Backbeats and Bong Hits

Man, this dude is wacky WED 9/21 In an age where music is packaged, censored, and commercialized for teenage consumption and MTV popularity, Brian Kenney Fresno is a breath of fresh air, or perhaps better put, a breath of fresh marijuana smoke. Kenney is a self-proclaimed cult leader and singer…

New releases available this week

Da Ali G Show: Da Compleet Second Seazon (HBO Home Video) Sacha Baron Cohen is inching closer to Tom Green territory; come this time next year his HBO show is likely to be on the pop-culture junk pile. Which isn’t to say this double-disc set doesn’t hold up — it’s…

Without a Trace

If you choose to vanish, we’re told early on in Madagascar, you probably won’t be found. Nine out of ten people who disappear most likely prefer to remain lost. What happens then? The answers are not easy, but they can be surprising, as is J.T. Rogers’s Madagascar. This delicate, ineffably…

Out of Africa

The collage drawings of female figures by Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu on view at Miami Art Museum are harsh and seductive, violent yet beautiful. Collectively titled “Amazing Grace,” their mottled surfaces glitter like distant planets, like microscopic organisms or rare fungi. They are ephemeral but also monumental in size (many…

Current Art Shows

Humberto Calzada: Humberto Calzada’s work is skillful and bright. His architectonic subject matter is sedate, even nostalgic; his sober white interior geometric vistas, adorned with stained-glass arches and flooded with water, have become mainstream. Beyond that, Calzada clearly creates a more complex, Escher-like space with stairs folding in on themselves…

Store Wars

When one goes to see a movie called El Crimen Perfecto, it might seem unlikely that the title of this Spanish film has been altered for American audiences. But it has — in Spain the title is Crimen Ferpecto, which makes the crime a general term rather than one specific…

New releases available this week

The Blues Brothers 25th Anniversary Edition (Universal Studios Home Video) Dan Aykroyd and John Goodman’s modern-day revival of the Blues Brothers is less a stroke of comedy genius than a dose of karaoke night at Hooters. Fight off those thoughts and pop in this 1980 classic. John Belushi and Aykroyd,…

New Times‘s top DVD picks for the week of September 6

Barn of the Naked Dead (Koch Vision Entertainment) The Bela Lugosi Collection (Universal) Bruce Springsteen: VH1 Storytellers (Sony Music) Charmed: The Complete Second Season (Paramount) Crash (Artisan) The Deer Hunter: Special Edition (Universal) Dragnet: Volumes 1-3 (Delta Music) Fat Albert’s Halloween Special (Ventura) Fraggle Rock: Season 1 (Hit Entertainment) Greta…

Not-So-Freaky Freak Show

The Mosaic Theatre’s Richard Jay Simon is one of the most talented theater directors in South Florida. He’s also one of the most versatile. His emotionally detailed hostage drama Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me grabbed my attention in Mosaic’s first season, when the company was playing to audiences of three…

Current Art Shows

marking time: moving images: Science, technology, and the speed with which we communicate today have altered modern-day perception of reality. The world is so much more accessible nowadays that time has become a fluid medium flashing back and forth — as if we were living inside a movie. Curated by…

Art of Rebellion

A rich family returns to its nice home after a vacation, but something isn’t quite right. The place has been … burgled? No, not quite. The stereo that’s missing — it’s in the fridge. The chairs have been stacked into a tower. And there’s a note attached: “Your days of…

Father Figure

Marc Bamuthi Joseph has won four national poetry slams and appeared on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. He’s been hailed by critics as being one of the most compelling and important spoken-word performance artists. But Bamuthi Joseph shrugs off the accolades. “My greatest achievement? It’s being a father. No question,” the…

Even Meaner Girls

Hollywood loves teen bitches THUR 9/8 “I’m very glad that I was born white,” says the smug Kimberly Joyce, the latest and possibly the most vile queen bee to manipulate her way to the top of the teen comedy hive. Written by Skander Halim and directed by Marcos Siega, Pretty…

Forget About the Rock

These rasslers are classics SAT 9/10 Maybe you want your children to see the titans you revered growing up — to teach them that the American dream is not just a nebulous concept applied to car advertising but also occasionally (rarely) a quality embodied in a man, a man like…

Rockin’ with Chopin

SAT 9/10 Frédéric François Chopin was born in Zelazowa Wola, Poland, in 1810. In 1977, Blanka Rosenstiel, a concerned Polish American, established the Chopin Foundation in Miami to support and encourage young pianists to follow in his illustrious footsteps. At 8:00 tonight the winner of the foundation’s 2005 National Chopin…

Go to Hell

The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which is based on a true story the same way Harry Potter and Star Wars movies are, is the latest — though certainly not the last — movie of this bloody (awful) year trying to scare the money right out of your wallet. It has…

Bobbin and Weavin’

Take two firecracker curators with a taste for edgy shenanigans, rub them against Miami’s marquee collectors, and — voila! — you have an audacious exhibit to spark off the art season. “Hanging by a Thread,” curated by Nina Arias and José Diaz, features the work of more than 25 artists…

Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy

But acting like one is FRI 9/9 BY PATRICE ELIZABETH GRELL YURSIK Back in 1993, Queen Latifah delivered a powerful message to the hip-hop community. “You gotta let him know/You ain’t a bitch or a ho,” she commanded in her hit song “U.N.I.T.Y.” More than a decade later, Latifah has…

Virtual Vision

“I always dreamt of traveling to far away lands,” recounts sixteenth-century sailor Bernal Díaz del Castillo in his Chronicles of the New Spain. That, of course, was long, long before the virtual world of the Internet, a place in which you simply stroll, or rather float, if you want to…

Current Art Shows

marking time: moving images: Science, technology, and the speed with which we communicate today have altered modern-day perception of reality. The world is so much more accessible nowadays that time has become a fluid medium flashing back and forth — as if we were living inside a movie. Curated by…

Low Yield

At the opening of The Constant Gardener, Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles’s adaptation of the novel by John Le Carré, we hear a conversation before we see it. The screen remains black, still running credits, as a man and a woman negotiate a departure. Slowly the scene dawns, revealing the couple…