On a recent morning in Little Haiti, geese honk, a rooster crows, and a goat named Michelle Jordan pokes around the kitchen of the Earth N’ Us Farm, two acres of enchanted tropical forest, vegetable gardens, fantastic tree houses, honeycombs, and compost heaps hidden behind an unassuming wooden fence. Brother-and-sister-homesteaders…
Miss Julie and The Stronger.
Written by August Strindberg. Directed by Rafael de Acha. With Iris Delgado, Marta Velasco, Israel Garcia, Robert Maxwell, Lucia McArthur. Through September 5. New Theatre, 65 Almeria Ave, Coral Gables, 3054435909.
Actress Elizabeth Dimon was so delightfully adroit this past spring in the Caldwell Theatre Company’s production of The King’s Mare and the Florida Stage’s Quills that it should surprise no one that she walks away with the part of Cissy, the female half of the comic pair of lovers in…
It has been almost 40 years since Eric Rohmer, riding the crest of the French New Wave, embarked on the first of his Six Moral Tales. The series eventually would include at least two classics: My Night at Maud’s (1969) and Chloe in the Afternoon (1972). Linked by theme, style,…
If Kevin Williamson has anything to say about it, the good works of noble movie schoolteachers like Mr. Chips and Miss Dove and Mr. Holland will be wiped out in one fell swoop. In their place the creator of TV’s hormonal Dawson’s Creek series proposes an unmitigated horror: a high…
Filmmaker Bobby Bowfinger, the lead character in the intermittently funny Hollywood satire Bowfinger, starring Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy, has a dream: He sees a FedEx truck cruising down the street toward his office, but instead of driving by, as it does every day, the truck stops, and the driver…
Spike and Mike’s 1999 Classic Festival of Animation, Spike and Mike’s latest edition of their annual festival (which is definitely not to be confused with their grosser, inferior Sick and Twisted fests) is their best compilation yet. There’s not a single stiff in the batch. The material is all new…
As any half-assed ascetic can tell you, there’s nothing in life that must be done. You do not have to eat. Or sleep. Or even breathe. If you allow yourself to suffer because you lack food or sleep or air, it is only because you desire to live in the…
Famous snakes in history: the slithery Svengali in the garden of Eden. The randy reptile in the Jungle Book. The colossal creature in Anaconda. Of course the proverbial snake in the grass. And bald, beady-eyed political consultant James Carville, whose wife Mary Matalin lovingly dubbed him “Serpent Head.” None of…
Time does not exist. It’s simply a human concept, completely invalid in terms of reality and Truth (in the Kantian, transcendent sense of Truth). You are being born, you are living in the moment you’re in, you are dying. You always have been and always will be. You are part…
Further evidence that they don’t make movies like they used to, or maybe just the first sign of the apocalypse: Runaway Bride, the Julia Roberts/Richard Gere fluff fantasy, is number one at the box office. For fans of serious cinema, disheartening to say the least. But as Hollywood directors continue…
Joan Chen, director and co-writer of Xiu Xiu the Sent Down Girl, is best known as an actress: American audiences probably identify her most readily as the doomed wife in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor or as Josie Packard, the alternately evil and innocent character in David Lynch’s weird-o-rama Twin…
London-born novelist-screenwriter Hanif Kureishi doesn’t have Margaret Thatcher to kick around anymore, as he did so incisively and effectively in My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, but his concerns have not wandered too far afield. Rather the hard edges merely have been softened. Universal issues still inspire…
Do not be fooled: Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley, and Peter Criss receive top billing in Detroit Rock City, but Kiss doesn’t actually appear in the film until its final three minutes. And when the band members do show up, clad in their de rigueur leather-and-greasepaint getups, it’s simply…
Dan Ireland’s impressive debut feature The Whole Wide World died quietly at the box office despite making many a critic’s ten-best list for 1996. His followup, The Velocity of Gary, may suffer the same fate, given its modest budget and a story line focused on male bisexuality. That would be…
When he was 107 years old, the story goes, Broadway legend George Abbott was asked what he thought was the most important development in the theater to have taken place in his lifetime. His answer: “Electricity.” Although his active career as an actor, director, and producer spanned some six decades…
Socrates and Plato, Emerson and Thoreau, Mr. Kotter and Vinnie Barbarino — the history of Western civilization is cluttered with memorable teacher-student pairs, each bringing its unique dynamic to one of the most powerful relationships in humankind. It’s no surprise that quite a few twentieth-century dramas, from Educating Rita to…
First published under the title The Iron Man in Great Britain in 1968, The Iron Giant is a minor classic of twentieth-century children’s literature. The slim volume by the English poet laureate Ted Hughes is a pacifist parable in the guise of a sci-fi hero fantasy. Hughes spun his yarn…
It’s always amusing when the movie industry discovers its spiritual side. Profoundly secular institution that it is, Hollywood promotes, at its peril, the notion that teenagers spewing pea soup in Georgetown can be purged of their demons by Catholic priests, that angels from heaven intercede in the lives of ballplayers…
In the highly competitive, dog-eat-dog world of the modern-day superhero, the members of the group that eventually becomes known as the Mystery Men (they don’t really have a name through most of the movie) start out with a couple of strikes against them. First off there’s the little matter of…
“Once I started listening to jazz, it wasn’t hard to realize it was very soulful, high-quality music that you could get totally engaged with. Good jazz doesn’t get dated.” Thus says Michael Chertok, who runs the Chertok Archives, one of the nation’s most extensive collections of jazz performances. And Chertok…
Walk into Miami’s Museum of Science on the second, third, or fourth Wednesday of any given month, and the cross-section of gray Tolstoyan beards, gelled Caesar haircuts, Pushkinian muttonchop sideburns, and assorted facial piercings might remind you of an L.A. film-school version of The Brothers Karamazov. The surreal effect deepens…
