A bearded man in olive drab spews out a fist-pounding diatribe. A couple gyrates brutally as if trapped in a sadistic rumba. A young man stands motionless with a black box over his head. A girl with a red scarf around her neck pulls it over her face in one…
For almost two decades, Stanley Kubrick wanted to make a film based on Brian Aldiss’s 1969 short story “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long,” about a robot child named David who wants only to be “real” so Mummy and Daddy will love him. The late director of 2001: A Space Odyssey…
The Road Home is the tenth feature from Zhang Yimou, still the mainland Chinese director best known to international audiences. (His closest competition is Chen Kaige, who made Farewell My Concubine and Temptress Moon.) His latest film has a couple of things going for it: It represents a synthesis of…
The subconscious mind is a funny thing. Especially if coaxed to the surface to play and prattle and perform onstage in front of an audience. At least that’s what comic hypnotist Flip Orley banks on at each of his shows, which are fueled by compliant volunteers. Given sold-out engagements at…
It’s the Fourth of July again, the day when everyone across the U.S.A. is supposed to puff up his chest with pride and pat himself on the back for being fortunate enough to live in the land of the free and home of the brave. Well, as free and brave…
Alan Cumming is, in no particular order, the following: an actor, a pop icon, a Renaissance man, a sex symbol, a bon viveur and the boy next door. “I am a combination of all those things,” insists the 36-year-old Scot, who punctuates every other sentence with a sly giggle that…
Ominous techno music engulfs the expectant audience at the Museum of Art Auditorium in Fort Lauderdale. The stage is barren except for a black office chair and desk. The desk is covered with a black cloth. As if the title of the play, The Penis’ Responses to the Vagina Monologues…
Robert Thiele’s exhibition at the Barbara Gillman Gallery makes me think of the end of the world. Not in a paranoid way — I’m not picturing a nuclear attack coming from the skies, or fearing an unforeseen market crash that makes capitalism obsolete. Rather Thiele’s sculptures convey the emptiness, even…
Who would have imagined that at this late date — more than half a century after the end of World War II, after The Diary of Anne Frank, Schindler’s List, Au Revoir, Les Enfants, Pierre Sauvage’s documentary Weapons of the Spirit, and Jan Kadar’s amazing The Shop on Main Street…
If internal combustion ever becomes obsolete — that is, if the auto industry ever allows internal combustion to become obsolete — whatever will movies do for heart-stopping drama? Hoof beats are dramatic, and the chug of a steam engine is suspenseful, but the roar of a gasoline-powered vehicle stirs the…
He’s a cowboy. He’s a construction worker. He’s a sailor. And a leather man. Anatomically correct — okay, he’s hung like a horse — and buff as a bodybuilder, he’s Billy the gay doll. Dreamed up by designer John McKitterick and debuted in a limited edition for a 1994 AIDS…
Bat dance, monkey dance, dance of the little horsemen. Small flutes called pitos and a giant gourd marimba. For the past decade, Grupo Cultural Uk’ux Pop Wuj (“the heart of the writings of the ancestors”), a community of Quiché Maya Indians from Chichicastenango, Guatemala, has actively sought to excavate its…
For the next five days, Richard Lewis will seldom leave his North Dallas hotel room, hidden away at the far end of the top floor with a view of overpasses, office buildings and distant dark clouds. He will venture out only to visit a couple of radio and television stations,…
Like apparitions rolling in from the sea, four rafters descend down the aisles from the back of the darkened Colony Theater toward the stage. Pedro (Luis Alberto Garcia), a soldier, crouches and peers excitedly through a telescope. Octavio (Gerardo Riveron) enters with a compass. Devoto (Jorge Hernandez), dressed as a…
In the annals of social change, Alma Schindler is strictly small potatoes, and Bruce Beresford’s new biopic, Bride of the Wind, unwittingly threatens to erase her altogether. For those who don’t have the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at their fingertips, Alma (Sarah Wynter) was an outspoken party girl from…
Up for a quick trip across the United States? If you can’t spare the time and gas money, an alternative might be the “road” movies currently screening as part of the Reel America Film Series at the Wolfsonian-FIU in Miami Beach. The idea behind the minifestival is to “explore travel…
Sabrina Matthews, a self-professed flannel-shirt-wearing truck-driving dyke who employs the word butcher as an adjective (“If I was butcher….”), and Jason Stuart, a goateed gay actor and comedian from a “very crazy and lovable Jewish family” who has a proclivity for leather and Speedos. Put them together and you have…
Watch your back for flying debris: Miami landmarks are falling fast. Witness the recent demolition of the 1899 house owned by Miami’s first doctor, James Jackson (as in Jackson Memorial Hospital), ranked second on Dade Heritage Trust’s list of the Ten Most Endangered Historic Sites just a short time ago…
At this moment, Baz Luhrmann, control freak and self-proclaimed ringleader of conspirators “who conspire to something greater than ourselves,” is not in control at all. The cameraman trailing behind him, like a faithful puppy awaiting treats, does not work for the director; rather, he is in the employ of the…
When Sonia (Connie SaLoutos), an aspiring lyricist, meets successful composer Vernon (Dan Kelley) in They’re Playing Our Song, she hesitates while searching for the right words to describe his work: “Your music is, well, universally embraced…. I don’t want to use the word commercial.” Ironically adjectives like commercial have plagued…
Fernando Garcia’s paintings are crafty enough to bring to mind Plato’s distrust of art. For the Greek philosopher, by attempting to become more real than reality, painting was a deceiving art form. But in fact Garcia’s work makes you relish the delicate balance between perception and illusion. Is that really…
When he was in his thirties, Ivan Reitman made comedies like a young man. His early movies, among them Stripes, Meatballs, and Ghostbusters, were messy, cocky, charming, daffy, and restless; they did anything for a laugh, even if that meant dousing John Candy in mud or Bill Murray in a…
