Kissing Jessica Stein ends several times — which likely explains how a film with so short a running time, 96 minutes, feels as though it lasts much longer — and each conclusion satisfies; each feels real, natural, and best of all, inevitable. That is, except for the actual finale, which…
Precious and cloying, Harrison’s Flowers sets out to prove itself a story of hope and human endurance, but swiftly deteriorates into a terribly obvious melodrama and rough-hewn vanity project for lead actress Andie MacDowell. (One can almost hear her shouting to her agent: “Hey, Meg Ryan landed a search-and-rescue picture,…
Zany Brazilian theatrical company Pia Fraus has a name that derives from Latin and translates roughly to a white lie. Aptly enough the notion that Pia Fraus would perform in Miami five months ago as part of Tigertail Productions’ seventh annual Florida/Brazil Festival (FLA/BRA) seemed like a white lie as…
Imagine taking dance lessons for several years during your childhood, entering the university later to study economics, contemplating life as a businesswoman, and then giving it all up to spend more than ten years living in a village strictly devoted to reviving and preserving classical Indian dance forms that date…
“Are we gonna play chicken here, Robert? Who’s gonna go first?” That’s Chris Moore talking, from the other end of a cell phone–the preferred means of communication for the Hollywood producer too afraid of standing still. Moore–a producer of Good Will Hunting and the American Pie films, partner with Ben…
At first glance there is much to celebrate in Out of Season, Elinor Jones’s new comedy now receiving its world premiere at the Caldwell Theatre. The play itself gives voice to five mature female characters, a welcome counterpoint to the general scarcity of roles for women, even in this so-called…
Over the past half-century, countless filmmakers great and obscure have stood in serious debt to The Bicycle Thief. But for my money, no one has borrowed so cleverly or shifted the weight of Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 masterpiece so gracefully as young Wang Xiaoshuai, whose Beijing Bicycle embodies the spirit…
Sometimes genius draws nigh, mollifying the gnashing critic with the promise of wild narrative fusion, perhaps even rollicking wit. Alas, sometimes genius then languidly squirms aside, like a loathsome strumpet, leaving one’s hopeful wantonness piqued but unfulfilled. Both cases apply to the boldly peculiar Scotland, PA., which sweeps up Shakespeare’s…
April may indeed be the cruelest month, according to poet T.S. Eliot. But if you believe Shakespeare’s soothsayer (and Julius Caesar really should have), mid-March is the time of year that really stinks. One of the few months boasting no real holidays to speak of (that is, unless you’re Irish),…
Enough with the letter i or lack thereof in actor Jim J. Bullock’s name. “I should have just left it Becky!” he jokes on the phone from his California home. The former costar of the hit ABC sitcom Too Close for Comfort once went by the cryptic handle “JM J…
When I think of Edward Albee, two particularly pungent quotes come to mind. “I have a fine sense of the ridiculous,” says American theater’s perennial bad boy, “but no sense of humor.” If you catch Albee’s witty, challenging The Play About the Baby, which is receiving its Florida premiere at…
Watching Intimacy, Patrice Chéreau’s latest film, is something akin to tracking a land-bound hurricane on the Weather Channel. You know the story will end in destruction, but you can’t help wondering when and where it will hit. Those looking for happy endings, or even happy moments, won’t find them here…
Victor Hugo called grief “a divine and terrible radiance which transfigures the wretched,” and anyone who has ever found himself touching the sleeve of his father’s favorite jacket on the day after his funeral, gazing at the toy-strewn floor in a dead child’s playroom, or surveying the carnage on a…
It would be easy, and tempting, to hail Kandahar as a masterpiece without even seeing it: It’s a foreign film, it takes on social issues, it’s directed by Iranian master Mohsen Makhmalbaf, it speaks to the causes of our war on terror, and it first hit U.S. shores right as…
In 1996 playwright, activist, and screenwriter Eve Ensler gave birth not to a child but to a play known as The Vagina Monologues. The work — featuring three women waxing lyrical about good, bad, and ugly aspects of the vagina — has grown to be quite a precocious child: enjoying…
Cuban poet José Martí compared Miami’s most beloved cycad, the palm tree, to forlorn girlfriends who await the return of long-lost lovers. In the Miami context, they’d wait for exiles to return to a free Cuba. Whatever. Flanked by a row of the island nation’s native royal palms, Martí’s words…
“Are we gonna play chicken here, Robert? Who’s gonna go first?” That’s Chris Moore talking, from the other end of a cell phone–the preferred means of communication for the Hollywood producer too afraid of standing still. Moore–a producer of Good Will Hunting and the American Pie films, partner with Ben…
Cupid became a cue for creative contemplation in February. On Valentine’s Day Sherry Gaché presented Real Love, a performance and installation display of blown-up multilingual love letters, at a handsomely refurbished Green Door Gallery. Put aside your conventional idea of love and enjoy four couples as they unabashedly make out…
“The word cool in my day meant low temperature, nothing more,” explains Morton Glosser, real estate broker, avocado and lychee grower, human hotline for the South Florida Bluegrass Association, harmonica and banjo player, and founder of the bluegrass group Corn Country, where he goes by the alias Pop Corn. A…
Verbal and pictorial hosannas to the strawberry have been rolling in for eons. In 1795 gentleman farmer, founding father, and future two-dollar-bill poster boy Thomas Jefferson, noted for raising strawberries on his Virginia plantation, wrote to his chum James Monroe that, in Jefferson’s not-so-humble opinion, the plant was one of…
Theater comes in all shapes and sizes, from loud, lavish, traditional musicals to small-cast, single-set dramas. The most intimate of all, the solo performance, offers a chance for direct audience/actor connection and an opportunity to take on material that might be too risky for a larger venture. Two such shows…
“Pray for us.” So ends a note Judd Apatow sent out last week to television critics who have been supportive of his series Undeclared, among the few half-hour comedies to debut last fall with any modicum of acclaim and expectation. Set at a northern California university and populated by awkward…
