Forget Independence Day. If you really want to see Earth get it, you can’t do any better than Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! It’s a destructo orgy orchestrated without any phony-baloney sanctimony about the fellowship of man — or spaceman. Burton isn’t interested in intergalactic amity; he’s not even interested in…
Some amusing stuff about sports agentry drowns in the emotional shallows of Jerry Maguire, which stars Tom Cruise (in the title role) as a hotshot dealmaker whose first bout of conscience torpedoes his future at his firm, the monolithic Sports Management International. After visiting a hospitalized hockey player who skates…
Since his debut as a novelist in 1963, Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa has been surprising the public. Not only does he move with stylistic ease between forms (novels, short stories, criticism, journalism, essays, plays) and genres (political allegories, mysteries, erotica), he wreaks havoc with literary conventions in his fiction…
Everyone’s aware that going to a mall during the holiday season will probably make you feel sick. Still, a lot of people who know better end up there anyway, with that pre-Christmas sale-induced consumer hysteria that leads to purchasing a mountain of stuff you would probably never even look at…
thursday december 5 Orquideas a la Luz de la Luna (Orchids in the Moonlight): The 3rd Street Black Box (in the San Villa Oriental Restaurant, 230 NE Third St.) collaborates with Peru’s Jucare Theater Group to perform Carlos Fuentes’s play about two sultry Mexican film stars and the impact of…
It’s impossible to capture on the printed page the anticipatory thrill of hearing Sylvester Stallone handle rapid-fire dialogue: the rumbling basso voice, the twisted mouth valiantly trying to wrap itself around an unruly stream of words, the consonants and vowels hurling forward like a toppled barrel of oranges. Will any…
Not long into the low-key 1994 Chinese murder drama The Day the Sun Turned Cold, writer/ director/producer Yim Ho serves up a defining moment in the marriage of husband Guan Shichang (Ma Jing Wu), the school principal in a rural village, and Pu Fengying (Si Ching Gao Wa), his tofu-making…
A bare-bones synopsis of Christopher Durang’s 1987 comedy Laughing Wild would read like a magic-realist love affair in which the protagonists meet cute: A man and a woman share a brief encounter in the aisle of a Manhattan grocery store. The woman relays her version of the meeting in a…
thursday november 28 White Party Week: If you haven’t already bought those $125 tix to Sunday’s big White Party at Villa Vizcaya (3251 S. Miami Ave.), you’re outta luck. But don’t despair: A bevy of social events has been structured around the bash, turning it into a five-day party extravaganza…
In the post-Babe era, can you make a live-action movie about animals and not have them talk to each other? For me, this is the deep philosophical question raised by Disney’s new 101 Dalmatians, a live-action remake of the studio’s 1961 animated feature — in which, by the way, the…
In the golden age of Hollywood, no less than the likes of Frank Capra owned Christmas on the big screen. But if you want Proof No. 496 of how far things have fallen, consider that in the Nineties holiday cinema is a wholly owned subsidiary of Chris Columbus — hired…
Thomas Hardy wrote Jude the Obscure in the mid-1890s, and to those of us professional critics who sometimes question the efficacy of our calling, it is considerably reassuring to note that the savage reception of the book actually discouraged Hardy from producing any more novels. Later on, English majors the…
A wavering light spins on the dark stage floor as an actor’s voice booms from the sound system, reciting a speech from Antony and Cleopatra. “Come, let us have one more gaudy night,” the voice beseeches. The stage lights rise and the actor staggers into view, pulling a costume rack…
One year ago last month the Wolfsonian opened its ornate gates on Washington Avenue in Miami Beach with much fanfare and a spectacular inaugural exhibition. “Designing Modernity: The Arts of Reform and Persuasion” has since embarked on an international tour. The show, which explores major modern social and political movements…
thursday november 21 Miami Book Fair International: The twelfth annual book fair continues its “Evenings With …” series tonight at Miami-Dade Community College’s Wolfson Campus Auditorium (300 NE Second Ave.) with author Walter Mosley (Devil in a Blue Dress, Black Betty), reading from his latest novel A Little Yellow Dog…
On its 30th anniversary, Star Trek exists only as a fetish or a fool’s pastime. The original series continues to air as a faded relic; the Next Generation cast was put to pasture as a film enterprise before its time; and Deep Space Nine and Voyager run and rerun so…
Anthony Minghella believes in ghosts — and, at his best, makes believers out of viewers, too. The writer-director of Truly Madly Deeply and this heartfelt, eye-filling (but problematic and puzzling) adaption of Michael Ondaatje’s Booker Prize-winning novel The English Patient salts his movies with passionate specters. In Truly Madly Deeply…
In the late Nineteenth Century, Thomas Edison created the first light bulb. In the early Twentieth Century, Henry Ford designed the first production-line automobile. Our plugged-in, revved-up contemporary world owes much to these quintessentially American geniuses, both of whom were as adept at marketing products as they were at inventing…
thursday november 14 New Vision Florida/Brazil: Tigertail Productions continues its second annual Florida/Brazil arts exchange festival this weekend with a number of dance and music concerts, lectures, and video screenings. First up is a dance lecture and video screening with Brazil’s premier dance writer and critic Helena Katz, who will…
“I coulda been a contender,” Marlon Brando laments to Rod Steiger in On the Waterfront. Instead, he got “a one-way ticket to Palookaville.” Russ, Jerry, and Sid, the three unemployed Jersey City guys at the core of the droll, poignant new film Palookaville, share Brando’s ultimate destination. Like the ex-pugilist,…
Mother Night, a loving adaption of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 novel of the same name, should be required viewing as a companion piece to Casablanca. Like that Bogart classic, Mother Night has a powerful World War II love story at its core, and uses that tragic romance to address the tricky…
Legend has it that French writer, artist, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau’s aesthetic was shaped by an injunction from the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev. The young Cocteau, having achieved a minor measure of celebrity as a poet in Paris before World War I, complained to Diaghilev that the older man did…
