Long before the Pope’s visit filled the world’s television screens with pictures of Havana, local audiences were imagining contemporary Cuba in the darkness of the MDCC Wolfson Campus auditorium. Since 1993 the Wolfson Cuban Cinema Series, organized by Alejandro Rios, has presented films and videos portraying Cuban life from every…
Most people associate the disco era with hedonism, homosexuality, a sense of community, tacky fashions, and awful music. But in his new The Last Days of Disco, writer-director Whit Stillman imagines the era as merely a singles bar for romantics in search of soulmates, mostly heterosexual and hardly debauchees. The…
The Truman Show, starring Jim Carrey, is the Zeitgeist movie of the hour. How could it not be? It’s all about the omnipotence of television and how our lives seem scripted by some unseen force — a TV producer, perhaps? Zeitgeist movies, almost by definition, are discussed not only by…
There’s nothing like a loud bang at the end of Act One to make you impatient for the end of the intermission so you can scurry back to your seat and find out what happens next. Especially if that bang shreds every notion you had about the play up to…
thursday may 28 Heard at spas and wellness centers around the world, the jazzy new-age music of guitarist Nicholas is said by some to have healing qualities. Find out for yourself how soothing the sounds can be as he performs two shows at South Beach’s new wine and champagne bar…
After working for eight years as a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Chris Mancini retreated into private practice. That was in 1987. He still thrives on crime, though — for fun. Along with historian Paul George, Mancini has conducted the Miami Murder, Mystery, and Mayhem Tour since 1995. What…
For a guy who possesses such a refined touch when it comes to designing objects and interiors, Philippe Starck can be downright clumsy with words. Three years ago, just as the snazzy Starck-ified Delano Hotel was set to open, the Frenchman candidly decried Miami’s terrible style and lack of sophistication…
Only one week after lizards crawled across the country’s screens in Godzilla and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, along comes the bloated Hope Floats, toting a barge full of saccharine sentimentality and bogus emotions. Let’s start with the title, two words whose juxtaposition is neither evocative nor yielding of…
The “Size Does Matter” marketing campaign for Godzilla is far more ingenious than the actual movie. It’s also highly annoying, and has spawned a spinoff: The ads for a new film called Plump Fiction inform us that “Width matters too.” Perhaps the best thing about the much-ballyhooed arrival of Godzilla…
Of all the theatrical hams that have wandered across the stage of American pop culture, none have endeared themselves as much as the tiny papier-mache morsel that wanders home atop the legs of Scout Finch near the end of To Kill a Mockingbird. She has just appeared in a school…
One thing South Florida probably doesn’t need: more hot air. You got your embattled politicians proclaiming innocence. You got your drag queens loudly signifying up and down Washington Avenue. You got Cuban Americans of every political stripe huffing and puffing in each other’s faces. Well, prepare for a bit more…
“The world sucks sometimes. The world is great. Then it sucks again. But you’ve got to be able to laugh.” So declares Charlotte Glover, writer, actress, and ad hoc publicist for Punch 59, which bills itself as South Florida’s only skit comedy troupe. “Mentally imbalanced for your amusement,” proclaims the…
thursday may 21 So what’s with all these lawyers turned authors? Brad Meltzer, who grew up in North Miami Beach, joins brethren Scott Turow and John Grisham as attorneys who now spend most of their time pecking out fiction rather than worrying about billable hours. Meltzer has already enjoyed a…
It’s the tail end of the 1996 California primary election campaign and incumbent Democratic senator Jay Bulworth (Warren Beatty) is having a nervous breakdown. Sleepless for days, famished, he channel-surfs aimlessly in the darkness of his office. In a rare moment of lucidity, he has an inspiration: He arranges to…
In director Barbara Kopple’s new documentary Wild Man Blues, we follow Woody Allen around Europe as he takes part in a whirlwind concert tour with the New Orleans-style jazz band with which he plays. He kvetches from the get-go. “I would rather be bitten by a dog than fly to…
Roughly the size of a double-wide trailer, the performance space at the Hollywood Boulevard Theatre is so small you can stare into the eyes of the actors, size up their varicose veins, and follow the trajectories of their spit with dumbfounding intimacy. As it happens, intimacy, or the spitting image…
Thirty-eight bands, three dance troupes, and a fire-eater are slated to perform at this weekend’s Miami-Little Haiti Roots & Culture Festival. But for Albert Jean Alexis, one of the festival organizers, the crowd is the main event. “What we’re trying to do is bring unity to the community,” explains Alexis…
“You don’t see a lot of it, not even in Egypt,” admits Jihan Jamal. “They think of it as a dying art.” Dressed in a black leotard with a long scarf-like affair tied at the waist, Jamal (her professional name) could be any dance instructor in any mirror-lined dance studio…
thursday may 14 Since 1985 the folks at Louis Wolfson II Media History Center have been collecting, preserving, cataloguing, and making the public aware of film and video materials about Florida’s history and culture. The center has grown into one of the largest and most active institutions of its kind…
Most disaster movies would be a lot better if they featured more disaster and less human drama. In Deep Impact the impending obliteration of much of the Earth by a pair of comets is merely the sideshow. The main event is a lot of goopy human-interest stuff: the daughter who…
The Horse Whisperer, the latest from Robert Redford — and the first of his directorial efforts in which he also stars — could almost serve as a compendium of Redford’s best and worst filmmaking tendencies. It features his eye for gorgeous, pictorial vistas, his straightforward narrative approach, and, most important,…
Of the potentially kooky types of people that could be dumped into a play — lawyers, clairvoyants, fast-food servers, and dying parents — the most unwieldy are the clairvoyants. Even if an audience buys the notion of second sight, the playwright is still stuck with a peculiar problem: how to…
