Film schools across the country should use Last of the Dogmen as a sort of final exam. If, after viewing the film for fifteen minutes, a student can’t come up with more than half the dialogue every character will speak before he or she utters it, that would-be filmmaker has…
In 1989, Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road was an empty strip of vacant stores, a shell of the lively outdoor mall filled with elegant shops that thrived in the 1940s and 1950s. With serendipitous foresight, John and Maria Rodaz of Area Stage Company rented an affordable storefront there, then set about…
Last year Tag Purvis lost three of his best friends to AIDS-related illnesses. They now appear in one part of Purvis’s film installation, Devil or Angel, at the South Florida Art Center’s Ground Level Gallery on Lincoln Road: images of two men and one woman projected onto sheets of translucent…
A half-dozen case-hardened cops crack dark jokes over the corpse of a young black clocker (crack dealer). The bullet that killed him passed through the kid’s T-shirt, which, ironically, bears the legend “I will kill you” under a line drawing of a gun. “Someone musta read it backwards,” deadpans one…
I don’t know, you tell me: In 1995, how big a deal is it for a pair of (presumably) straight actors best known for lady-killing and macho action roles to play drag queens on-screen? (I’m talking indisputably gay characters, not heteros-in-heels like Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in Some Like…
Like the school year, vacations, and marriages, theater seasons kick off with anticipation, fueled by promises of pleasure, fulfillment, and growth and driven by unarticulated fantasies that, in theatrical terms, look like this: An inspired melange of classic, contemporary, and cutting-edge work with tickets priced at the cost of an…
In the 400 years since Shakespeare entertained Elizabethan England with histories, tragedies, and comedies, his works have been updated, translated, elaborated, extemporized, bowdlerized, and set to music and dance. Macbeth went sci-fi. The Merry Wives of Windsor outwit Falstaff in 1950s suburbia. Women played Hamlet. And a Wild West version…
Remember museums? Right after Labor Day, the new exhibition season begins. Upcoming shows at Miami institutions will focus on contemporary work and historical themes that provide context for art today, mostly eschewing blockbuster shows in favor of small, purposeful exhibitions. A lot of these are prepackaged displays put together by…
Papa McMullen was an oul-bollocks. He drank. He beat Mom. He died. Mom’s eyes barely had dried from the funeral service when she announced her decision to pack off to Ireland to live with the man she had really loved for all those years. Her parting advice to her three…
I suppose the mere fact that I’ve never seen a movie quite like Desperado should qualify as a high compliment. After all, these days so many movies seem like so many other movies, which seemed like so many others before them, that a little originality deserves praise in and of…
Early in Jeffrey, the big-screen version of Paul Rudnick’s funny-sad off-Broadway play about a gay man wrestling with love and intimacy in the Nineties, there’s a hilarious scene that neatly and astutely anticipates the film’s commercial dilemma. Two male characters share a sloppy kiss. The camera cuts away to an…
The most unnerving — and delectable — skill of film noir masters such as John Huston, Billy Wilder, and Jules Dassin may have been the way they turned all of human relations into a slippery fiction, a pack of lies, an extended alibi. In the dangerous netherworld of these movies,…
The Seventies refuse to die. Whatever else you say about that God-forsaken decade, it has proven incredibly resilient. Disco –both the music and the fashions — has made a strong comeback. The Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations have made many Americans nostalgic for those of Ford and Carter. Saturday Night…
A dumb movie is one thing, but a dumb movie about the importance of education — now that’s something special. The only thing dangerous about Dangerous Minds is the glibness with which it treats its subject matter. Even the title is a transparent attempt to sex up what is (or…
Summer in the city of Miami, backs of our necks getting sunburned and sandy. In this season of jet skis and lobster diving, the main branch of the Miami-Dade Public Library offers two exhibitions of nautically themed work, most of it done by local artists. “Boat Images from South Florida…
Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie has evolved into an American classic since its debut on Broadway five decades ago. In addition to stage productions and film and television versions, the play has found its way into high school and college literature anthologies as a progenitor of contemporary American drama, with…
Only three American actresses have proven to Hollywood they can attract large audiences by name recognition alone — Demi Moore, Meg Ryan, and Julia Roberts. Moore is by far the worst of the three, a relentless publicity machine whose presence in wretched box-office triumphs such as Disclosure proves that moviegoers…
Dust rises from the dirt trenches in front of the Thunderbird Resort Motel on Collins Avenue at 184th Street, where a state highway renovation project lately has created an obstacle course for summer tourists. Repairs are in progress at the motel as well. On a recent afternoon, two painters perched…
As everyone knows by now, Waterworld is the most expensive movie ever made. Fierce Pacific thunderstorms, logistical nightmares, a nasty feud between director and star, the star’s insistence that scenes be re-shot because he didn’t like the way his hair looked — such were the problems that ran the tab…
If American adults are still capable of being shocked by the behavior of teenagers, then Larry Clark’s Kids is the movie that will shock them. The New York City teens we meet here for one harrowing 24-hour period talk dirty. They pursue sex and drugs with casual single-mindedness. They lie…
We can measure how far American culture has come since social satirist Lenny Bruce challenged the proprieties of the 1950s and 1960s by noting that New Times can print the word cocksucker and no one’s going to get hauled off to jail on an obscenity rap. Cocksucker. In October 1961,…
With a pitch-perfect performance from precocious eighteen-year-old music video starlet Alicia Silverstone and a sharp, sassy, knowing script from writer-director Amy Heckerling (Fast Times at Ridgemont High), Clueless steps right to the head of the class of high school comedies, surpassing even Heckerling’s own previous foray into that perilous territory…
