At the movies the fun-loving temptress has been liberating the buttoned-up clod ever since Katharine Hepburn’s leopard made off with Cary Grant’s dinosaur bone in Bringing Up Baby, 61 years ago. Maybe even longer, if you count pioneer vamp Theda Bara’s effect on a long succession of speechless men. In…
Imagine a brainy spider battling cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn and you’ll get some idea of the shenanigans onstage in the National Actors Theatre touring production of The Gin Game, starring Julie Harris and Charles Durning. The Tony Randall-produced revival, which just left the Royal Poinciana Playhouse to take up residence…
thursday march 11 Glorifying the influence of the mass market, the machine, violence, global communication, and war were all tenets of the ahead-of-its-time Italian movement known as Futurism. As the name implies, it was an attempt to propel the then-underdeveloped country into the future. Founded in 1909 by Filippo Tommaso…
Five years ago an event known as the Winter Party was staged for the express purpose of raising funds for SAVE (Safeguarding American Values for Everyone). The mission: to defeat an anti-gay amendment to the Florida constitution that would allow discrimination based on sexual orientation. At that fete close to…
On the other end of the telephone line, Jim Mazur ponders the possibilities. A major think. Listen hard, and you can almost hear the clickety-clack of his brain at work as it rummages rapidly through the available mental data. Then after a long pause and a sighing, “Oh, geez,” he…
Immodesty becomes Guy Ritchie, the British writer-director who makes a jovial debut on a Jovian scale in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. In this wayward gangster comedy set in London’s East End, Ritchie cooks up a gleefully improbable tale using mismatched ingredients: a rigged card game, a hydroponic marijuana…
For Cruel Intentions, writer Roger Kumble’s directorial debut, he has come up with the clever idea of updating Choderlos De Laclos’s durable eighteenth-century novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses. With its focus on totally amoral protagonists who use sex as a tool to manipulate innocents, often just for the hell of it,…
In the three decades that director Ken Loach has been a steadfast champion of the British working class, his films have lost none of their sting. Whether examining a brutal Belfast police incident in Hidden Agenda (1990) or the plight of an unemployed man struggling to buy his daughter a…
Li’l Bit, the haunted protagonist of How I Learned to Drive, compares her Uncle Peck to the Flying Dutchman, the legendary figure condemned to travel the Earth until a maiden loves him of her own free will. The play, which won author Paula Vogel the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for drama,…
thursday march 4 We’ve all heard that drivel about not judging a book by its cover. Face it, an attractive cover makes a difference. As good-looking books go, Griffin & Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence is one of the prettiest. Author/illustrator Nick Bantock’s colorful and lushly illustrated 1991 volume told the…
We live in a funny place. Watching eccentric and corrupt politicians stumble through their daily duties is a major form of amusement around here, but that only goes so far. Sometimes it’s nice to know that the folks making you howl are not juicing your tax dollars, too. You’d almost…
Roses are everywhere: in nine out of ten poems ever written, in pop songs, all over TV. Ah, but those orchids. They’re more elusive, yet just as beautiful, aromatic, and symbolic as roses, and frankly, damn sexier. This weekend orchids get their due via the 54th annual Miami International Orchid…
When hit men wore hats and Cadillacs had running boards, the average Mafia don could knock off the Tattaglia brothers in midafternoon and sit down to a nice plate of chicken cacciatora that evening, content that he’d seen to the family business and blazed a path for his first-born son’s…
The independent production/distribution company The Shooting Gallery probably got more attention when Monica Lewinsky showed up in Washington, D.C., wearing a cap bearing its logo than it is likely to receive from the release of this modest, deserving film from writer-director Nancy Savoca. Savoca has made three earlier features: True…
During the opening titles of 200 Cigarettes, we hear Bow Wow Wow’s near-peerless bubble-gum anthem, “I Want Candy.” The movie that follows seems designed to satisfy that craving: It’s sweet, tart, brightly colored, insubstantial, and utterly lacking in nutritional value. It’s also fun to consume, and harmless enough as long…
At the center of Taking Sides is a rube, a crass insurance salesman to be exact. A guy who doesn’t know Toscanini from teriyaki. A man who sleeps through Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, “because Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony bores me shitless,” as he explains to his secretary. Bored or just a bore,…
Choreographer and teacher Karen Stewart: “Black is my favorite color. If you open my closet, you’d swear I was married to an undertaker.” Stewart laughs at her reason for naming her dance troupe the Black Door Dance Ensemble. Another obvious reason: Her dancers are black. “I wanted to have my…
thursday february 25 The New World Symphony’s tribute to Finland’s most famous composer, Jean Sibelius (1865-1957), ends tonight as conductor Michael Tilson Thomas leads a rehearsal of Sibelius’s Symphonies no. 4 and 5. The conductor will also deliver “live” program notes from the stage. A key figure in promoting Finnish…
“It all started with me trying to get a gig for the Afro Polyphonic Space Orchestra,” recalls Jose Elias Mateo, referring to the genesis of the first-ever Afro Roots World Music Festival taking place this Friday at Tobacco Road. Mateo, a local multi-instrumentalist who performs with a variety of acts…
The sixteenth Miami Film Festival continues this week with even more international fare. On the must-see list are Thursday’s presentation of a sublime offering from French newcomer Erick Zonca that created quite a stir at Cannes, The Dreamlife of Angels. The same day Buena Vista Social Club showcases famed German…
A movie, a novel, a Broadway musical, and a stage play. The only popular dramatic form Kiss of the Spider Woman hasn’t conquered is the TV sitcom. Given its high-concept idea (a fussy homosexual and an idealistic politico sharing a small space and becoming the best of friends), can its…
As acts of conjuring go, God’s universe-in-seven-days gig was none too shabby. But George Merrick’s siring of Coral Gables, conceived with a flash of genius and realized with all the precision of divine foresight, is almost enough to make the Big Guy jealous. Coral Gables: The City Beautiful, the latest…
