The world’s demand for minimally talented 30-year-old high school dropouts who believe they’re great poets or great musicians or great movie directors isn’t going to catch up with the supply anytime soon. That won’t keep the strivers from striving, of course, nor will it snuff out their dreams. Case in…
The nuclear suitcase, the repository of codes needed to launch Russia’s nuclear weapons, was one of the last things (other than his title, a few symbolic medals, and the presidential pen) that outgoing Russian Prime Minister Boris Yeltsin handed over to his successor Vladimir Putin before leaving the Kremlin on…
The stolid stone faces on Easter Island as rendered by German artist Wilhelm Moser remind viewers of one eternal truth: Nature will always reclaim even the most noble monuments built by human hands. The moment of creation also is the moment of gradual disintegration. On display at ArtCenter/South Florida in…
Some people really are crazy, but then crazy is a relative term. Does it apply to someone who thinks he might spin off into outer space and never be able to get back down to Earth? Or is it only crazy when you have to cling to the nearest table…
The War Zone opens with a black screen and the sound of waves gently crashing against the shore. The methodical ebb and flow of the water produces a soothing rhythm and a sense of tranquility. The film’s first visual image is equally evocative — a beautiful section of seashore, buttressed…
In The Allegory of Painting, seventeenth-century Dutch master Jan Vermeer paints a portrait of the artist painting a portrait. To the left of the canvas, a lavish curtain is drawn to reveal an empty chair, perhaps reserved for the viewer. Beyond the curtain a seated man has just begun the…
The most memorable detail in Tom Tom on a Rooftop, Daniel Keough’s new play now receiving its East Coast premiere in Hollywood, is a piece of the set. The feeble comedy takes place entirely on the tarpaper roof of a modest apartment building, where, amid lawn chairs and milk crates,…
Surrounded by a canal, an airport, and railroad tracks, the City of Miami Springs is a calm oasis of small-town America nestled in Miami-Dade County. Conceived in 1922 by aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss and his partner James Bright (they’re also responsible for Opa-locka) as a reaction to building run amok…
Among the neon lights and shimmery surfaces of the Magic City, it’s often easy to lose sight of the past, but the folks at Miami-Dade County’s Fruit and Spice Park remember a time when the world did not speed along the digital pathways of the Internet. Some even recall the…
Andy’s Top 10Film critics are by nature a sour lot, so it is with truly great pleasure that I suggest that 1999 has been the best year for cinema — certainly for American cinema and even for the major studios — in my fifteen years on the beat. I’m at…
In the literary classic, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, photographer Walker Evans and journalist James Agee make heroes of three unknown families struggling to survive as tenant farmers in rural Alabama circa 1936. Evans and Agee’s praise for the poor but proud helped drum up support for President Franklin…
Of all the versions of Cuba that exist, few are as fragmented or elusive as those that live in the memory of exiles. Anyone who left the island before his or her own memories really began or grew up in the United States with exile parents knows stories of how…
By sheer coincidence, A Bicycle Country, Nilo Cruz’s bewitching play about the fate of three balseros, is premiering against the backdrop of the political drama of the young rafter Elian Gonzalez. Or is it coincidence? If six-year-old Elian hadn’t been rescued off Palm Beach on Thanksgiving Day, then perhaps some…
In totalitarian societies terror is the instrument to force submission, and the threat of terror is often marked on the very land itself. Human sovereignty, a basic political right, is seized and annihilated by an übermensch utopia. Putting ideology over rights and rhetoric over truth, dictatorships from the right and…
When Paul Thomas Anderson’s second feature, Boogie Nights, was released in 1997, critics and film industry types fell over themselves to designate Anderson the next big thing, an auteur in the footsteps of Scorsese and Coppola. His film turned Mark Wahlberg from a has-been underwear model and rapper into a…
“Hell is a sort of high-class nightclub,” wrote George Orwell, “entry to which is reserved for Catholics only.” This sentiment is on stark display in the work of novelist Graham Greene, whose adulterous relationship (with the very married Catherine Welston, a wealthy farmer’s wife) propelled him to scrutinize the mechanics…
Writer-director Anthony Minghella has chosen to follow up his Oscar-laden The English Patient with another literary adaptation — this time, of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. Highsmith is known to film buffs as the author of Strangers on a Train, the basis for one of Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers; but…
How do you spend nearly 24 hours a day with another person for an entire year and not end up divorced, insane, or homicidal? Ask historian/Miami native Cesar Becerra and journalist/Connecticut Yankee Maud Dillingham. The married couple recently hit the road in their restored 1979 Chevrolet Malibu Classic station wagon…
Where the hell were the dancing hippos? That was the first question raised immediately after a screening of Disney’s new Fantasia/2000, a retooled, souped-up, IMAX version of the original animated 1940 flick, which succeeded in terrifying children around the world, pretty much assuring they would never in a million years…
The single poignant moment in Buddy — The Buddy Holly Story depicts an imperiously fragile moment of rock and roll history, the one in which protorocker Buddy Holly wrote the song “Everyday.” Not the best or the most popular of Holly’s work, the tune nonetheless is charming, and so much…
At first glance Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother seems uncharacteristically grim for a filmmaker with such a demonic sense of humor. Within ten minutes the heroine’s seventeen-year-old son is hit and killed by a car, which propels her and the events of the film into motion. In the next…
Let’s hear it for sports movies! The most avid sports fan occasionally can be bored by lackluster games, but the casual spectator also can appreciate what the big screen can do for an athletic contest, even one played by actors rather than athletes: the closer-than-life closeups, the dramatic use of…
