans, and his threadbare Chuck Taylor high-tops are so far gone that his wife Adris is only half-kidding when she says she likes them because she can nibble on her husband’s toes without taking his shoes off. No, Bill Orcutt does not…
Nick Nolte playing the lead in a musical — now there’s something you don’t see every day. Nor, for that matter, will you see it any day, thanks to the early test-screening audience that gave the musical sequences in I’ll Do Anything a thumbs-down — way down. Writer-director James L…
In their infinite wisdom, Sony Pictures Classics, whose offices are in New York, decided to independently release the intricate French drama The Accompanist here in Miami on the eve of the Miami Film Festival. The Festival is an extremely popular and eagerly anticipated orgy of foreign movies that would sate…
Let’s hope the L.A. earthquake didn’t claim any acting coaches. After viewing the latest outings by Madonna and Sharon Stone, Hollywood is going to need every last one. Madonna’s new film is director Abel Ferrara’s Dangerous Game, one of those self-indulgent film-within-a-film exercises. It’s hard to tell exactly where art…
Hotshot architect Vincent Eastman barrels down a slick mountain road in his classic 1968 Mercedes 280SL. He rounds a tight curve to discover a dilapidated VW van that has stalled while attempting to enter the thoroughfare ahead of him. Eastman swerves into the left lane to avoid the van –…
Film festivals are the newest growth industry in South Florida. From Key West to Sarasota, they’re proliferating like melaleuca trees. In Dade and Broward alone we’ve got the Black Film Festival, the Jewish Film Festival, the Queer Flickering Light festival, the Fort Lauderdale Film Festival, the South Beach Film Festival,…
We live in a litigious world. Lawyers proliferate like locusts, except that the six-legged insects have a seventeen-year gestation period while the two-legged pests require only three. Yet no matter how many thousands of litigators law schools pump into the pipeline annually, the crime rate rises and the legal system…
From its opening scene of Richard Harris doing pushups in the nude, Wrestling Ernest Hemingway practically dares you to write it off as one of those feisty-but-lovable-old-folks-raging-at-the-dying-of-the-light movies. The Florida setting (in a fictional beach town called Sweetwater which bears as much resemblance to the municipality in West Dade as…
I can’t really say I knew Bill Cosford. I met him a few times at previews. He liked popcorn. He was usually the first one out of the theater when a screening was over, no doubt a pre-emptive maneuver designed to avoid becoming entangled in endless “So, whadjathink?” queries from…
One of my New Year’s resolutions was to avoid giving away the endings of films in my reviews. But sometimes a movie is so predictable I can’t help myself. I feel that old temptation and I end up writing something to the effect of: “You know from the moment you…
Warning lights ought to flash in every filmgoer’s head any time the words “based on a true story” or “adapted from a play” are used to promote a motion picture. A true story is one thing, but based on a true story — that’s like the difference between 100 percent…
Eddy the Baptist. It’s not what most South Floridians think of when they hear the name Eddy Grant. As the artist himself readily admits, the knee-jerk response to that moniker is “Electric Avenue.” Boosted by exposure on MTV back when that moribund institution was still a scrappy, eclectic upstart, the…
Manifest Destiny. What a clever two-word rationalization for the indiscriminate slaughter of tens of thousands of indigenous peoples and the bald-faced theft of their land. On September 5, 1886, Chiricahua Apache warlord Goyahkla, better known as Geronimo (a moniker bestowed upon him by the 3000 or so Mexican soldiers whose…
Everyone has heard that shopworn saying, “The third time’s a charm.” But what if you’re successful the first two times you try something? Does that mean you’ll blow it the third time around? If your name is Oliver Stone and you’ve carted away Best Director Oscars for Platoon and Born…
Two years ago, in the pages of this newspaper, I wrote an open letter to the Mavericks nominating myself as a replacement for founding guitarist Ben Peeler, who had just been dropped from the band. They chose to go with a Texan, David Lee Holt, instead. They’ll tell you it…
