In the best of all possible worlds, a veteran art teacher would decide to shake up the inertia of the system with the quixotic idea of recruiting inner-city high school students for an art program he builds from scratch; then he would end up sending his graduates to the best…
As its title suggests, Spy Kids is an action fantasy aimed primarily at the preteen/early-teen audience. For all its thrills — and it has plenty — it’s strictly a PG film, which is all the more surprising when you consider its source: Robert Rodriguez, master of bloody gunplay and monster…
Amid the plethora of films with Freddie Prinze, Jr., Mena Suvari, Chris Klein, and Jason Biggs, it’s nice — in theory at least — to see a contemporary romantic comedy, like Someone Like You, where the characters, while hardly over the hill, are all over 30. In practice, however, “nice”…
Despite its rather odd name, the organization dubbed MIAPUG! has nothing to do with chubby smash-faced dogs that roam wild through Miami International Airport. The moniker actually describes a group of enthusiastic PDA aficionados. Okay, we’ll stop with the acronyms. PDA stands for personal digital assistant, the latest accessory people…
“This isn’t about trying to turn any place into Miami Beach or trying to duplicate Miami Beach,” says Randall Robinson. “It’s about offering the experiences of Miami Beach to people so they can take from it what they will, to lend a hand because we know that nobody wants the…
Violet represents the quintessentially American spiritual journey: the road trip. Set in 1964, it is the story of a young woman named Violet (Jennifer Hughes) who travels by Greyhound bus, her late mother’s confessional in hand, from her mountaintop home in rural North Carolina to the Hope and Glory Building…
Want to make a movie? Get a big house, preferably in a beautiful rural setting, gather a group of good-looking actors, and photograph them wandering around, discussing life and death. No, we’re not talking about The Big Chill or Enchanted April or Howard’s End or a dozen other successful films…
Im Kwon Taek has long been the best-known Korean director in the United States; in fact it would be fair to say he’s pretty much the only even vaguely known Korean director, and even then his renown is strictly among festivalgoers. The general distribution of his latest film, Chunhyang, should…
In the spin cycle of the universe, days stretch and shrink like laundry. During the astronomical phenomenon known as the equinox, night and day briefly become almost identical parcels of time as the sun traverses the celestial equator. This occurs twice a year with the vernal equinox, signifying the advent…
Vibrant colors leap from artist Peter Max’s canvases — not to mention from the posters, murals, wrapping paper, T-shirts, jumbo jets, and racing cars he’s decorated in a more than three-decade-long career. Born in Berlin, Max spent his formative years in Shanghai, Tibet, Israel, and Paris, arriving in the United…
Gil Cates takes a long, deep breath before answering the question: Is producing the Academy Awards show the ultimate no-win situation? Cates has produced nine of the past 11 Oscar telecasts, and he returns March 25 after a year’s layoff; for those scoring at home, Cates is not to blame…
There’s a myth that the right person saw the right starlet slinging hash at the local diner and poof! Metro Goldwyn Mayer and 20th Century Fox popped up out of nowhere. Derek Elley’s 1998 documentary, Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies, and the American Dream, debunks this myth by revealing a more fascinating…
The House, the latest in a series of alternative art spaces popping up around Miami, seems to reflect a generational trend. Martin Oppel, Bhakti Baxter, and Tao Rey are three artists just out of a serious art-brewing operation: New World School of the Arts. They rented an old house off…
With luck Yi Yi (A One and a Two), the seventh release from writer-director Edward Yang, one of Taiwan’s most respected filmmakers, will open a vein of interest in Taiwan’s cinema, but it will be an uphill struggle. While it’s a rich and rewarding film, its pace is more leisurely…
The somber figure of Ingmar Bergman no longer looms over the film world like a guilty conscience, but the great Swedish director has spawned enough artistic descendents to keep us supplied with thorny philosophical and ethical questions for decades to come. Faithless, the second film that actress Liv Ullmann has…
To keep it simple, Enemy at the Gates plays like a cross between the PlayStation game Medal of Honor, a World War II Nazi-shoot-’em-up viewed through a sniper’s scope, and a Harlequin Romance novel. It’s history lesson as video game, video game as soap opera, soap opera as highbrow drama,…
Okay, in terms of history Miami is not exactly New England. No Pilgrims landed on any famous rocks here in the 1600s. No people burned each other at the stake. Aside from Indians whom outsiders almost eliminated, youthful Miami lacks droves of natives. Most residents have moved here from somewhere…
Butterfly Mystique is not a fancy overpriced attraction but a family-operated farm with an ever-blooming crop of scaly winged creatures and other insects. Owners Matt Bielecki and his mother, Renee, began raising butterflies for pleasure; as the hobby and their friends’ interest in it took flight, they decided to set…
The strife between the lead characters in Caldwell Theatre’s production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane goes way beyond the typical mother-daughter friction. Early in the play, while Maureen Folan (Cary Anne Spear) slams cabinet doors and slings pans around the kitchen of their little cottage, her aged mother, Mag…
In his latest film, Spectres of the Spectrum, filmmaker/archivist/pack rat Craig Baldwin creates common ground for his postmodern bricolage somewhere between the hazy vision of a corrupted techno future and the rose-colored modernism of the postwar American media. It’s not nearly as much of a stretch as you might think…
Van Gogh was a lunatic who cut off his ear. Picasso was a self-absorbed cur who abused women. Warhol turned out to be a weird, desperate loner, Basquiat a doomed junkie. Try as he might, shriveled little Toulouse-Lautrec failed miserably at romance. As for El Greco’s explosive affair with that…
Director John Herzfeld’s 1996 feature, the droll and underrated 2 Days in the Valley, was a more than adequate counterbalance to the catastrophe of his first feature, Two of a Kind, a 1983 John Travolta vehicle (which, together with Moment by Moment, put its star on the fast track from…
