According to the American Library Association, Saturday, September 21, marks the first day of Banned Books Week. For the past 21 years the ALA along with several other co-sponsors have been exalting free speech and expression by commemorating one’s right to read anything. Fighting tenaciously against the closed-minded minions who…
I know. Life is a struggle sometimes: You’re faced with traffic gridlock, work overload, relationship limbo. But cheer up, at least you’re not Baby Doll Gibbons. Not only is her on-again, off-again romance off again, her roommates are furious that she trashed their apartment in a fit of jealous pique…
For those with any kind of pop cultural memory, it’s more than a little surprising to see Ice Cube in a movie like Barbershop. Not because it’s a light comedy — Friday was too, and that was certainly in character. What’s odd about Barbershop is its seeming embrace of positions…
Sweet Sauerkraut “I’m not compulsive; I’m precise,” insists Martha Klein, the accomplished but rigidly self-contained heroine at the center of this enormously appealing German romantic comedy-drama called Mostly Martha. The head chef at an upscale Hamburg restaurant, Martha (Martina Gedeck) is so focused and dour that she doesn’t even recognize…
A brigade of strangers firing up chainsaws in your back yard was already an ominous sight. It only got worse when your property was left looking like a hurricane had just blown through. Orange trees eliminated, grapefruits gone. The citrus canker killers didn’t mean any harm. They were just following…
A casual ménage à trois at stage right, a frisky Frenchman at stage left, couples — hopeful or just horny — coupling and uncoupling everywhere else. Not a naughty night on South Beach but what promises to be an entertaining evening of theater in the suburbs, namely The Nature of…
What’s the movie world coming to? Time was, if you wanted flash, dash, and empty-headed excitement you looked for them in the latest Hollywood bonbon, not in those sober, slow-paced films from Europe. Yet here comes Nadie conoce a nadie, a stylish Spanish thriller that pays deliberate homage to Hollywood…
Iranian films that make it to American shores generally fall into two categories: sensitive dramas featuring young children, à la The White Balloon and Children of Heaven, or pointed political statements about the plight of women, such as The Circle and The Day I Became a Woman. Secret Ballot is…
Like Clint Eastwood, Robert De Niro is one of those guys who can make just about any material inherently enjoyable. Also like Clint, he will sometimes make you wish he’d pick roles that are a little more challenging. His recent record of relatively disposable films speaks for itself: tough-yet-sensitive cop…
Strange math has been permuting the American psyche since the September 11th attacks. Perhaps in an attempt to rationalize deep-seated uncertainty, Americans have been conjuring formulas involving the tragedy’s numerology. You know, September is the ninth month and nine plus one plus one equals eleven. American Airlines Flight 11, the…
The toughest part of being an international megastar? “Being in that very high income bracket,” admits Dame Edna Everage, who has put in more than her share of hours for her dollars and pounds. On the heels of co-hosting the Queen of England’s jubilee concert, appearing on Ally McBeal, and…
Escaping the glare and heat that pounded the concrete separating the downtown Miami-Dade Public Library from the Miami Art Museum, I cracked the MAM door, intent on sucking up some sweet air conditioning. As soon as I’d caught my breath, I noticed a sign announcing that Timothy Greenfield-Sanders had delivered…
In Tom Walker, a new play at the New Theatre, a very old story is given a modern twist. The Devil appears to the title character, dupes same into a hellish bargain, and runs off with poor Tom’s soul. Playwright John Strand has performed a similar act of piracy: He…
Somewhere, sometime, someone had a good idea: Let’s create a public-art project that identifies a city with an endemic animal. Let’s cookie-cutter-produce them, get businesses to sponsor them on behalf of a charitable organization, give artists a pittance to “decorate” them ($500 and the artist must provide the materials), and…
Naked alien goddesses, with big tits and bouffant hair, frolicking in the sun on Super-8 film. Buxom harlots smothering men to death with their breasts and slashing one another. Sordid kisses in wood-paneled rooms and toupéed men spanking creamy virgins on shaggy rugs. Ashtrays, closeups of ashtrays, weird velvet paintings…
This is the time of year when the weather starts to infect everyone in Miami. The city’s tempo slows down and a whole lot of hustle and bustle gets put off till mañana. But here’s a not-so-early warning for you jazz and film fans: Hustle over to the Absinthe House…
Toward the end of Jazz Seen — German filmmaker Julian Benedikt’s hagiographic 2001 documentary about photographer William Claxton — Los Angeles gallery director David Fahey, who has mounted exhibitions of Claxton’s iconic images of American jazz musicians, deftly defines the photographs’ potency: “Viewers are not hearing the music, but they’re…
Most of the politically caffeinated abuelitos loitering around Little Havana have no idea what they’re missing when the Heavy Shtetl Klezmer Band plays Miami Beach. And the typical Ms. Bal Harbour doesn’t drive the Benz to Overtown nearly enough to absorb the seductive rhythms of Afro-Caribbean folkloric dance. That’s because…
Things you will learn from a forthcoming oral history of Saturday Night Live: Dan Aykroyd slept with, among others, Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman and writer Rosie Shuster, the latter of whom was, at the time, married to the show’s producer and creator, Lorne Michaels. To this day, Chevy Chase regrets…
For most South Floridians, late summer means numbing heat, hurricanes, and back-to-school specials. But for those astute and lucky New Times readers, the dog days of August also herald a revived arts scene. Within a month or so, dozens of theater companies up and down the tri-county coast will be…
In life, as in the movies, perspective is everything. Adults often recall their childhoods as idyllic and carefree, but such nostalgia is more fiction than recollection. Children live lives as full of heartache, fear, anguish, and doubt as any adult’s. Perhaps more, for children often suffer the consequences of adult…
Andrew Niccol keeps making the same movie over and over again and dressing it in slightly different clothes: the sleek charcoal Hugo Boss grays of Gattaca, the crisp Crayola hues of The Truman Show, and now the silk-and-satin Hollywood resplendency of Simone. Niccol, writer and director, is obsessed with a…
