Trivia question: What do the black Gibson Flying V guitar with gold hardware on which Jimi Hendrix played “Red House” on Rainbow Bridge; an empty sleeping pill bottle filled at Schwab’s pharmacy on May 5, 1961, by Marilyn Monroe; a pen-and-ink self-portrait of John Lennon masturbating; Madonna’s wedding dress from…
“Ten working days.” That’s been Doc Wiley’s mantra for the past three months. Wiley made the mistake of giving me an advance listen to the Live at the Square Vol. II tape in April. Since then I’ve been on his case constantly. “Any word on that CD, Doc?” “Ten working…
It’s easy to see why Michael Crichton, who wrote the novel and the first draft of the screenplay for Rising Sun, eventually became so upset with director Philip Kaufman’s vision that, depending on whose version of the story you believe, he either abandoned the project or was removed from it…
The playground. You remember it, don’t you? Swing set. Jungle gym. Slide. Dirt. Asphalt basketball court with a weather-beaten hoop, chain net rusted and broken. Shattered bottles everywhere. Maybe a tennis court or a baseball diamond nearby. Sorry, old sport. These are the Nineties. The playground, as you knew it,…
What is it about summer weather that propagates bad comedies like Nebraska corn? Anyone who has suffered through Life with Mikey, Son-in-law, Weekend at Bernie’s Part 2, Dennis the Menace, Hocus Pocus, and Another Stakeout knows what to expect if the sewer line beneath Biscayne Bay finally blows: wave after…
Talk about your love-hate relationships. Opinions don’t get much more divided than those among the patrons who caught the Tumbling Dice show on July 17 at Stephen Talkhouse. People marched out in disgust. People cheered for three hours and begged for encores. It was that kind of night. The all-star…
Lesbians have always gotten a pretty raw deal from Hollywood. They’ve generally been portrayed as either villains or seductresses, take your pick. Sure, you’ll find the occasional self-consciously sensitive film (usually made by a man) like John Sayles’s Lianna or Robert Towne’s Personal Best, which took themselves so seriously that…
Remember Vic Hitler, the narcoleptic comic in Hill Street Blues? Terry Kiser received an Emmy Award nomination for his portrayal of the comedian with the penchant for nodding off just when he had an audience rolling in the aisles. Like most of the quirky characters who populated Hill Street, Vic…
You don’t always get what you pay for. Weekend at Bernie’s II and Son-in-law are lame excuses for comedies, but seeing them will still lighten your wallet noticeably. Meanwhile Studentfilms, Inc., an offshoot of Robert DeNiro’s Tribeca Film Center in New York City, has compiled a touring exhibition of eight…
Welcome to another installment of Bad Career Move Derby. Today’s contestants are a pair of male actors whose professions began auspiciously enough but have spiraled inexorably downward ever since: Donald Sutherland and Gary Busey. Sutherland broke from the gate with a vengeance, lending his bug-eyed irreverence to such films as…
Poor Al D’Andrea. He’s doomed. It’s hard to look him in the eye because you know he’s going to die soon. Al is not an AIDS patient, a Somali warlord, a gangbanger, or a journalist in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It’s worse than that. Al is the latest guy to hold the job…
Life with Mikey is one of those execrable exercises in sitcom sentimentality that leaves even the uncritical viewer with one question: What were they thinking? Let’s be charitable. Maybe the filmmakers were inspired by Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose, but the only way they could obtain financing was to cast…
“We’re creating our own history,” offers Helaine Blum, manager of promising local rock band Black Janet. She is trying to explain what sets South Florida’s rock music scene apart from other cities’, and in particular why she and so many other local women have taken up the cause. “Because of…
One of the things that distinguishes South Florida’s music scene from, say, Seattle’s, is that our bands do not have an identifiable sound, like grunge. The women making the music at our original rock venues have little in common beyond geographical proximity. Ponder the following: “I don’t know if spit…
Tina Turner is the heroine of What’s Love Got to Do With It. The dramatic sequences in the rock siren’s film bio hammer home the point that Turner (formerly Anna Mae Bullock from Nutbush, Tennessee) overcame huge odds and years of physical abuse to become the international megastar that she…
The Firm is one of those so-so movies critics dread. It’s like generic vanilla ice cream A tasty enough to satisfy a craving, but not compelling enough to go out of your way for. It’s not bad. It’s just bland. Like Last Action Hero, five writers share in the blame…
It happens every summer. Things get slow. The clubs (the ones that survived) try to conserve cash. Local bands play at venues they might have been crowded out of by national acts a few months earlier. It’s a hot time for local music fans. Recognizing that tradition, we’ve compiled brief…
Yikes. Just when you thought Arnold was nearly as invincible at the box office as the on-screen characters he’s been playing, along comes Last Action Hero to put his survival skills to the test. Last Action Hero has the feel of a movie that can’t make up its mind what…
Privately, so as not to give away your age, ask yourself a question: Do you remember when Ralph Bakshi’s Fritz the Cat was considered scandalous enough to merit an X rating from the MPAA? How the fun thing to do was smoke a couple of joints and head down to…
Cute kids are a regular feature of Steven Spielberg’s movies, but it will be a cold day in Jurassic Park before a Spielberg film embraces a family like Leolo Lozone’s. “Because I dream, I’m not,” intones the youngster at the center of Jean-Claude Lauzon’s semiautobiographical tour de force, Leolo. Not…
At last! A big-budget summer movie that actually lives up to the hype. Jurassic Park is the cinematic equivalent of a doctoral thesis on special effects wizardry from director Steven Spielberg. It’s also a heart-stopping, jaw-dropping, eye-popping spectacular that supplies all the vicarious thrills of a trip to Disney World…
Seems like everywhere you look these days, something’s falling. America has fallen on hard times. The dollar has fallen in value against the yen. President Clinton’s approval rating, SAT scores, GNP, consumer confidence A falling, falling, falling, falling. Everywhere you look, standards are dropping, heroes are backsliding, institutions are toppling…
