As far as we know, frighteningly prolific television writer/producer Stephen J. Cannell doesn’t traipse around his hometown of Los Angeles wearing Nike sneakers. If he did though, it wouldn’t be startling. His lengthy career seems to exemplify the athletic-wear company’s advertising slogan/philosophy, “Just Do It.” The co-creator, writer, and sometime…
It seems like only yesterday that movies dealing with gay and lesbian life were synonymous with extravagant displays of gloom and doom. From the suicides of The Children’s Hour and Advise and Consent to the serial killers of Cruising and Basic Instinct, same-sexuality was no fun — in the worst…
What is it they say — that even a flea can reach Mount Olympus riding in Pegasus’s mane? Well, in the case of the new Albert Brooks comedy The Muse, Brooks is the flea and Pegasus is his delectable costar, Sharon Stone. But I get ahead of myself. In The…
A somber, meditative film from the Greek master Theo Angelopoulos, Eternity and a Day tells the story of a terminally ill writer Alexandre (played with creaky eloquence by German star Bruno Ganz) as he moves out of his seaside home and begins to look back over his life on the…
Just when you thought you got the hang of the latest fad, the trendmeisters up in the sky (or wherever they are) go and change things. Once upon a time swing may have been the thing. But savvy dance fans, especially those who are connoisseurs of television commercials, know that…
On a recent morning in Little Haiti, geese honk, a rooster crows, and a goat named Michelle Jordan pokes around the kitchen of the Earth N’ Us Farm, two acres of enchanted tropical forest, vegetable gardens, fantastic tree houses, honeycombs, and compost heaps hidden behind an unassuming wooden fence. Brother-and-sister-homesteaders…
Miss Julie and The Stronger.
Written by August Strindberg. Directed by Rafael de Acha. With Iris Delgado, Marta Velasco, Israel Garcia, Robert Maxwell, Lucia McArthur. Through September 5. New Theatre, 65 Almeria Ave, Coral Gables, 3054435909.
Actress Elizabeth Dimon was so delightfully adroit this past spring in the Caldwell Theatre Company’s production of The King’s Mare and the Florida Stage’s Quills that it should surprise no one that she walks away with the part of Cissy, the female half of the comic pair of lovers in…
It has been almost 40 years since Eric Rohmer, riding the crest of the French New Wave, embarked on the first of his Six Moral Tales. The series eventually would include at least two classics: My Night at Maud’s (1969) and Chloe in the Afternoon (1972). Linked by theme, style,…
If Kevin Williamson has anything to say about it, the good works of noble movie schoolteachers like Mr. Chips and Miss Dove and Mr. Holland will be wiped out in one fell swoop. In their place the creator of TV’s hormonal Dawson’s Creek series proposes an unmitigated horror: a high…
Filmmaker Bobby Bowfinger, the lead character in the intermittently funny Hollywood satire Bowfinger, starring Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy, has a dream: He sees a FedEx truck cruising down the street toward his office, but instead of driving by, as it does every day, the truck stops, and the driver…
Spike and Mike’s 1999 Classic Festival of Animation, Spike and Mike’s latest edition of their annual festival (which is definitely not to be confused with their grosser, inferior Sick and Twisted fests) is their best compilation yet. There’s not a single stiff in the batch. The material is all new…
As any half-assed ascetic can tell you, there’s nothing in life that must be done. You do not have to eat. Or sleep. Or even breathe. If you allow yourself to suffer because you lack food or sleep or air, it is only because you desire to live in the…
Famous snakes in history: the slithery Svengali in the garden of Eden. The randy reptile in the Jungle Book. The colossal creature in Anaconda. Of course the proverbial snake in the grass. And bald, beady-eyed political consultant James Carville, whose wife Mary Matalin lovingly dubbed him “Serpent Head.” None of…
Time does not exist. It’s simply a human concept, completely invalid in terms of reality and Truth (in the Kantian, transcendent sense of Truth). You are being born, you are living in the moment you’re in, you are dying. You always have been and always will be. You are part…
Further evidence that they don’t make movies like they used to, or maybe just the first sign of the apocalypse: Runaway Bride, the Julia Roberts/Richard Gere fluff fantasy, is number one at the box office. For fans of serious cinema, disheartening to say the least. But as Hollywood directors continue…
Joan Chen, director and co-writer of Xiu Xiu the Sent Down Girl, is best known as an actress: American audiences probably identify her most readily as the doomed wife in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor or as Josie Packard, the alternately evil and innocent character in David Lynch’s weird-o-rama Twin…
London-born novelist-screenwriter Hanif Kureishi doesn’t have Margaret Thatcher to kick around anymore, as he did so incisively and effectively in My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, but his concerns have not wandered too far afield. Rather the hard edges merely have been softened. Universal issues still inspire…
Do not be fooled: Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley, and Peter Criss receive top billing in Detroit Rock City, but Kiss doesn’t actually appear in the film until its final three minutes. And when the band members do show up, clad in their de rigueur leather-and-greasepaint getups, it’s simply…
Dan Ireland’s impressive debut feature The Whole Wide World died quietly at the box office despite making many a critic’s ten-best list for 1996. His followup, The Velocity of Gary, may suffer the same fate, given its modest budget and a story line focused on male bisexuality. That would be…
When he was 107 years old, the story goes, Broadway legend George Abbott was asked what he thought was the most important development in the theater to have taken place in his lifetime. His answer: “Electricity.” Although his active career as an actor, director, and producer spanned some six decades…
Socrates and Plato, Emerson and Thoreau, Mr. Kotter and Vinnie Barbarino — the history of Western civilization is cluttered with memorable teacher-student pairs, each bringing its unique dynamic to one of the most powerful relationships in humankind. It’s no surprise that quite a few twentieth-century dramas, from Educating Rita to…
