Pretentiousness masquerading as profundity; self-indulgence masquerading as art. The Loss of Sexual Innocence, the dreadful new film from writer/director Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas, One Night Stand), joins the ranks of the worst films ever made. A statement that may, on the surface, seem harsh and heartless but that will…
While Hong Kong movies have been invading Hollywood through the success of Jackie Chan, John Woo, Jet Li, and others, mainland Chinese cinema has invaded the classier neighborhoods of the film industry during the past decade or so. The latest contender is The King of Masks, an affecting melodrama from…
Like the old adage about good campers who can start a fire with only three matchsticks, the M Ensemble Company, Inc., has struck a full blaze with Home, a production crackling with inventiveness that defies its low-budget parameters with combustible theater talent. Samm-Art Williams’s drama-in-poetry about a young Southern farmer…
Info: Much Ado About Sonnets By Robin Dougherty The two-year-old Actors’ Project Theatre Company is the first to admit that with Love’s Fire, it’s shamelessly cashing in on the current cachet of William Shakespeare. “He’s hip and young, but older crowds recognize him, too” says Irene Adjan, the company’s cofounder…
A fine line divides inspired silliness from out-and-out witlessness; it’s a short leap from grin from groan. In 1997’s Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Mike Myers took a thin premise — spoof the Sixties by transplanting a horny Matt Helm-like secret agent into the Nineties — and danced an…
In John Sayles’s Limbo, which is set amid the rough-and-tumble of southeast Alaska, an ex-salmon fisherman with guilty memories (David Strathairn), an itinerant lounge singer with a lousy voice (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), and the singer’s melancholy teenage daughter (newcomer Vanessa Martinez) become stranded, Robinson Crusoe-style, on a remote island. This…
In an early scene in Instinct, released by Touchstone, a division of Disney’s Buena Vista Pictures, we’re told that a brilliant primatologist named Ethan Powell (played by Anthony Hopkins) is being brought back to the United States from Rwanda, where for several years he has been engaged in a close…
thursday june 10 It’s tough keeping a band together, especially when your ensemble consists of grizzled veteran musicians who know the road all too well and get antsy playing in one place too long. The sextet performing during the Van Dyke Cafe’s (846 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach) regular Thursday night…
Fascination with Cuban culture is understandable for those of us just a short jaunt from the island. But long ago the lure of the enchanting nation and its infectious music took hold of Bill Summers as a ten-year-old living in Detroit. Back then Summers was studying classical piano at a…
Wearing a white, lacy, sleeveless blouse with a matching long, flowing skirt, Elena Garcia sways from side to side, snaps her head and shoulders forward and backward, and swirls rapidly around in circles to a loud Afro-Cuban chant coming from a boombox. Looking like a cork bobbing in a tub…
If memory serves, Archie Bunker never ranted about brilliant country and western stars who experienced rapid career trajectories and died tragic deaths, possibly because none ever crossed his path. So it’s difficult to imagine what he’d think of daughter Gloria losing her head over Patsy Cline. Of course more than…
It has not been lost on the Quinn brothers (actor Aidan, cinematographer Declan, and writer/director Paul) that in old Gaelic culture the tribal bard, or storyteller, was held in the highest esteem. The Quinns want to be Irish storytellers, too, and to that end they have loaded up This Is…
The peerless Ethiopian distance runner Haile Gebrselassie is a tiny man (five foot three and barely 115 pounds), but in his native country his heroism looms large. Since 1994 he has set fifteen world records at five different distances, and at the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, he outdueled…
In the desert outpost of Needles, California, two pathetic, near-bankrupt used-car salesmen (writer/editor/ director/producer Joe Carnahan and producer Dan Leis) are offered a quarter of a million bucks just to hide a 1963 Pontiac LeMans for two days … without looking in the trunk. They know the deal stinks, and…
In the garden of his home in Lisbon during the Renaissance, a well-to-do elderly man talks to a young girl about life, love, and death. Three women share their day-to-day experiences and dream of better times. Another woman narrates how she did what she could to get by. These and…
thursday june 3 Most people admire Jennifer Lopez for her sizable butt and her stellar acting skills. (Who can forget that performance in Anaconda? Okay, she did do alright in Out of Sight.) But now her adoring public can learn to love Lopez for her voice. (Not that it’s anything…
Three figures covered in powdery white body paint squirm together on the floor, tying their bodies into a living knot, struggling to disentangle themselves, anxiously rolling and stretching in a mass of intertwined limbs. The woman climbs over the two men, transforming the knot into a tower, and then descends…
Suicide, abortion, death by torture, and plagiarism of an obscure British novelist are an awful lot to cram into a single play. In fact just one of these topics would be a challenge for the best of playwrights. Shakespeare’s potboiler, Titus Andronicus, for example, contains rape, mutilation, and family squabbling,…
If your poodle is decked out in the complete Captain Kirk uniform, you’ve taken Klingon language classes, or you once mailed DeForest Kelly a joint taped to a piece of cardboard just “to return the favor,” the 86-minute documentary called Trekkies is a must-see: love it or loathe it. In…
Relentlessly hip? You better be. Enjoy pretentious talk about the great god Art and the hidden meanings in old gangster movies? Couldn’t hurt. Like to sit up till dawn smoking black cigarettes and exchanging ironic barbs about the tragedy of life? Bingo. Amos Poe, an East Village-based avant-gardian since the…
Maybe it’s the damn blinking thing, because it’s not simply the foppish hair and boyish face, or, for that matter, even the vaguely befuddled reticence and wry, self-abasing demeanor we Americans prefer to see in our Brits. It’s got to be the blinking. That’s what he does, almost all he…
Count the legendary Hardy Boys among the visitors to Summer Shorts ’99, the annual festival of one-act plays produced by City Theatre. In fact include playwright Christopher Durang, too. The writer, who penned The Marriage of Bette and Boo, American theater’s most scathing sendup of family values, didn’t invent the…
