Early in the first quarter of the Miami Hooters’ franchise-opening Arena Football League game against the Charlotte Rage, rather than ducking his head and safely absorbing a sack in the quarterbacking equivalent of the fetal position, Hooters quarterback John Fourcade uncoiled in the face of several onrushing Rage defensive linemen…
Audiences are incredibly tolerant when it comes to romantic comedies. Inane dialogue, contrived plots, transparent sentimentality A all is forgiven if the filmmaker is able to create the illusion of even the remotest strain of chemistry between the principals. That goes double for movies that revolve around the matchmaking of…
A living actor portrays a dead actor who, while he was alive, was a gay man pretending to be straight who made a movie wherein he played a straight man who seduced a woman by pretending to be gay. Confused? Imagine how Rock Hudson felt. Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, opening…
Because it was there. Some men climb mountains. Some men sail around the world in papyrus boats. Some men cross the Atlantic in hot-air balloons. Some men drive on the Palmetto Expressway at rush hour in Toyota Tercels. And when you ask them why they did it, what madness or…
The venerable director of Ju Dou (1990) and Raise the Red Lantern (1991), the first Chinese films ever nominated for Academy Awards (in spite of the fact that they have yet to be released in the country where they were shot), was sixteen years old when Mao and the Red…
Back in 1980, writer-directors David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams teamed up to create Airplane!, the landmark send-up of one of the most cliche-ridden, typecast, overwrought melodramas of all time, Airport. Airplane! was silly, schmaltzy shtick that worked because it dared to be stupid at a time when it…
The good news is that Karina Lombard is great in bed. The bad news is that the novice thespian’s acting skills drop off precipitously the further she ventures from the boudoir. Luckily Wide Sargasso Sea, the cinematic adaptation of Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel, calls for Antoinette (the tragic heroine played…
It could have been a disaster. The cardinal rules of good party throwing were broken. Anticipating a crowd of 300, the organizers of the Premiere Night Gala Screening Program of the first annual Make-A-Film Competition were not prepared for the nearly 500 folks who showed up. The caterer ran out…
“The dog ate the part we didn’t like” — from Panama, by Thomas McGuane You probably don’t have to hate George Bush or his presidential predecessor, Ronald Reagan, to appreciate The Panama Deception (opening Friday at the Alliance on Lincoln Road), this year’s Academy Award winner for Best Documentary Feature…
Miami is teeming with successful, hard-working businesspeople whose establishments are integral threads in the fabric of our daily lives. Yet at times it seems that unless they throw a decadent, $700,000 coming-out party, nobody pays them any mind. We pass their fiefdoms every day on the way to work, eat…
Oh, yeah, they’re out there. Is anybody listening? Oh, yeah! Here we go again. The recording artists calling Miami home are steppin’ to it, and we’re kickin’ what they’re droppin’. Please join us. Mary Karlzen Hide (Y&T Music) “Hey, don’t I know you? You look familiar….” It takes less than…
A body at rest tends to remain at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. bodies, rest & motion is proof positive of the veracity of that Newtonian law of physics. This is an insufferable, pretentious, existential character drama that starts out at rest and stays there. Nick, played…
Lesbians have feelings too. That’s the earth-shattering revelation at the core of three of hearts. (What is it with lower-case titles these days? bodies, rest & motion, the night we never met A am i the only one who finds the trend precious?) For the first twenty minutes or so,…
Lampooning middle-class neuroses has long been a staple of television sitcoms. From the Bundys to the Simpsons, some of our most popular TV families are paragons of bourgeois dysfunction. But the big screen has been another story; mainstream Hollywood hasn’t really gotten suburban angst right since The Graduate. But not…
After watching Robert De Niro sleepwalk through Mad Dog and Glory, it was a relief to see that someone had awakened the venerable actor in time for his next performance as an abusive stepfather in This Boy’s Life. Unfortunately, whoever roused the sleeping Dog for the film adaptation of Tobias…
“I didn’t like the way he cocked his hat and he wore his gun all wrong” A Joe Ely, “Me and Billy the Kid” Heroes are hard to find, or so the saying goes, which makes it all the more important that we appreciate them when they do come around…
It happens every spring with numbing predictability. The crush of Christmas blockbusters and Oscar contenders peters out sometime in mid-January, and with one or two exceptions the pickings A at least in terms of first-run domestic theatrical releases A remain slim until the advance guard of the big summer films…
Well, it finally happened. An unnerving milestone was reached on February 26: a major terrorist strike on U.S. soil. The bombing of a high-profile public building is no longer something that only happens in faraway countries. The faaade of invulnerability has been irrevocably shattered. Addressing the World Trade Center bombing,…
In the annals of American cinema, has there ever been an actor whose first name so accurately critiqued his performances as Woody Harrelson? In Doc Hollywood he was Woody the lovestruck hick; in White Men Can’t Jump he was Woody the street-hustling ballplayer; Indecent Proposal offers us Woody the architect…
Gombo, the ingenuous hero of Close to Eden, wields a mean urga. The preferred tool of the Mongolian rancher, the gadget resembles a long fishing rod with a noose at the end of it and is one handy piece of equipment for a guy trying to scratch out a living…
As a rule, the last place a movie critic wants to view a film is at a promotional screening. Such events, if successful, are usually loud and crowded, two factors that are not exactly conducive to thoughtful analysis of the motion picture in question. The WMXJ-FM (102.7)/Community Newspapers-sponsored showing of…
The kitchen and the bedroom. In 1910 Mexico, a woman’s choices, bound by tradition and the macho ethic, were severely limited. Like Water for Chocolate, the film adapted by Laura Esquivel and her director/producer husband, Alfonso Arau, from Ms. Esquivel’s internationally best-selling novel, is the raunchy, romantic, dreamlike rendering of…
