“Sometimes you go into the studio and it works well. The first seven times it didn’t work,” says mixed-media artist Annie Wharton about the eventually successful project she made from cement, wood, pigments, and photo transfers for the exhibition, The Art of Work, the Work of Art, which goes on…
The great attorneys of our time — Tom Cruise, Susan Sarandon, Tom Hanks — must now make room in the firm for a new partner. John Travolta, who in past lives has been a disco king, a hip hit man, and a deep-fried presidential candidate, reinvents himself in A Civil…
The relentless charm of Kirk Jones’s Waking Ned Devine lies in its embrace of two lovable Irish geezers who manage to work beautiful mischief on the world, in the raw beauty of their sun-splashed coastal village, and in the general notion that Ireland is the land of poetic conversations, enduring…
Denmark was the first Scandinavian country to have a film industry, but with the exception of the revered Carl Dreyer (The Passion of Joan of Arc, Ordet), whose career lasted from the middle silent era through the Sixties, the nation’s filmmakers until recently functioned in the shadow of Swedish directors…
Why are years more important than moments? As any Buddhist will tell you, there is no molecular reality in time. It’s just a way our species sorts and measures — a feeble grasp at the intangible. The calendar in use by modern society is arbitrary, random, borderline nonsensical. Leap year?…
A couple of times a year count on Bill Wharton and the Ingredients, modern-day troubadours from Monticello, a little town in Florida’s panhandle, to pass through some juke joints between Del-ray Beach and the Keys. During a New Year’s Eve bash tonight and an encore performance Saturday, Wharton (a.k.a. the…
thursday december 31 Too much Christmas shopping may have tapped you out, but it hasn’t dampened your enthusiasm for celebrating New Year’s Eve. Maybe you should take the family, head downtown, and close out 1998 at the Big Orange New Year’s Eve Celebration, the nation’s largest New Year’s bash south…
Silver lining or slender thread? That question nags at me as I go over my best-of-the-year list. There were some terrific movies in 1998 — eight, according to my count. But the average film keeps on getting worse. If movies remain as synthetic and incompetent as they are for the…
When a damsel with golden ring-curls finds herself tied to railroad trestles by a mustachioed villain, or, as in Little Mary Sunshine, strapped to a tree by a vicious Indian, most audience members know that the lady in peril will be rescued momentarily, either by the entire U.S. cavalry, or…
In 1933 producer Merian C. Cooper, director Ernest B. Schoedsack, and pioneering animator Willis O’Brien created one of this century’s most indelible and powerful archetypes: King Kong. Then they did a peculiar thing. As if appalled at what they had wrought, but also delighted at the money it made them,…
The talents of Maya Angelou — she is or has been a teacher, memoirist, prize-winning poet, actress, civil rights activist, editor, playwright, composer, dancer, producer, theater and TV director, and adviser to three presidents — range so far and deep that no feat she accomplishes should come as a surprise…
Call Pablo Cano a romantic, a dreamer, even a junk collector. He doesn’t mind. Junk is his life, although amassing it almost ended his life. The artist, acclaimed for the intricate puppets he creates from found objects, used to skulk around town in the wee hours rifling through people’s trash…
Back in 1981, when the emphasis in Coconut Grove was definitely on the “nut” part, Glenn Terry and seventeen other Grove residents hit upon a most festive holiday-season idea: They’d form a “Mango Marching Band” (instrumentation: conch shells and kazoos) and enter Miami’s King Orange Jamboree Parade. The very traditional…
Given the manipulative tendencies of many mainstream pictures, Stepmom could have easily slipped into a sticky morass of sentimentality and melodrama. Instead, it proves to be a genuinely affecting movie that approaches its adult themes with intelligence, maturity, and rare authenticity. The film stars Susan Sarandon as Jackie, a divorced…
Directed by Walter Salles (1995’s Foreign Land), the Brazilian film Central Station (Central do Brasil) concerns the relationship between a homeless nine-year-old boy and the insensitive, acerbic woman who reluctantly agrees to help him find his father. Winner of the Golden Bear for Best Film at the 1998 Berlin Film…
Geniuses often come across unimpressively in the movies. Amadeus presented Mozart as a giggling fop. Both Kirk Douglas and Tim Roth gave us Van Gogh as a pathetic head case. I.Q.’s Albert Einstein was a Cupid-playing old duffer. Ken Russell’s freaky depictions of Liszt and Mahler speak for themselves. When…
British actress Jane Horrocks is thrice-gifted: She can act, she can sing, and she can sing like Judy Garland. And like Shirley Bassey, Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, and a host of other legendary performers. Horrocks’s ability to mimic the singing and speaking voices of these artists lies at the heart…
thursday december 24 So you’re a nice Jewish boy or girl. A lonely nice Jewish boy or girl. That fact certainly doesn’t help you on Christmas Eve, does it? But console yourself: At least you don’t have to attend some cornball family celebration and drag along a friend who’ll pretend…
In the second half of Steve Dietz’s new play Rocket Man, time moves backwards in an enchanting fashion. The elderly are the newest people on Earth. Teenagers, veterans by comparison, choose the parents who will care for them as they grow younger and more dependent. And on one character’s sweet-sixteen…
At the heart of Pat O’Connor’s rich, bittersweet Dancing at Lughnasa lies the quaint notion that, once upon a time, people, especially women, whose youthful dreams were dashed, might have been able to attain a state of grace, a kind of ascetic nobility to which the rest of the world…
When Delma Isles “defected” from the world of traditional ballet and founded Momentum Dance Company in 1982, the last thing on her mind was staging a version of the Nutcracker. Her troupe was and still is steadfastly dedicated to modern dance, and a ballet set to a Tchaikovsky score is…
Satan’s Enchanted Forest wreaks all the horrors of the holiday on unsuspecting innocents, tormenting young and old alike with vicious wild animals poised to attack and more neon than downtown Vegas. What? Not Halloween? Christmas, you say? Oh, sorry. You might understand our confusion. We are naive to the point…
