Somewhere in the meat-packing district in downtown Manhattan, behind a nondescript door in an unremarkable building, about 100,000 reels of film sit in stacks on twelve-foot-high metal shelves, and in unruly piles on the concrete floor. The titles taped to the sides of each canister — The Honey Industry, Resistance…
Even though he was actually born on July 3, legendary Broadway showman George M. Cohan (1878-1942) didn’t let the matter of a few hours stop him from proclaiming Independence Day his birthday. Immortalized by Hollywood’s Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) and Broadway’s George M!(1968), the theatrical producer/actor/playwright/songwriter fostered America’s growing nationalism…
The summer doldrums have taken their toll on the South Florida art scene. Most local galleries and museums, it seems, have been on vacation — or might as well have been. With few culturally minded out-of-towners to cater to and with Miami art aficionados off at the Venice Biennial or…
thursday august 28 Big Wig: From New Jersey, the state that gave the world Bruce Springsteen, the Misfits, and Bon Jovi, among others, comes Big Wig — a hyper-catchy melodic-core band that packs a punk punch. The band’s recent album, UnMerry Melodies (on Fearless Records), boasts a dozen fast-paced, moshibly…
If you’re nostalgic for the cockeyed let-it-all-out gabfests of the late John Cassavetes, She’s So Lovely will seem like dejà vu all over again. Cassavetes wrote the script more than a decade ago, and now his son Nick, whose first feature, Unhook the Stars, starred his mother, Gena Rowlands, has…
Excess Baggage, Alicia Silverstone’s first feature from her First Kiss Productions, turns out to be a rather shaggy and uninvolving jaunt. As Emily T. Hope, the moneyed teenager looking for love from her emotionally distant single dad (Jack Thompson), Silverstone pouts a lot while trying to wring our sympathy. Even…
The sky was as dark as an actress’s roots when I pulled into the lot of Fort Lauderdale’s Studio Theatre, where the newly formed Actors’ Project has set up shop. For its first move on the local scene, the company is flexing its muscles with the musical Song of Singapore,…
thursday august 21 Frugal Indulgents: It’s hard to be a broke twentysomething with expensive tastes. When you have Donna Karan tastes and a Clothestime budget, having an empty wallet seems to be a constant rebuke. But don’t despair — Jennifer Griffin, one of the authors of Frugal Indulgents: How to…
Mike Leigh’s new film Career Girls is compact and minor. I don’t mean that as a slam, exactly. After the dawdling expansiveness of last year’s Secrets & Lies, his latest one is something of a relaxation — it’s appealingly small-scale. Leigh isn’t doing anything here he hasn’t done better before…
In G.I. Jane, Demi Moore plays a naval intelligence officer, Lt. Jordan O’Neil, who is recruited to be the first female SEAL. She gets a buzzcut. She endures the indignities of the male volunteers snickering at her in the food line. She rolls huge barrels through the surf and clambers…
When the beautiful entomologist rips open the chest cavity of a huge bloodthirsty insect in the sci-fi nightmare Mimic, it turns into Thoracic Park. This movie, like Spielberg’s, features evolution gone haywire and dramaturgy gone to hell. In the prologue, the heroine — the reckless and courageous (or foolhardy and…
Looking for something different, I turned to the movie listings. Bad idea. Speed 2, Batman and Robin, George of the Jungle: a bevy of tired sequels and spinoffs that sent me fleeing back to the theater capsules, where I opted for Shakespeare. Ahhhh, why bother with Hollywood hacks when the…
Ann Lorraine Labriola’s sculpture Stargazer sits on the ocean floor five miles southeast of Key West in eighteen feet of water. On a brilliantly sunny Saturday afternoon recently, a light breeze wrinkled the surface as the artist and her boyfriend approached the site in his fishing boat. After the boat…
thursday august 14 Video Rewind: Anchors Away!: The New Times offices are located not far from the WPLG-TV (Channel 10) studios, and occasionally our “Calendar” personnel spot some of that station’s on-air personalities at local lunch joints. We gawk, we attempt to eavesdrop, we try to remember exactly which Diane…
The cops in Cop Land carry on like a bunch of goombahs. On the take from the Mob, they mimic the Mob. The fuzzy line dividing cops and crooks is the subject of many a strong police movie, but Cop Land goes a step further — it says there is…
In the not-so-brave new world of independent filmmaking, low-budget movies premiere at Sundance or Cannes and win plaudits from over-psyched audiences, publicity from desperate feature writers, and distribution from boutiques that are usually subsidiaries of major studios. Right now Tarantino-style thrillers are out; crazy-clan stories and upstairs-downstairs tales are in…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
