It is rare to find a film that defies one’s expectations as sweetly and satisfyingly as Raising Victor Vargas, a coming-of-age comedy-drama from first-time feature writer-director Peter Sollett, which first premiered here at the Miami International Film Festival. The surprise isn’t in the plot — that would be too easy…
Musclebound fighters all slick with sweat and Vaseline. Bruised and battered warriors raging on despite puffy welts and cramping legs. Bloody brows, cut lips — the gasp of a knocked-out brawler struggling to get to his or her feet. There is something primal about watching a really good fistfight. Our…
Thurday 4/24 Zora Neale Hurston is one of Florida’s most important and least recognized writers. A dry and quizzical critic of a segregated America, Hurston was among the vanguard of the Harlem Renaissance before she wound up sadly working as a maid in Miami Beach hotels. North Miami’s M Ensemble…
Sandra Ramos is part of a generation of Havana artists whose visual language makes frequent reference to the dream and reality of exile. Her work, both conceptually clever and affectively sincere, often takes the form of suitcases or trunks, containing what the artist calls “a compilation of the experiences, dreams,…
Sat 4/26 Lofty Living Brightly colored hot air balloons floating peacefully in the sky. Competitive balloonists lobbing sandbags at on-ground targets. Motorists swerving in and out of lanes while craning their heads out car windows. Talent shows, free pancakes, and even a towering Energizer Bunny that stands fifteen feet higher…
Sat 4/26 In a culture enslaved to the concept of the superlative, halls of fame have proliferated at an alarming rate in recent times. Even horse tracks like Calder Race Course (21001 NW 27th Ave.) boast them. This Saturday the speedy Florida-bred Chaposa Springs and her trainer Marty Wolfson will…
Sat 4/28 Now that Iraq, the cradle of civilization, has been bombed to bits and the remains have been hastily demolished or looted by its own citizens, what other part of the world still exists to teach us something? Remember Asia? It’s no accident the Orient is still going strong,…
Sat 4/26 Move over, Orson Welles, Woody Allen, Christopher Guest, and Quentin Tarantino. Here comes Clifton Childree. Who? Why, the Broward-based musician-performer-filmmaker, that’s who. In the early Nineties, the South Florida native founded such Broward hipster hot spots as the multimedia Mudhouse and Theatre 1225, home to art and horror…
Fri 4/25 Karen Peterson attests that no other artist is more bound to the body’s wear and tear than a dancer. As an experienced choreographer, Peterson has a unique spin on the maturation process: “As a dancer gets older she has more to offer. Maybe you can’t do endless pirouettes,…
It has been a few weeks since it hit the headlines. If you haven’t been paying attention, Nilo Cruz, the Cuban-born, Miami-raised, New York-based playwright, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama for his lyrical Anna in the Tropics, a play that received its world premiere last fall at the teeny…
Filmmaker Terry Gilliam is no stranger to fiasco. After all, this is the human dynamo who saw 1989’s inventive (if sometimes incoherent) The Adventures of Baron Munchausen through a series of artistic and financial crises that would have landed most people in an asylum. But Gilliam’s encounter with the tale-spinning…
Imagine a large, dead Saint Bernard with its bones removed. Then visualize a hefty bellows inserted into it from behind, with a gorilla hopping up and down on it, causing the huge dog’s baglike corpse to twitch spasmodically, wheeze, and croak. Voila, this is today’s Nick Nolte. What’s amazing is…
In 1997’s The Apostle, Robert Duvall took on a subject near and dear to his heart: Southern Pentecostal preachers. No one would make the film for him, so he went ahead and directed it himself, garnering much acclaim from media both secular and religious for his warts-and-all portrayal of a…
My beer belly deserves some attention — national attention — I’ve decided. While my vanity tells me it’s not totally flabby, my lower torso leads my way through life. Gently sloped love handles are forever spilling over my belt line. It will NEVER be flat. I’m learning to love my…
Thursday 4/17 Snarling defensive types cloaked in leather, vicious growling dogs, a tiny flower breaking through a concrete sidewalk. Just another day in the life of New York-based (and part-time Miami resident) photographer and filmmaker Katrina Del Mar, whose multimedia “Ruff Trade” exhibition is currently at the Miami Light Project…
There’s never been a shortage of Cole Porter (1891-1964) tunes on Broadway, off Broadway, and in regional shows around the country, but choreographer Karen Stewart’s Black Door Dance Ensemble may put the most innovative spin on Porter yet: an all-minority cast dancing to Porter’s work en pointe. Black Door Dance…
Monday 4/21 Going deep with self-hypnosis So you’ve tried yoga, capoeira, plastic surgery, and shopping therapy but still, life stresses you out. Trust Martha Stewart on this one, tension is not a good thing. The Women’s Institute of Total Health In Nature (WITHIN), a nonprofit alternative health center in South…
Wed 4/23 The joys of stalking owls in a dark park Flashlights are optional. Your eyes slowly adjust to the moonlight as you step gingerly through a path of silhouetted oak trees in Greynolds Park (17530 W. Dixie Hwy., North Miami Beach). It’s a leisurely hike with a name as…
Monday 4/21 Sweet dreams are made of this, indeed Imagine paying the mortgage by eating ice cream. That’s exactly how John Harrison, the official ice cream taster for Edy’s Grand Ice Cream, keeps a roof over his head. Harrison has not only sampled every flavor in the universe, he also…
Thur 4/17 Revisit the Golden Age of Havana Exiles lost in a reverie of what once was may protest vigorously, but Cuba never looked as good as it does right now on the fifth floor of Miami Beach’s Wolfsonian-FIU museum. Nestled in a small room, part of the larger area…
Sat 4/19 Drill teams bang out da funk They stomp and sway to a battery of drums and cymbals. They pound the floor in construction boots and brag in sassy rhymes. While dueling onstage they hex each other by throwing threatening glares and crossing their drumsticks. They go by the…
There’s never been a shortage of Cole Porter (1891-1964) tunes on Broadway, off Broadway, and in regional shows around the country, but choreographer Karen Stewart’s Black Door Dance Ensemble may put the most innovative spin on Porter yet: an all-minority cast dancing to Porter’s work en pointe. Black Door Dance…
