Price-gouging hot dog vendors, dollar-copping corporations, testosterone-oozing crowds — all elements of the punk-rock music extravaganza known as the Vans Warped Tour, stopping in South Florida this weekend. Big-name bands Green Day and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones headline this year. What makes this Warped Tour distinctive from the past, however,…
While some critics would say Nathaniel Hawthorne’s dark tales are not of this world, The House of the Seven Gables reveals a work very much of two worlds, or rather two Americas — the new and the old. Woven from the black cloak of Calvinism but enlightened by the threads…
Murphy and Pryor. Skywalker and Kenobi. Amos and Zeppelin. Regardless of the creative universe, the maverick apprentice tends to stride off into territory beyond the edges of the master’s map. So it is with Alan Rudolph, whose career blossomed after serving as assistant director to Robert Altman on Nashville in…
Local pols like to boast of Miami as Hollywood East, and for a few days recently there was some truth behind that hype. The National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP) held its second annual convention at the Eden Roc Resort and Spa in Miami Beach, attended by 330 filmmakers…
Directed by Miguel Arteta. Screenplay by Mike White. Starring Mike White, Chris Weitz, Lupe Ontiveros, Beth Colt, and Paul Weitz.
The usual subjects Miami-based photographer Jamie Robinson shoots are flamboyant drag queens, hunky male exotic dancers, adorable dogs, even the president of the United States. But this weekend at a Biscayne Boulevard art gallery, Robinson, who was a White House videographer during the Carter administration, exhibits fifteen images of women…
In the course of two hours, Neil Gaiman speaks 10,000 words (or damned near, when transcribed), and it seems a shame to waste a single one, since there is not an uh or y’know among them. Even the most eloquent writer gets lost in thought every now and then…uh…y’know? But…
Bryan Singer did not read comic books as a young boy, because he couldn’t read them. As a kid, he was slightly dyslexic and, therefore, unable to follow the dialogue as it bubbled across panels and pages; quite simply, Singer says now, comic books confused him, so the Jersey boy…
The key to great parody is that it hits home in contemporary society. Although Cuban playwright Rolando Ferrer’s play Lila, La Mariposa (Lila, the Butterfly) was meant to be a criticism of Havana and the 1950s when it was first written back in 1954, Teatro Avante’s rendition continues the tradition…
In Bryan Singer’s last movie, 1998’s Apt Pupil, Ian McKellen portrayed a Nazi war criminal hiding out in the suburbs, passing himself off as an ordinary old man crouching behind drawn blinds. In Singer’s new movie, X-Men, McKellen plays Erik Magnus Lehnsherr, the son of Jews who were murdered in…
Why is this film called Disney’s The Kid? Is it really possible the studio was so concerned that someone might actually mistake the film for an update of the Chaplin classic that the brand name had to be formally incorporated into the title? Or was this an attempt to reinforce…
Canadian documentarian Ron Mann, who previously examined aspects of pop culture in Comic Book Confidential (1988) and Twist (1992), takes on a broader and more controversial subject in Grass, a history of America’s second-favorite smokable substance. As he has done before, he provides a sugarcoated crash course on a huge…
“They don’t have a decent piece of fruit at the supermarket. The apples are mealy, the oranges are dry … I don’t know what’s going on with the papayas!” once lamented eccentric, fruit-obsessed Kramer in the long-running sitcom Seinfeld. If the local grocery store is just not cutting it, and…
“There it is. This is the house I was born in and grew up in. It’s still standing. It’s painted but this is not the house I knew,” affirms 68-year-old Silvia Morini in the documentary Our House in Havana. Director Stephen Olsson’s film (screened as part of the Cuban Cinema…
Walking out of the Caldwell Theatre’s production of Snakebit, you can be certain you will not hear a playgoer over age 60 sigh, “Ahhh! To be young again!” This hard-hitting drama leaves no room to fantasize about the potency and possibility of the thirties. Playwright David Marshall Grant’s increasingly complex…
Artists never make art in a void, but autobiographies are more concrete in some peoples’ works than in others. Such is the case with the newly opened Blue Door Art Studio’s “The School of Unlearning” (“La Escuela de Desaprender”), an installation by the intriguing Paloma Figueiro, a 24-year-old Cuban-Brazilian artist…
Is there a more bankrupt genre than the parody movie? So many movies nowadays are so painfully self-aware and referential anyway that there often isn’t much left to make fun of, which is especially the case for Kevin Williamson-penned films like Scream and its clones, clichéd teen slasher movies that…
Director Alison Maclean, from Canada by way of New Zealand, turns her camera on the American landscape — or more accurately the underbelly of the American landscape — in Jesus’ Son, an uneven but often effective adaptation of Denis Johnson’s autobiographical book. Billy Crudup stars as a thoroughly marginalized character…
Film has always turned to classic literature for inspiration, but rare is the film adaptation that dodges the Scylla and Charybdis of the trade: too much reverence leads to inert moviemaking, too little results in parody. In Time Regained Chilean director Raoul Ruiz has taken on the Mount Everest of…
If you’ve ever beat up your little sister just for fun, dyed your hair purple to annoy Dad, or bickered with your spouse over what color shower curtain would look best in the downstairs bathroom, then you understand. Families are weird. They are groups of people who share the same…
Gregory Nava’s Hollywood epic My Family/Mi Familia (1995) turns the travails of a Chicano family in Los Angeles into a saccharine-sweet elegy. Maria Escobedo’s fluffy romantic comedy Rum and Coke (1999) sends a hunky firefighter to rescue the Cuban identity of a confused New York damsel. Ela Troyano’s Latin Boys…
