There are many reasons to head north to the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival (FLIFF) this week, ranging from a rare screening of George Harrison’s fantastic Concert for Bangladesh (timed to commemorate the late Beatle’s birthday), to Sundance favorites like Old Joy. This year, as part of the Black History…
No vacationing to Greece this month? The next best thing might be the 28th Annual Greek Festival at St. Demetrios Orthodox Church. Xenia Tangalakis has been volunteering there since the fest’s inception. This year she’ll be helping to bake more than 6000 cookies. Other than the popular baklava, Tangalakis anticipates…
Awhile back, Mother Jones magazine quoted award-winning playwright Tony Kushner as saying, “People shouldn’t trust artists, and they shouldn’t trust art. Part of the fun of art is that it invites you to interpret it.” Apparently his critics agree wholeheartedly. Kushner’s controversial Angels in America has been canonized as one…
Dust off your blades and get the good times rollin’ at the seventh annual Great EsSkate Weekend. This superhip inline-skating tour features a weekend of nonstop fun that’ll have you singing “Rollin’ on the o-ocean!” for the rest of the week. On Saturday, February 10, a live DJ will host…
During this wonderfully balmy time of year, dozens of festivals pop up all over our city. On any given weekend, you can find an outdoor celebration that reveals the best in film, comedy, art, music, food, wine, antiques, and even maps. This weekend brings us the second annual Mantra International…
Phallic? No! Miami is sexy. Prince is sexy. So why is everyone surprised that his show at the Super Bowl on Sunday had phallic imagery? Here’s CNN’s take on this, well, extraordinary phenomenon. And here’s a non-sex related post on Prince’s Super Bowl performance. This explains why The Purple One…
The tattoos are picante! The hike up to the BankAtlantic Center in Sunrise isn’t an easy one for southern-dwelling Miamians. But we slogged through ridiculous rush hour traffic to see the last show of the Red Hot Chili Peppers/Gnarls Barkley tour, and for the most part, the traffic sufferation was…
willie for prez Willie for president! No, seriously, to hell with Obama and Hillary. Vote for Willie Nelson: – He feels your pain (the IRS went after him in 1990 for $16.7 million in back taxes) – He’ll end the “war on drugs” madness (he is co-chair of the National…
Note the collar At first glance, six-foot-tall Albert Cutie looked quite at home this past Saturday night at Nikki Beach’s tenth-anniversary bash. He showed up fashionably late with the ubiquitous white haired figure of G. Jack Donahue (who has run a nightclub, served time for dealing drugs, worked as a…
Though I’m sure it’s purely coincidental, the decision to release the Diane Keaton-Mandy Moore rom-com Because I Said So with the scent of this year’s Sundance Film Festival still fresh in the air provides us with an excellent opportunity to review the wayward career of the movie’s director, Michael Lehmann…
What, have we already exhausted the world’s reserves of recyclable Seventies schlock? Apparently not — is that a poster in the megaplex lobby for the goddamn Hills Have Eyes 2? — but nobody told music-vid whiz Dave Meyers, who sets his way-back machine for dimly remembered 1986 and fetches a…
PARK CITY, Utah — We all know about the cathartic power of blues music, but until the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, who knew that it could serve as a cure-all for everything from nymphomania to childhood sexual abuse? In Hustle & Flow director Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan, whose out-of-competition…
PARK CITY, Utah — Ten days of terse texting among professional narcissists working on little or no sleep in one of the last cold spots left on Al Gore’s inconvenient Earth: Welcome to Sundance ’07, where wounding homefront melodrama Grace Is Gone sells and it hardly pays to be nice…
PARK CITY, Utah — Even by the lacerating standards of recent Sundance docs Why We Fight and Iraq in Fragments, the nonfiction at this year’s fest felt, well, real — alarmingly so. Indeed, after doing battle with films about U.S. policies on Iraq, Darfur, and global warming, this critic was…
One morning, Gary Walkow was suddenly transformed into a successful Hollywood filmmaker. Gone were the hat-in-hand searches for financing, the deferred salaries, the long shooting days with undermanned crews, and the months upon years spent touring the festival circuit while seeking a distribution deal. For a moment, he was taking…
PARK CITY, Utah –On the first Saturday of the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, I rolled out of bed and hustled up Main Street for the 8:30 screening of Tamara Jenkins’ The Savages, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as adult siblings caring for an irascible elderly parent. Only I…
Puccini was not alone in loving this woman. The public first fell for her as the heroine of the sexy novel The Tale of the Chevalier Des Grieux and Manon Lescaut by Abbé Prévost. It was the saga of a fast girl’s rise and fall that was turned into operas…
Sin Full Heaven: The third installment of Ricky J. Martinez’s Island Trilogy is a good example of everything that can go wrong with homegrown, indie theater. The writing is a mess of clichés and hideously tortured sentence structures (Q: “Haven’t you kissed women before?” A: “Never the lips of an…
Fine-tuning an alternative art space’s programming is not an easy thing to do. Exhibitions are usually booked a year or more in advance, after curators and organizers sift through reams of proposals, combing the wheat from the chaff. Serious spaces do so hoping to deliver challenging shows that remain true…
Su-en Wong: At Kevin Bruk Gallery, Su-en Wong parodies and pulverizes preconceptions of Asian women in a show that’s both brazen and brainy. Mining the muck of porn fantasy, Wong clones herself in paintings and drawings in which she often appears nude or draped in suggestive schoolgirl regalia, turning the…
Catch a Fire (Focus) In his commentary for the underrated, undervalued Catch a Fire, director Phillip Noyce discusses the inspiration: witnessing the terror attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. He wanted to comprehend “the terrorist’s mind,” so he found a story that accomplishes such a difficult thing: the…
Anyone who played games back in the olden days (i.e., the late ’80s) knows they used to be a lot tougher. Cartridges back then subscribed to the “Oh, you want some of this?” school of game design. They made you gnash your teeth, throw your controller, and bellow four-letter words…
