The John Grisham industry has claimed another heavyweight. Late in 1997 Francis Ford Coppola delivered up John Grisham’s The Rainmaker, and now Robert Altman sails into view with The Gingerbread Man, based on an “original” Grisham story, although it’s basically a recycling of other Grisham recyclings. Who would have guessed…
From its very first frame, Neil Jordan’s The Butcher Boy whooshes us inside the rollicking, deranged world of twelve-year-old Francie Brady (Eamonn Owens). Francie is a redheaded rascal who lives with his alcoholic “Da” (Stephen Rea) and screw-loose mother (Aisling O’Sullivan) in a small town in the north of Ireland…
Crack open a playwright whose career has just gotten under way and you’ll more than likely find a dreamer wrestling with the ghost of Anton Chekhov. American theater festivals are littered with reworkings of The Three Sisters, the Chekhov classic in which characters saddled with longing speak of the day…
“It doesn’t get much cheaper than this,” declares furniture designer and artist Matthew Zbornik. “There’s so much openness to create here. If you have an imagination and you have the energy, it’s like, do it.” Zbornik “does it” — making curvy yet functional furniture from wood and metal — at…
They’ll be no talk of booze and broads when vocalist Walt Andrus joins the Don Wilner Quartet to perform A Tribute to the Music of Frank Sinatra this weekend. You see, Andrus doesn’t need Scotch and gender slurs to emulate Ol’ Blue Eyes. He is not an impersonator, a subspecies…
Thursday April 9 You want to write a novel but are daunted by the prospect. All those characters to develop. How do writers do it? Ask Donald Antrim, whose delightfully wacky novel The Hundred Brothers is populated by 100 characters — all of them brothers. The siblings range in age…
If nothing else, The Big One, the current edition of Michael Moore’s continuing self-love fest, has a great subject: the desperation hidden inside a “thriving” U.S. economy. While politicians and financial wizards point to unemployment on the wane and profits on the rise, Moore notes that the largest employer in…
When you think about how some of the smartest, most surprising films about women have been made by men — and vice versa — you start to realize that directors should dare to speak for the other gender more often. Few filmmakers know the ritual bonds and betrayals of men…
Moments after the legendary showboat Cotton Blossom pulls up to its Natchez, Mississippi, berth, skipper-cum-thespian Cap’n Andy, declares, “You’ve never seen a show like this before.” Chances are, though, you’ve seen many shows like this before. Indeed, you may have even performed in a show like this. Show Boat –…
The genius of choreographer Twyla Tharp’s brilliant three-decade career has largely resided in her ability to combine athletic bravado with balletic emotion, instilling the dance vernacular with virtuosity by wedding everyday movement to the romance of the stage. Musically, Tharp has been all over the map. Mining both the ubiquitous…
Thursday April 2 For the past fifteen years the Dade Heritage Trust (the county’s largest historic preservation organization) has sponsored Dade Heritage Days, a celebration spotlighting South Florida’s architecture, environment, and history. This year’s theme is “A River of History,” and for the next six weeks more than 100 events…
When you think about Luciano Pavarotti, you probably don’t think about Brazilian cinema. Unless, of course, you’re Adriana Dutra, executive director of the Brazilian Film Festival of Miami, which is about to unspool its second season with a free April 4 beachfront showing of Sandra Werneck’s romantic comedy Little Book…
Lovers of American movies used to joke that foreign films wouldn’t seem so good if you saw them without subtitles. John Sayles’s new movie Men with Guns plays better than his previous films because it does have subtitles. Bald dialogue always sounds better in Spanish or in Indian dialects. Set…
Though critics often compared Virginia Woolf’s nonlinear, almost Cubist narratives to the then burgeoning cinema’s use of montage, closeups, flashbacks, tracking shots, and rapid cuts, the strength of Woolf’s novels lies in the rhythm of her arresting style, and in her heroines’ poignant and melancholic musings, which insidiously seep through…
When Seinfeld fans joke ad nauseum that the popular TV show is “about nothing,” they mean that the sitcom doesn’t have a traditional story hook. There’s no overarching premise along the lines of, say, “Widowed dad raises three kids with help from Japanese housekeeper.” But even when a script offers…
Thursday March 26 Thomas Lynch often walks among the dead. He’s not a zombie. He’s an undertaker and a writer. Lynch, who works as a funeral director in Michigan, has had poems and essays published in The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, the Paris Review, and Harper’s. He’s…
During good times, it seems only fitting that we remind ourselves how bad times once were and could become again. This weekend academics from all over the country will flock to Miami to discuss just that — the good and bad old days — at Perspectives on New Deal America:…
“You ever see all the stunts that get done on-stage or in a film ? How [actors] take all those falls, kicks, punches, how they pull hair?” asks Stewart Solomon, president-owner of Creative WorkShops in Aventura. “That’s what this is.” This being an intensive two-day workshop in unarmed Combat for…
Probably every film director itches to make a Western, so let’s be thankful that, with The Newton Boys, Richard Linklater has scratched his itch. Now he can go back to making movies about subjects he has some genuine feeling for. Linklater should not be begrudged his chance to “stretch.” But…
In the male-dominated sport of sailing, women were once viewed as the weaker vessel, docile and helpless — not aggressive enough to take on an opponent on the high seas, not strong enough to manage basic tasks such as hoisting sails and trimming sheets. Men frowned on using women as…
His hands cupped to the sides of his face to block out the late afternoon sun’s glare, Paul George peers through the glass doors of a small mausoleum with the words “Somoza/Portocarrero” cut into the mottled marble just above his head. Inside, a four-foot-wide by eight-foot-long space. Mostly white marble…
Thursday March 19 An evening of sizzling song and dazzling dance awaits those who attend tonight’s Spanish Spectacular, presented by the Miami City Ballet. Topping the bill is Spain’s leading stage and recording star Paloma San Basilio, who, since launching her career in 1975, has starred in several television shows,…
