In all, a far better year than any in recent memory, so much so it feels impolite and irresponsible to choose a mere ten best among the annum’s offerings. This list remained in flux till the last possible moment; five seconds ago it featured, among others, Signs, Full Frontal, Human…
Four of the top ten films I saw this year don’t actually open in the U.S. until 2003, but they played at various film festivals during the year. By listing them here I not only alert readers to films they should watch out for in ’03, but I also make…
David Levinthal, a grown man, can’t help but play with toys. Cowboys, Indians, Barbie dolls, figurines clad in S&M-wear: All have posed for the photographer’s large-format Polaroid camera — one of six in the world — over the past 30 years. Or better said, he has posed them. A graduate…
To hear it from the viejos and the not-so-viejos, everything Cuban was (and is) unique. Sure, their brand of inflammatory politics is one point. And to the unschooled palate black beans can seem odd. But how different can things Cuban really be? Two exhibitions at the Historical Museum of Southern…
In 1965 a savvy cabal of Los Angeles-based pop-culture stem-cell researchers coalesced to formulate three-quarters of the verities that have come to define the rigid boy-band genre: modest singing ability, some facility with light comedy, and a certain ineffable cuteness. Among the participants: writing partners Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker…
A free truffle giveaway? No. Then why did people get so happy about fungi recently at the Sagamore Hotel? Two doors south of the Delano, the joint’s jam-packed with groovy contemporary art. The owners, Cricket and Marty Taplin, are big collectors and their newest acquisition — a permanent installation by…
Based on the true story of three young Aboriginal girls who walked 1500 miles across the Australian Outback to be reunited with their mothers, Rabbit-Proof Fence might well be subtitled True Grit in recognition of the courage and single-minded determination that drove the trio to undertake such a perilous journey…
It’s been nearly three years since Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother won the Oscar for best foreign language film. Perhaps it’s in the spirit of spreading things around that Spain has not nominated Almodóvar’s latest, Talk to Her, as its entry this year. Certainly it’s hard to imagine any…
This season has seen its share of family dramas that playwrights keep reinventing to good theatrical effect. One recent incarnation is Charles Randolph-Wright’s moody, engaging comedy/drama Blue, a semi-autobiographical account of one wealthy black family’s domestic disturbances, a tale that spans several decades. The story is narrated by Reuben Clark…
What if you took the Swiss penchant for detail, seriousness, and thoroughness and mixed it up with Miami’s spirited, self-indulgent underdevelopedness. The result would be Art Basel 2002 in Miami Beach. First in its class, Art Basel did indeed deliver a proliferation of art, sending waves crashing around the county…
Adaptation is the most overrated movie of the year (of all time?) by people who should know better. Film critics have either been suckered in by its gimmick (Being John Malkovich screenwriter Charlie Kaufman can’t adapt a book for the big screen and winds up writing himself into his screenplay,…
Martin Scorsese’s latest epic of the streets, Gangs of New York, means to show us how a great metropolis was forged in the mid-nineteenth-century cauldrons of unbridled greed, ethnic violence, and Civil War. It means to give us the city as wild frontier — without the usual cowboy hats. This…
Ahh, show biz! One minute you’re wearing long hair and skintight Spandex onstage; the next minute you’re wearing long hair and flowing robes onstage. Blond-locked Sebastian Bach, onetime wild frontman for popular metal band Skid Row (1987-1996) and more recently leader of the supergroup the Last Hard Men, can relate…
A long time ago in a galaxy not so far away, a couple of dudes spent months camped out on a Seattle street waiting for the opening of the new Star Wars movie, Episode Two — Attack of the Clones. You might remember these losers and all the hoopla the…
Notes from a network executive’s forthcoming biography, pilfered from the desk of an editor at a major publishing house. This was hard to read, as it was scribbled in crayon on the back of a copy of Highlights taken from a pediatrician’s office. From page 412: “Last week, I met…
Theater has always had a rabble-rousing role at the margins of society. Plato mistrusted poets and art in general. Aeschylus got himself exiled when his plays criticized the Athenian politicos. The Puritans tried to ban the Elizabethan theaters, and Hitler burned down a number of them. Henry Fielding, the great…
Maid in Manhattan, in which Jennifer Lopez goes from pauper to princess, comes not from a screenplay but from a handful of self-help books and fairy tales and fashion magazines cut and pasted together in a glossy montage committed to celluloid. Characters, made from the highest-grade cardboard and resplendent in…
The first image most of us had of music and the Third Reich was watching each von Trapp tyke sing “auf Wiedersehen, good night,” bow off the stage, slip into the night, surmount a few low hurdles, and climb a couple of mountains to freedom. Loosely based on a true…
Of all the movies you could be spending your December with — and there are many good choices, from Oscar-bait to better-than-expected sequels like The Santa Clause 2 — why would you want to end up at Drumline? “Hey dear, wanna go see the new Scorsese flick, or maybe one…
Three songs into Night Time!, Dan Zanes’s new album for kids, the former Del Fuegos frontman teams with Father Goose (West Indies emcee Rankin’ Don) to trade lines and duet on a cover of the buddies-forever chestnut “Side by Side.” In the final minute, shucking and jiving like Bob Hope…
All throughout our childhood, those Saturday-morning Schoolhouse Rock jingles assured us that three was the magic number. Journalist and radio producer Gustavo Noguera likes the number nine, particularly the bracing Ninth Symphony written by Romantic-era composer Ludwig van Beethoven. No matter that the German kicked the bucket 175 years ago…
The long arm of our faltering economy has reached out and touched this New Year’s Eve. But don’t worry — you’ll be the beneficiary. Most clubs and restaurants on South Beach, even big names like crobar, Level, and the Forge, are lowering New Year’s party prices from last year. That…
