“Fuck it, we drove.” Milk Can’s Joel Schantz didn’t mean to encapsulate the mindset of the entire Dade County delegation in attendance at the recent Southeastern Music Conference in Tampa with his offhand remark. But as anyone familiar with Milk Can’s body of work can attest, Schantz has a gift…
Well, at least those idiots at the Motion Picture Academy (MPA) got this one right. Last month Nikita Mikhalkov’s Burnt by the Sun copped the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. It’s a damn good film — I still prefer Before the Rain, but why quibble? And yet I swore…
Nothing in writer-director Christopher Monger’s filmography provides a clue that he was capable of spinning a yarn as enchanting as The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain. Prior to this release, the high point of Monger’s career was 1990’s diffuse comedy Waiting for the Light,…
Tommy Anthony doesn’t look like a pop star. He has the rough-hewn features and stocky build of an ex-football player. (In fact, if you pry a bit he’ll admit he played a little semi-pro ball with the Miami Storm.) The bandanna he frequently sports atop his head gives him a…
It probably won’t do any good to preface this review with a disclaimer, but here goes: I wanted to like The Perez Family. I really did. May has been a sad month for movies about Latin Americans with the word family in the title. Last week I panned director Gregory…
Like The Perez Family, Steven Soderbergh’s new film, The Underneath, ultimately underachieves despite flashes of brilliance. Soderbergh tries his hand at film noir with disappointing results, largely because all the clever editing, time-frame juggling, droll dialogue, and unconventional camerawork cannot conceal a pencil-thin narrative that boils down to this: A…
Gerard Depardieu may well be the greatest actor in the world, but you can’t blame American moviegoers for doubting the veracity of that claim if their only familiarity with Depardieu’s work stems from his three strikes at cross-Atlantic stardom: Green Card (1990), 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), and My Father,…
I don’t know how I’d go about making the ultimate film about the Chicano experience in the U.S. without resorting to cliches and stereotypes. But I don’t feel so bad; Gregory Nava didn’t have a clue, either, and somebody gave him a pile of money to tackle the job. In…
Any credibility the film version of Jim Carroll’s raw, seditious, autobiographical 1978 book The Basketball Diaries may have hoped to establish flies right out the window the first time you see Carroll’s Hollywood surrogate, Leonardo DiCaprio, attempt to dribble a basketball. In the literary Diaries, Carroll lives for the game…
I hope all the hue and cry over David Caruso’s decision to bolt from TV’s NYPD Blue to pursue a career as a leading man in Hollywood does not muffle the bang made by Nicolas Cage in Caruso’s first film since the split. Cage is in peak form in Kiss…
Forrest Gump’s momma said it best: Stupid is as stupid does. Too bad Pauly Shore didn’t grow up under her care, as well. Stupidity is not just another word to Totally Pauly. It’s a vocation. Dumber than Dumb and Dumber, Pauly’s latest exercise in pointless poppycock and narcissistic nonsense is…
Rock stars do the darnedest things After nearly four decades in the music business, much of it at the upper levels of the rock and roll stratosphere, Roy Young has met, toured, recorded, or partied with just about every British rock star of consequence, and quite a few important American…
Meet Roy Young, the patron saint of anyone who has ever turned down a job and lived to regret it. “Every night before I go to bed, I go into my bathroom and hit my head against the wall ten times,” sighs the congenial midfiftyish Englishman with the sand-colored beard…
Far be it from me to second-guess the platinum-plated producing tandem of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. Money talks, and nowhere does its voice carry more weight than in Hollywood, where the Simpson-Bruckheimer team churn out sleek but vapid entertainments that regularly rack up spectacular box-office returns. Since their initial…
“Gluttony is not a secret vice,” lamented the late great writer-director-actor-bon vivant Orson Welles, a man as well-remembered for his prodigious girth as for his oversized talent. Marlon Brando, who vies with Welles for the distinction of being the most feared, respected, influential, and caricatured figure in post-World War II…
Toadies Rubberneck (Interscope) One month ago in Austin, Texas, during the annual South by Southwest Music & Media Conference, Toadies singer-songwriter-guitarist Todd Lewis tested the working order of a peculiar-looking two-microphone setup prior to the band’s 40-minute show at the cavernous Liberty Lunch club. As he did so, moving his…
Straight, middle-age widower Harry Mitchell just wants to make his gay son, Jeff, happy. Nothing wrong with that. But Harry tries so hard to encourage Jeff’s alternative lifestyle that he becomes a well-meaning nuisance. Eventually Harry learns that no matter how pure your motives or how badly you want to…
The Sum of Us is an Australian vessel from stern to bow. David Stevens, an award-winning Aussie screenwriter (Breaker Morant) and filmmaker (the TV miniseries A Town Like Alice) scripted it. Jack Thompson, a fixture in Australian cinema as well as a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for Refugees and a…
During a question-and-answer session with the audience following the screening of the film Exotica at the Miami Film Festival in February, someone asked writer-director Atom Egoyan whether a closing shot of a troubled young woman entering an ominous-looking house signified that the woman was a murderer. Egoyan raised an eyebrow…
Here’s my fatal flaw as a film critic: After more than three decades of moviegoing, I still walk into a theater expecting the filmmaker to show me fairly quickly why I should give a damn about his protagonist. Experience has taught me that if I’m not hooked within the first…
Deep in the heart of Texas hold ’em Texas hold ’em, the poker permutation favored by the pros and the game played in the annual World Championship of the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, is a particularly treacherous variant of seven-card stud. The basics can be learned in…
Money was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score. The real excitement is playing the game. — Donald Trump, The Art of the Deal It’s not the money,” scoffs John Spadavecchia. Not many men could brush off a million dollar payday as convincingly as…
