During one wrenching scene near the end of Lee Blessing’s Independence, the oldest sister, Kess, tries to convince her unstable mother and two bitter siblings to join in a civil afternoon tea and say positive things about one another. According to the town psychiatrist, she insists, it’s more important to…
The label that has come to be known in the moviegoing lexicon as “the woman’s film” continues to strike an empty, intellectually fraudulent note, for the often-taken assumption is that its filmic sensibility has been honed by – and is directed exclusively toward – one audience: women. Thus, the argument…
It’s hard to begrudge the success of an Italian-American character player who doesn’t bawl like a child upon winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, but instead merely shuffles up the gangway to receive his statuette, whispers into the microphone, “It’s my pleasure,” and walks away. But when that…
My husband, a research scientist and well-educated man, has a mental block when it comes to the arts. Using the logic and empirical knowledge that serves him so well in the laboratory, he wonders aloud at the end of a cinematic or theatrical disaster – as an impressive list of…
As director of John Hughes productions such as Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful, Howard Deutsch has heretofore only been paid to point his teenpic camera at Molly Ringwald’s carrot crew cut, Andrew McCarthy’s BMW, Mary Stuart Masterson’s drumsticks, and Eric Stoltz’s stupefied mope. Both these films had…
In The Theory of Psychoanalysis published in 1913, Carl Jung speculated as to how the small world of childhood, with its familiar surroundings and characters, can be a model for the greater world. “The more intensively the family has stamped its character upon the child,” wrote Jung, “the more it…
Eugene O’Neill believed that artists who try to save the world lose themselves. I don’t think he meant to discourage the role of theater as a social or religious force, but instead recognized the contrivances possible when one tries to write something “important.” Like expert lovemaking, great plays insinuate themselves…
If Gate II isn’t a good horror movie, what is? Good horror movies (rare ones such as George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and John Carpenter’s Halloween, to name two) work best as suburban morality play – a dark, desolate setting far away from mainstream society, a group of…
Imagine a cross between a backstage drama like Punchline and a sisterhood saga like Mermaids – that’s Nora Ephron’s directorial debut, This is my life, in a nutshell. Ephron, you may remember, wrote the script for the rather ordinary, if Oscar-nominated, When Harry Met Sally…, and in the past has…
It’s tourist season, which means you can expect local theaters to pull a few bunnies out of their hats. Most venues try to open top shows, or at least new shows, to snag the attention of snowbirds temporarily bored by beach and bar. Catering to audiences wired on a vacation…
Just when you begin to suspect that intelligence, wit and charm have vanished from the movies under the haunches of full-grown dogs like For the Boys and Shining Through, a sleeper pops up to restore your faith. Hear My Song, an Anglo-Irish comedy made on a shoestring, features elements of…
If anyone ever doubted to what extent English and Spanish have been mingled, maimed, or mangled over the course of 33 years of Cuban exile in the United States, I have a suggestion: Rush to your nearest movie theater this weekend and catch The Mambo Kings. The gallery of rogue…
As bizarre as any form of sycophantic behavior is – whether it’s tearing out chairs in a frenzy over Sinatra, or throwing underwear on stage at the feet of Axl Rose – one of the most perplexing and bloodless incarnations has to be the literary groupie. While living in New…
What’s a theatrical producer to do? Grants are being slashed without warning, ticket sales plummet in proportion to the economy, while the salaries of some artists strain modest budgets to the point of cancellations. Minimizing set changes and elaborate costumes may help, but usually not enough, so the producer resorts…
Last year, in a review of Oliver Stone’s The Doors for this paper, Ben Greenman delivered a brilliant parting shot aimed at Stone, concluding that the best Doors movie ever was Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Admittedly it’s a loaded sentence – Coppola’s Vietnam War movie isn’t about The Doors at…
Illiteracy and philistinism, America’s most unremitting woes in the age of homogenized tube culture, could scarcely have found two wittier, more delightful exponents and defenders than Saturday Night Live’s Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar, the hyper-juvenile, heavy-metal yarn spinners whose late-night, public-access cable show, direct from Wayne’s basement in Aurora,…
It’s a challenge to define the term illuminati in all its incarnations. Several science fiction novels, as well as historical documents, describe a secret society of white and black magicians – including the legendary British sorcerer Aleister Crowley – who planned on ruling the world through esoteric rituals and spiritual…
What is to be done with the Miami Film Festival? The question has plagued critical columns (mine and those of others throughout South Florida) for years, and based on a predictably limited advance peek at this year’s festival selections, the answer for me remains as elusive as ever. On one…
“Glamour, excitement, and ennui” promises the press release about the Ninth Miami Film Festival ready to roll this Friday at Gusman Center for the Performing Arts. In keeping with such promises over nine years, at least you can count on one being fulfilled this year – ennui. I shouldn’t yet…
It takes a supremely perverted sense of humor allied to a well-meaning foolhardiness to conjure up something like Kafka. The new film, delivered in The Third Man thriller style, has the added cachet of being loosely based on the life of – and employing themes taken from works by -…
The question most frequently asked of a theater critic is whether a particular production was good or bad. This often is not answered simply, but requires a lengthy discussion. Actors may be deficient, while the direction is innovative; an excellent play may suffer because of a markedly inadequate presentation. Among…
Thorough, profound, astonishing, and insufferable imbecility envelops the screen in Shining Through, a Hollywood-formula spy thriller-romance set in a woebegone World War II, finding a permanent home there for two hours and twelve minutes. It’s one of the worst movies to come my way in a long while, which is…
