Once upon a time Alex Cox was a director who seemed assured of a bright future in Hollywood. His first film, 1984’s Repo Man, gained him cult status. His second, 1986’s Sid and Nancy, established Cox as a gifted, powerful filmmaker with a career as ambitious as he cared to…
Rene Rodriguez is a punk. Not the scowling, pierced, and tattoed kind; the Herald staff writer and film reviewer looks more like Opie Taylor than Sid Vicious. No, Rodriguez’s punkdom slashes deeper than nipple rings, jackboots, and the other affectations of the fashionably disaffected. Rather, he’s one of the far…
Is it just me or does anybody else out there have a problem with Peter Coyote as a paragon of Nineties studhood? The hollow-faced, crooked-toothed actor with the scraggly eyebrows that threaten to prolongate his creased and furrowed forehead like ivy on a pitted brick wall somehow landed the part…
An outraged member of the local theatrical community recently confronted me during the intermission of a play and asked if it was true that I, like some other regional critics (who he did not name), was about to begin rating productions using a star system, as do many restaurant and…
You have to tip your hat to any motion picture with a scope broad enough to make room for former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, nihilistic rock and roll animal Lou Reed, and Peter Falk as Detective Columbo. Faraway, So Close, the sequel to 1988’s hypnotic Wings of Desire, is, like…
Stay home this Thursday evening. Sequester your house pets. Lock your kids in their rooms or pack them off to spend the night with out-of-town relatives. Get to Blockbuster early before all the copies of Another Stakeout are rented. Throw some Orville Redenbacher into the microwave and settle down in…
After observing more than five years of solid growth in South Florida theater, it has become clear to me that certain venues, mostly by virtue of the skills of their artistic directors, produce dependably excellent work, both in the choice of scripts and actors. The bad news in this is…
Thank God for John Waters. Box-office returns and market demographics have always driven Hollywood, yet residents of the self-deluding little colony still call themselves artists and make a grand show of patting themselves on the back on those exceedingly rare occasions when their handiwork offers more than just escapist entertainment…
If there’s anything encouraging to be gleaned from Cops and Robbersons, the feeble new Chevy Chase vehicle costarring flinty old macho man Jack Palance, it’s that contrary to popular belief, Hollywood takes care of its own. How else to explain hack director Michael Ritchie’s enduring career? Or Chase’s? We’ve all…
A.R. Gurney seems to be one of those playwrights you either love or hate, depending upon your appreciation of the dry wit and humor slowly unveiled within the restrained settings of his plays. Whether it’s the painful family estrangement in The Middle Ages or The Cocktail Hour, or the ironies…
Miss Saigon — that monster musical hit from the creators of Les Miserables and producer Cameron Mackintosh, now playing at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts — reminded me of the Vietnam War, which serves as its backdrop. Like the war, the show contained some striking and poignant scenes,…
Far be it from me to whine about how tough my job is. I learned long ago that there aren’t many folks sympathetic to complaints from a guy who sits around all day watching movies and getting paid for it. Suffice it to say if it was that easy, everyone…
Chilean novelist Isabel Allende’s epic The House of the Spirits is set in a fictitious South American country. About the most charitable term one could apply to the setting of the film version, which was directed by a Dane and shot in Denmark and Portugal, is that it’s probably not…
Hugh Grant, star of Mike Newell’s current Four Weddings and a Funeral, is also the star of Australian John Duigan’s new Sirens. Grant plays a young, vaguely liberal English vicar who is sent to the outback by the bishop of Sydney. His mission is to persuade painter Norman Lindsay (Sam…
If playwright Geoffrey Hassman were a high school freshman, and if his play Jacob’s Blanket A currently running at the Drama Center in Deerfield Beach A were his first attempt at writing, I might cut him some slack. Some of the characters are endearing, the pace is not slow, and…
On paper, they probably seemed like wonderful ideas. How about a reworking of His Girl Friday, set at a big-city newspaper, but with an ensemble cast full of likable stars? Maybe they could crack a hot story about a couple of teenagers who are being railroaded for murder, huh? Or…
Before the antics of Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura, Pet Detective, before Jerry Lewis won over the fickle hearts of the French, lo, even before Milton Berle was belted with numerous pies in the face and Buster Keaton tripped over his own feet, a very famous writer wooed the crowds…
Say what you will about the sorry state of theatrical film exhibition in South Florida; some of our local movie houses are at least trying to remedy the situation. One of the most popular offerings from the 1993 Miami Film Festival, Bigas Luna’s Jam centsn Jam centsn, did not begin…
The mix-up-at-the-sperm-bank premise, the basis for 1993’s vacuous Made in America, takes a turn for the kosher in Vadim Jean’s and Gary Sinyor’s Leon the Pig Farmer. The quirky, oddly engaging little film has its Miami premiere this Saturday at the Colony Theater as part of the Jewish Film Festival…
“One hundred rinses cannot wash away these kinds of stains,” warns Duilio, eighteenth-century patriarch of the Benedetti (“the blessed”) clan in the rolling hills of Tuscany. He’s a poor farmer speaking to his fellow villagers in the town square, where a French lieutenant named Jean will be executed at dawn…
While pure lighthearted entertainment is fine from time to time, I freely admit to preferring art, whether on stage, screen, page, or canvas. If someone were to pin me down and demand a definition of art — a term so often abused — I would state that it is simply…
I can’t help it. It’s a reflex action. I hear the word “documentary” and some uncontrollable voice from deep within me screams, “Boring!” I realize it’s an irrational response; after all, I’ve seen plenty of entertaining documentaries. Then again, most of them have had something to do with rock music,…
