It’s summertime and the livin’ is compas. Miami’s second annual Haitian Compas Festival coincides with the glut of new compas albums released each July. The sales barometer rises just before August, when the Haitian diaspora in Miami and New York heads home for the annual town festivals bearing gifts for…
Remember those old Mickey Rooney flicks where all the “kids” would be sittin’ around just shootin’ the breeze? Suddenly Mickey would jump up and declare: “Hey, kids, I got a great idea. Let’s put on a show!” In a matter of seconds, a piano rolls in. Judy Garland strikes a…
Nick Park speaks so softly that the tape recorder barely registers him at all. His is a whisper of a voice, the sound of a man who has spent years in isolation talking to no one but himself. Transcribing an interview with him is like trying to decipher a man’s…
Ceremonia Inconclusa (Unfinished Ceremony).
Created by, directed by, and starring Magaly Agüero. Artemis Performance Network’s Performance Space 742, 742 SW 16th Ave; 305-643-6611.
In the new Jim Carrey farce, Me, Myself & Irene, the rubber-faced comedian plays a meek Rhode Island state trooper named Charlie, whose aggressions are so pent up that they finally break out in the form of a second personality called Hank. Where Charlie silently endures potty-mouth curses from little…
I never imagined the day would come when I would cringe to see Ralph Fiennes onscreen. Not only is he shamelessly good-looking but, whether playing the brooding, remote figure doomed by love in The English Patient or the bloodless commandant of a Nazi death camp in Schindler’s List, he projects…
Holy moly! Yet another version of Hamlet? Will they never stop? Ah well, at least Michael Almereyda’s new adaptation is one of those really different takes on the venerable play. While the last two widely seen versions (the 1990 Mel Gibson/Franco Zeffirelli film and the four-hour-plus 1996 Kenneth Branagh/Kenneth Branagh…
Round about two in the morning on weekends from the 1930s through the 1950s, the smartly dressed residents of what was then known in Miami as Colored Town would gather at the doors of the hotels on NW Second Avenue. There they would wait for jazz greats like Count Basie,…
If you were around during the Roaring Twenties and you had the nerve to call Peggy Hopkins Joyce a gold digger, she probably wouldn’t have responded by delivering a stinging slap to your face. The former Ziegfeld girl, sometime Hollywood actress, and five-time divorcée most likely would have smiled flirtatiously…
There exists deep within any man who once read comic books and collected them–protected them, actually, with plastic sleeves and cardboard backs and boxes that fought off the yellowing of time–the mythical being known as The Fanboy. A long time ago, The Fanboy pored over every issue of World’s Finest…
We take a seat in front of the screen, stage, or box to disengage. Sometimes it has to do with art — a riveting portrayal of the human drama — sometimes not. TV and film provide many ways to disengage, through electronic hypnosis, Surround sound inoculation, big-screen digital imagery, and…
There is no doubt about it: Little Havana is bubbling over. The 6street visual arts collective phenomenon seems to have spread. Even a cautious observer would have been impressed by what happened on Friday, May 26, when about seven blocks of SW Eighth Street — between Twelfth and Nineteenth avenues…
Sixty years after Walt Disney’s original plans to expand on 1940’s Fantasia, Walt Disney Pictures has finally gotten around to making new musical segments for a reprise of the film’s classical-music-cum-animation concept. Fantasia/2000 has seven new sequences, with that old favorite, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” thrown in for old times’ sake…
It’s the year 3028, and man … is an endangered species! (Haven’t we heard that somewhere before, like last month?) But this time around, the threat is a little more intimidating than those effeminate, Xenu-worshipping Conehead psychologists in platform boots. The villains in Fox’s new animated spectacular Titan A.E. are…
Blink — or, more likely, doze — and you will miss it, this tiny, beautiful oasis in the middle of an otherwise barren wasteland. For a moment, a precious, frustrating moment to be treasured in a movie that flaunts its disposability, Nicolas Cage reminds us how good an actor he…
Say the word Juneteenth and it’s pretty much a given that most people won’t have the faintest concept of what you’re talking about, let alone realize that in some states (including this one) it is a holiday. An eventful day in history, most notably for blacks, Juneteenth is an abbreviation…
FIU history professor Darden Asbury Pyron first got to thinking about the rhinestone-studded enigma that is Liberace while browsing at a bookstore several years ago. Pyron picked up a memoir by one of the great pianist’s lovers and got completely weirded out when he flipped to a photograph in the…
His name appears in almost every book written about Groucho Marx, so much so, he has been given the appropriate appellation by members of the Marx family: Wesso. But Paul Wesolowski is of no relation to the famous clan. He’s a man in his 40s who lives outside Philadelphia and,…
If all the world’s a stage, then surely a courtroom is the place to see some of the best drama. Just think of Johnnie Cochran, striding across a courtroom and slamming down his briefcase, or O.J. Simpson, struggling to squeeze his huge hand into the glove that didn’t fit. A…
War, as many have said, is created by old men to be fought by young men. In today’s world that ancient adage must be amended to include young women. While many American kids stroll through their school years without much more to worry about than clothes and grades, too many…
Could there be any less appealing image than that of a fat Martin Lawrence in drag scratching his rear, as on the poster for Big Momma’s House? The idea of sitting through any movie promoted in such a fashion brings to mind the hideously awful It’s Pat: The Movie, or…
As a systematic ichthyologist (a scientist who explores the diversity and classification of fishes) for the Smithsonian Institution, Carole Baldwin has grown accustomed to her share of “swimming with the fishes.” But when she starred in the IMAX-3D film Galapagos, on land and under the waters of that nineteen-island chain…
