The pursuit of the majestic billfish is probably best known to most of us landlubbers as the subject of one of the true American literary masterpieces — and probably your seventh grade book report — Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea. So it’s fitting that the Miami Billfish Tournament…
As the founder and executive director of the Women’s International Film Festival, there have been moments when Yvonne McCormack-Lyons has questioned her sanity. Putting together a four-day film festival that features over 170 films from seventeen countries must boggle the mind at times. But thanks to her blood, sweat, and…
As the program director of the University of Miami’s motion pictures program, Paul Lazarus is immersed in Coral Gables campus life. In the Seventies, Lazarus worked in Hollywood as a producer, on films like Yul Brynner’s sci-fi/western Westworld, and the James Brolin/OJ Simpson vehicle Capricorn One. But it took a…
Getting down for a good cause Since it was erected last fall from scraps of wood and sheet metal, Liberty City’s Umoja Village shantytown — which currently houses 50 residents – has managed to keep close to whatever’s hot in Miami. During the Superbowl, Umoja residents staged demonstrations, calling national…
Winter Music Conference might have spawned some pretty stellar parties, but Susanne Bartsch’s bash at the swanky Setai hotel on South Beach this past Friday was the ultimate in divine debauchery. Where else would you find the likes of America’s most infamous transsexual, aka Amanda Lepore, perched naked in a…
The Bebop Theatre Collective’s Sty of the Blind Pig opened last night at the Joseph Caleb Auditorium. Sitting in that theater in the heart of Liberty City, time seems to rewind. You’re transported to a small apartment in pre-civil rights Chicago — a witness to the secrets inside one of…
Even 67-year-old actresses can have their moments of Internet infamy, as Lily Tomlin discovered this week, when the sister blogs of celebrity snark, Gawker and Defamer, posted guerrilla video shot on the set of I Heart Huckabees, the 2004 film in which Tomlin clashed with director David O. Russell. Along…
Democracy can be a messy affair. After months of closed doors negotiations and planning for Museum Park (a.k.a. Bicentennial Park), the city held a public meeting Wednesday to show preliminary plans and take comments. More than 100 people jammed into a meeting room at the Performing Arts Center, with more…
In the same week that sees Adam Sandler playing a grieving 9/11 widower in Reign over Me, another lone figure reeling from post-traumatic stress fills the central role in the new Antoine Fuqua-directed thriller, Shooter. Named Bob Lee Swagger and played with appropriately gruff machismo by Mark Wahlberg, he’s a…
As Charlie Fineman, a New York dentist who lost his wife and three young daughters in one of the September 11 plane crashes, Adam Sandler sports a mass of bedraggled locks and walks with his head hung low, the sounds of the city drowned out by The Who or Bruce…
The feature debut from South African director Sunu Gonera is straight from the sports-film playbook, the one in which an underdog team coached by an obstinate overachiever overcomes obstacles and adversity to take home the gold. It’s Hoosiers in a swimming pool — well, Glory Road, anyway, given this is…
La Cage aux Folles is a weirdly resonant story, and that is not just my opinion. It began life as a French play, got reworked as a now-classic French-Italian film, was turned into a Jerry Herman/Harvey Fierstein musical that proceeded to win just about every Tony ever invented, and then…
Fat Pig: If you are a successful young businessman and you find yourself falling in love with a pretty, witty, engaging girl who just happens to be 80 pounds overweight, do you break up with her when your friends start making fat jokes? That’s the dilemma faced by Fat Pig’s…
“Bodies”: Controversy has stuck to “Bodies … The Exhibition” like a blood tick on a hound dog’s tail, but more than 10,000 spectators flocked to see the corpse show within days of its debut. If you’re one of the few people who still hasn’t seen what all the fuss is…
Blood Diamond (Warner Bros.) Ed Zwick’s Blood Diamond, about the civil war over diamonds that devastated Sierra Leone in the late 1990s, plays like a guilt-ridden Jerry Bruckheimer movie. It’s little more than action-adventure pulp drenched in someone else’s blood — which it tries to wash off by proselytizing to…
There’s one similarity between Ghost Rider and most videogame movie tie-ins: Get too close to either, and your ass will probably get burnt. Though it stars goofy Nic Cage and Sam Elliott sound-alikes, Ghost Rider claims only to be an offshoot of this year’s soul-sucking blockbuster — not a direct…
Batman Beyond: Season Three (Warner Bros.) The Bridge on the River Kwai (Sony) Burning Annie (Warner Bros.) The Caine Mutiny (Sony) The Care Bears Movie: 25th Anniversary Limited Edition (MGM) Come Early Morning (Weinstein) Eragon (Fox) The Guns of Navarone (Sony) JAG: The Third Season (Paramount) Justice League Unlimited: Season…
So you wanna be a writer? Ready to endure editorial heartbreak, stomach agony, and a head full of constipated ideas? To quote Ishmael Reed, “writing is fighting.” It’s about expressing yourself under tremendous internal pressure, and enduring the slings and arrows of critics. If you feel the particular throb in…
An “ethno-poetic sound threat” is how Octavio Campos describes Kitchen Monkey, one of the bleeding-edge performances scheduled as part of the Miami Light Project’s Here and Now: 2007 at the Carnival Center’s Studio Theater. The Miami Light Project is doing what it does best — shining a light on edgy…
Joel Grey is known as one of Broadway’s ultimate stars, having made his name as the Master of Ceremonies in both the original stage and film versions of Cabaret. Fun fact — he is one of only seven actors to have won both a Tony and an Oscar for the…
Rachel Brown is a soul singer whose smoky voice has drawn comparisons to Toni Braxton and Anita Baker. But of herself Brown says, “I don’t compare myself to anyone. I idolize Whitney Houston but I don’t have a lot of her style in my music.” Still, she does have some…
It’s the final stretch of the regular season. Games like this one, against the young, bottom-of-the-table Atlanta Hawks might look easy on the schedule, but often turn into gut-wrenching fourth quarter shootouts for the Miami Heat. Come check out the game the Heat must win for a playoff position, before…
