You’re a homemaker weary of whipping up boring old chicken dishes every day for your family. Your culinary repertoire needs some variety, so you head to the library to check out some African, Mexican, and Asian cookbooks. There you come across the same astonishing information over and over again: Africa…
Gay-theme programming has made a rapid rise to general acceptance in the movie and television industries, and on the public stage as a whole. In the last month Boys Don’t Cry, an arthouse feature based on the true story of a Nebraska teen, snagged a Best Actress Oscar for Hilary…
Pretty and popular Megan (Natasha Lyonne) tromps through what she assumes is the life of a normal high school teen, while her parents secretly pray for her over dinner and plot an intervention with her friends. Quicker than you can say, “Two, four, six, eight. God is good. God is…
For a film exploring the uncharted territory of the black gay experience in West Hollywood, Punks staggers in shallow water. The film is a kind of gay male Waiting to Exhale about a couple of brothers trying to wade through the singles scene. This ensemble comedy features characters whose lives…
Even while opening night looms for this year’s festival, director Robert Rosenberg is making plans for the future. Big plans. “This festival is only two years old, and we have a lot of room to grow,” says Rosenberg, a lanky, energetic ex-New Yorker whose own film experience (he’s an Emmy…
Los Angeles dramatist David Rambo (his real name) describes his discovery of a televangelist’s audio technician as the missing link in his three-character play this way: “The Heavens opened, so to speak. I realized I had a trinity: the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost!” But in his play God’s…
In his award-winning memoir of life in the Middle East, journalist Thomas L. Friedman compares Beirut to a Skinner box, the maze apparatus mice are forced to navigate in psychology experiments. For Friedman, Beirut (the capital of Old World disorder) possessed a particular and brutal capacity for conditioning its inhabitants…
From its opening moments, The Road to El Dorado looks and sounds oddly out of time, as though it were removed only yesterday from a time capsule sealed and buried in 1972. With its Peter Max visuals and Elton John vocals, it’s a decidedly unhip piece of work — Starlight…
Grass director Ron Mann’s archival history of weed, Mary Jane, skunk, boo, mezz — you name it, we’ll smoke it — is damn entertaining, to a point. See, perhaps we made the mistake of actually watching it stoned, which seemed a good idea at the time; I believe the words…
“Men know that once they know how to lead, any woman they want is theirs,” says Randy Atlas, making a statement that might apply to the political or business arenas, but actually refers to the world of dance. It’s a realm he knows well. The light-on-his-feet Atlas, in an odd…
“You dance the epoch you live,” says choreographer Jeanguy Saintus. The popular Haitian saying serves as a motto for his dance company, Artcho Danse Répertoire. Founded in 1987 by Saintus and co-director, Jean-Rene Delsoin, Artcho presents traditional Haitian dance in a brand-new form. “I wasn’t born in 1804,” explains Saintus,…
The digital revolution has radically altered the way we perceive art. Since the arrival of the Web, art has changed in form, content, and delivery. Electronic bits are sent over telephone lines, by microwave relay or satellites, through a scanner hooked into a Sony 700VW-Betacam video camera, and end up…
It’s a brave thief who reveals his booty to the man from whom he stole it. But Jim Jarmusch could not resist showing his film, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai to Seijun Suzuki, the 76-year-old Japanese director whose 1967 film Branded to Kill is echoed throughout Ghost Dog…
The gun is a coward’s weapon — always has been, always will be. Likening it to the sword is like equating rape with romance. For reasons that can only be attributed to collective insanity, however, Hollywood absolutely loves to romanticize the gun, serving as an adjunct advertising agency for the…
Forget Miami Beach, Coral Gables, the Design District, and Bird Road. The neighborhood to inhabit if you’re young, wild, and free (read: an artist) now seems to be Little Havana. Long-time Lincoln Road mosaic artist Carlos Alves has landed there and set up a studio, as have former Bird Roaders…
Lucy is at it again. Ricky is in white tie and tails, wowing the nightclub crowd with his 1946 hit “Cuban Pete.” He opens his arms wide, inviting the audience to join him in a “dance/of Latin romance. Cuban Pete won’t teach you in a hurry/Like Arthur Murray,” his song…
Madonna, heaven help us, has yet to don patchwork jeans and a tiara and croon “Cat’s in the Cradle” to a synthesized beat. But the day still may come when Harry Chapin’s ballads, like Don McLean’s “American Pie,” become fodder for the pop diva’s gristmill. Until then you can trip…
There’s an old show-business maxim that as soon as you stop chasing your big break, it chases you. Such is the dilemma faced by Lena Machado, the titular character in Lena’s Dreams, an edgy independent feature from the writing/directing team of Heather Johnson and Gordon Eriksen. Set in the gritty…
What if fate has something horrific in store for you, and you can’t escape it? It’s an idea that’s been around for a long time, from Greek myths like Oedipus Rex, to the New Testament, to EC Comics and The Twilight Zone. Cinematically we tend to prefer the idea that…
Paola di Florio’s documentary Speaking in Strings takes a midcareer look at Italian-born violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, who leapt to prominence in 1981 when she became the youngest-ever winner of the international Naumburg Competition. Salerno-Sonnenberg, who moved to the United States at the age of eight, became a child prodigy of…
People strolling down Miami Beach this weekend will have something more interesting to look at than hard bodies working on their tans and old fogies milling about with metal detectors. Planted in the sands along 21st Street, sprawling across an area roughly the size of a football field, will be…
Everyone sits in the dark and watches movies. Few of us really listen to them, that is, listen to the music that accompanies those often-indelible images. But would we be laughing, crying, gasping at the appropriate moments if all we heard was dialogue? Of course not. The subtle form of…
