Just because Miami, at a little more than 100 years old, is so young, doesn’t mean its history is any easier to figure out than that of an older town. Our callow condition notwithstanding, misconceptions abound. Ask any Miami buff what purpose was served by the small limestone and wood…
How can you not be leery of a play staged in an attic? The ominous mahogany furniture, the curled yellowed pages of old newspapers and photo albums, and the inevitable sepia-tone photos hark back to a time only remarkable to the people who own the clutter. Most attic settings are…
The Green Door Gallery used to be a derelict construction spot among a monotonous row of secondhand stores on North Miami Avenue. It came to life when Gary Fonseca and Mino Gerges (both students at the New World School of the Arts) decided to change things around. These young men…
Quick, what gonzo visionary is a prime inspiration for many American directors, including Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, and Julie Taymor? The answer is Jan Svankmajer, an obscure Czech puppet master and filmmaker whose latest feature, Otesánek, makes its Florida premiere (and second U.S. screening) at the Mercury Theatre on Saturday,…
That anyone should consider making a film of Reinaldo Arenas’s memoir Before Night Falls is curious. That the person to do it should be painter-turned-film director Julian Schnabel truly is unusual. And that the results should be as good as they are is most remarkable of all. But it would…
The doomed often are a remarkably energetic and productive lot, especially when it comes to creating portraits of their personal horrors. Themes vary in intensity between slow self-destruction and grand devastation, but in vampirism the full spectrum of ghastliness may be covered, because the imbalance represents so much to so…
When Cristina Delgado, founding director of alternative arts organization Miami Arts Project, invited Stalker (an interdisciplinary architectural group from Rome) to explore the Miami River on foot as part of its biannual contemporary arts in urban spaces program, the result was an installation conceived beyond the walls of a gallery…
How does the thought of dinner with a horse grab you? Not dinner made from a horse but eating your meal, drinking your drinks, right next to an enormous whinnying animal. If you’re appalled by that idea and think of yourself as more of an ecology-minded type, then how about…
For 17 years, Dorothy Swanson has waged the loneliest battle: keeping good shows on television, a medium that exists as if only to taunt her. You can hear in her voice the toll such a struggle has taken on her. Her voice breaks and softens when she speaks about the…
The small-town setting of The Laramie Project has been compared to Thornton Wilder’s Grover’s Corners in the classic play Our Town, and rightfully so. Both plays forage the archetypal American town and uncover truths that are disturbing, moving, and in the case of the more recent work, brutal. The bare…
Israeli writer-director Amos Gitai’s last film, Kadosh, was a claustrophobic tale of two sisters living in an ultra-Orthodox religious community in Jerusalem. The 1999 picture moved at a snail’s pace and turned an already rigid, divisive belief system into a completely alienating experience. In contrast the director’s most recent work,…
With the canon of Jane Austen all but exhausted, literary filmmakers continue their assault on Edith Wharton, another sharply observant writer of yore with something timeless to say about the plight of women. Terence Davies’ The House of Mirth, from Wharton’s beautifully detailed, ironically titled 1905 novel about a mannerly…
If M. Night Shyamalan makes movies to be seen twice, then Joel and Ethan Coen make films to be pawed over a dozen times. O Brother, Where Art Thou?, an opulent and often slapstick updating of Homer’s The Odyssey by way of Preston Sturges, Robert Johnson, and Clark Gable, sneaks…
“I’ve been on my knees for days!” admits designer Juan Carlos Arcila-Duque. Coproprietor of the Design District showroom called ROOM and soon owner of a-d furniture interiors, Arcila-Duque hasn’t taken on a new position as a presidential intern. He’s just adding the job of curator to his résumé, since he’s…
Masterfully commingling aspects of experimental theater and contemporary dance since the early Eighties, postmodern maverick Joe Goode has used everything in his art — from power tools to Chanel suits, spoken word to singing, film to fables — to peel away the convenient packaging of society’s particular, often peculiar, brand…
At the time, it was meant to be read as a great compliment: Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez create comic books for people who don’t read comic books! A publisher or pitchman couldn’t have come up with a more glorious phrase, one magical sentence that would reel in the literate and…
Buffalo soldier, dreadlock Rasta There was a buffalo soldier In the heart of America Stolen from Africa, brought to America Fighting on arrival, fighting for survival — Bob Marley Made famous by the Jamaican singing legend, “buffalo soldiers” was the name given to the African-American U.S. Army troops that patrolled…
The week before Christmas, Old Havana was open season on foreigners, more of them than ever, who had come to see Castro’s Cuba for themselves. Entrepreneurs, ready to pose for pictures, waited by the cathedral to charge tourists for the photos. Pretty young women in frilly folkloric dresses smiled stiffly…
For slightly more than a decade, Chinese martial arts films have directly and indirectly gained a growing audience in the United States. Now the genre may find its greatest breakthrough coming from an unlikely source: director Ang Lee, best known for comedy-dramas of social manners such as Sense and Sensibility,…
The war on drugs has become this generation’s Vietnam, the unwinnable conflict that will, in the end, destroy the innocent and reward the guilty. That, in a coke vial, is the premise of Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, a film that gives flesh and face to bloodless government statistics and statements seldom…
Jazz, that most ignored of musical genres, seems to be sweeping the nation of late. Currently holding musically inclined audiences in its thrall is prodigious documentarian Ken Burns’s multipart series about the uniquely American art form, which recently made its much-anticipated debut on PBS. Jazz piano gal Diana Krall is…
Midday the lobby of the Eden Roc Resort & Spa on Miami Beach is a swirling current of baggage, people, and noise. The flotsam and jetsam of shrieking and darting children, cleaning ladies, and clanging plates wash around Los Angeles-based site-specific choreographer Heidi Duckler as she energetically discusses her Collage…
