Men Behaving Badly

In the Company of Men is about Chad (Aaron Eckhart) and Harold (Matt Malloy), two thirtysomething white-collar execs who have recently been passed up for promotions and rejected by their girlfriends. En route to a six-week business trip to the home office, Chad, the bristlier and wilier of the two,…

On the Road Again

With an ad in the New York Times that reads “Never out of style … but heading out of town,” Full Gallop is just one of the Big Apple’s current hits now packing its trunk for a road tour that will include a stop in South Florida. During a recent…

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thursday august 7 Quartetto Gelato: The Coral Gables Congregational Church (3010 DeSoto Blvd., Coral Gables) continues its summer concert series with some sophisticated eclecticism. Toronto-based classical-crossover group Quartetto Gelato — made up of tenor-violinist-mandolin player Peter De Sotto, oboe and English horn player Cynthia Steljes, violist and accordion player Claudio…

Road Worrier

Jerry Fletcher, the hero of Conspiracy Theory, is a comic, glamorous variation on Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Like Travis, he’s a New York cabbie obsessed with protecting a woman from the world’s hidden malignancies. Unlike Travis, Jerry snaps when he achieves sanity. Mel Gibson has been almost too willing…

Winged Victory

For decades, when theater folk used the word angels, they were referring to those rare investors who could miraculously save productions with their financial backing, but whose good will proved to be as difficult to attain as divine providence. In 1993, Angels with a capital a became the theatrical buzzword,…

Major Percussion

Local residents often lament Miami’s lack of culture: no stellar museum collections, a dearth of first-run, first-rate theater, frequent snubs by rock and pop stars who bypass us on their U.S. tours, and so on. But while many sit and bitch about our relative poverty in the fine arts as…

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thursday july 31 Florida Marlins: Someday they will talk with reverence about the Atlanta Braves. Extraordinary. Dynastic. Unbelievable. Dominant. When the historians look back on organized baseball in the Nineties, they will look at Atlanta. In the past eight years the Braves have won a World Series championship and four…

Learning Disabled

187, a number favored by adolescent thugs, is the California state penal code for homicide — and a harsh sentence for all involved in this hopeless, hapless movie. The gifted Samuel L. Jackson stars as a high school teacher who cracks under the constant threat of rabid teen machismo and…

Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places

In Picture Perfect Jennifer Aniston tells a whopper of a lie partially to win the attentions of a guy who has heretofore ignored her, interrupts a wedding, and humiliates another guy at his workplace. This follows on the heels of My Best Friend’s Wedding, which finds Julia Roberts trying to…

Backstage Passes

In a variation on the St. Patrick’s Day saying about the Irish, in South Florida theater these days there are two types of shows: those that are Jewish and those that wish they were. Eager to reach the vast numbers of ticket buyers among the region’s sizable Jewish population, producers…

Last Tango in Tokyo

At first glance, the new Japanese comedy Shall We Dance? appears to be an Asian remake of the Australian hit Strictly Ballroom. But in fact the similarities are only surface-deep, and just barely that. Part of the difference is rooted in the cultural gap between the two nations, but wider…

A Royal Pain

Mrs. Brown (a Cannes hit and Miramax release) is dignified to the dead max — brownish-gray in mood and look and spirit. It’s based on the true story of the platonic but controversial bond between Queen Victoria (Judi Dench) and a Highlander named John Brown (Billy Connolly), who had been…

Point Plank

Not satisfied with the president you have? Here’s Harrison Ford’s James Marshall in Air Force One: Vietnam war hero, straight as a ramrod, devoted husband and father. We first see him delivering a speech before a roomful of Russian dignitaries. Departing from the prepared, wishy-washy text, Mr. President fire-breathes his…

A Beach Too Far

It’s been said that all you need to create theater is two planks and a passion. With its basic platform stage, South Beach’s EDGE/Theatre comes raggedly close to meeting the first criterion. As for the second, Jim Tommaney, the company’s artistic director and general manager, supplies the requisite passion in…

Paintings from the Edge

In a painting on paper that hangs just inside the door of Miami-Dade Community College’s InterAmerican Gallery on SW 27th Avenue, a man screams. The cartoonish figure’s mouth is wide open, his beady eyes popping, conveying a darkly comic sense of slow-burning distress. Joseph Oakes, the artist, a resident of…

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thursday july 24 Arthur Hailey: Author of mega best sellers Hotel (which eventually became a long-running television series starring Barbra Streisand’s current honey-pie James Brolin and Connie Selleca, wife of the musical antichrist, a.k.a. John Tesh) and Airport (turned into a hit movie with a superfluity of screaming), Hailey is…

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thursday july 17 Zo’s Summer Groove: Under all that scowling and snarling he does on the court, the Miami Heat’s Alonzo Mourning has a soft spot for kids. This weekend Zo hosts a series of charity events for children, including tonight’s kickoff Mourning Knight Gala, a black-tie dinner at 6:30…

Dead Man Working

What must those poor guys in Insane Clown Posse be thinking? After all, the sad white rap act only made a record that included profanity, and still they got drop-kicked off a panicky Disney-owned Hollywood Records, a label whose greatest catalogue asset is Queen. Martin Lawrence, on the other hand,…

Silver Standard

When the producers at Miami Beach’s Area Stage and Coral Gables’s Florida Shakespeare Theatre discovered several weeks ago both troupes had scheduled a South Florida premiere of a work by the same playwright, they decided to join forces and create what they’re calling the Nicky Silver Play Festival. During the…

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thursday july 10 Franco-Hispanic Film Festival: Celebrate French independence with a four-day festival of recent films co-produced by French- and Spanish-speaking nations, at CocoWalk 16 Theatres (3015 Grand Ave., Coconut Grove). Tonight’s opening gala features the Florida premiere of Raul Ruiz’s Franco-Chilean 1996 film Genealogies d’un Crime (Genealogy of a…

A French Foreign Legion

Just in time for Bastille Day, the consulate general of France in Florida and CocoWalk 16 Theatres are offering the inaugural Franco-Hispanic Film Festival (July 11 through 13; see “Showtimes” or “Calendar Listings” for a complete schedule), whose raison d’etre appears to be to spotlight cinema that’s co-produced or co-distributed…

Space Suet

A lot of ink has been shed in the press lately about the “seriousness” of the new Robert Zemeckis film Contact, starring Jodie Foster as an astronomer who receives humankind’s first extraterrestrial message. Forrest Gump made Zemeckis a guru; now he’s being primed as a philosopher king. Just abouxt every…