When Delma Isles “defected” from the world of traditional ballet and founded Momentum Dance Company in 1982, the last thing on her mind was staging a version of the Nutcracker. Her troupe was and still is steadfastly dedicated to modern dance, and a ballet set to a Tchaikovsky score is…
Satan’s Enchanted Forest wreaks all the horrors of the holiday on unsuspecting innocents, tormenting young and old alike with vicious wild animals poised to attack and more neon than downtown Vegas. What? Not Halloween? Christmas, you say? Oh, sorry. You might understand our confusion. We are naive to the point…
thursday december 17 Paulito Fernandez Gallo is the most versatile of Cuba’s young singing stars. A true sonero in the tradition of Benny More, he can render a ballad as suavely as Frank Sinatra. He even sounds great rapping in Spanish. The mix of romantic salsa and aggressive Cuban timba…
DreamWorks’ grandiose attempt at an animated feature for adults is a flimsy musical about Moses, a Sunday school filmstrip writ ultralarge and decked out with the spectacle of Hollywood Bible epics. Slender sermons nestle amidst flashy action sequences and diaphanous fashion statements from the more tasteful pages of the Nefertiti’s…
On May 30, 1957, the Los Angeles Times reported that the body of “the distinguished film producer and director James Whale” had been found floating in the swimming pool at his home in Pacific Palisades. Fully clothed, Whale’s corpse exhibited a head wound. “Whale,” the Times went on to point…
Old-fashioned romantic comedies are an endangered species, and in these generally unromantic days it’s always a pleasant surprise to find a decent one like Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail. Ephron, of course, made her bones five and a half years ago with the huge hit Sleepless in Seattle, but since…
Gavin MacLeod, erstwhile captain of the Love Boat, sails blithely through Moon over Buffalo with an erect rubber nose. He’s playing Cyrano de Bergerac. Or rather he’s playing an actor playing Cyrano in Ken Ludwig’s 1995 Broadway hit, a comedy about a troupe of washed-up actors in 1953 who, by…
thursday december 10 The glitz and glitter for which South Beach is becoming too well known can be seen today at the Bass Museum (2121 Park Ave., Miami Beach), when the exhibition Liza Lou’s America opens. The California-based sculptor and installation artist Liza Lou has a fondness for sparkly things,…
After two decades of directing the annual Miami Christmas Pageant, Chuck Bridwell recalls one particular scene that will forever stick in his memory: the time a camel nearly backed into the orchestra pit. “It came within three feet of the violins,” he says. The camel is just one of some…
More than three years ago, when he was working as a paid production assistant on Fernando Trueba’s shot-in-Miami Two Much, Herschel Faber soaked up the moviemaking vibes while solidifying, once and for all, what he wanted to do with his life. “As I was watching the film being made,” he…
Ultratough guy Jesse “The Body” Ventura says he means business as the new governor of Minnesota. But for now the nasty crime wave in that state continues unchecked — in the movies anyway. Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan, a psychological thriller that shows us how dangerous life can get after…
Here we go again. Enemy of the State is Fascism in America 1998, Chapter Four … or Five … or whatever we’re up to. It readily invites comparison to The Siege, but for better or worse its goals are more mundane. While The Siege seems like an ideological agenda driving…
First of all, if you’re among the benighted who’ve never seen Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 shocker Psycho, stop reading at the end of this paragraph. A movie review, even one as incisive and elegant as this, is no way to be introduced to Hitchcock’s horror masterpiece. Your assignment is to rush…
Of all the repertory programs ever devised, the double bill playing this month at the New Theatre has got to be one of the most delightfully odd. Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is bound to pop up somewhere this time of year, of course, but would you expect to find…
A tinsel-decked Christmas tree overwhelms the living room of Atlanta’s upstanding Freitag family. The ceiling-scraping spruce is about to be topped by a star until one of the characters declares that “Jewish Christmas trees don’t have stars.” How the Freitags come to have this gold ornament packed away among their…
Lead Stories *Recently dismissed San Jose, California, police officer Johnny Venson, Jr., age 48, in jail facing fourteen counts of on-duty burglary, was awarded a $27,000 annual pension in November by the city’s retirement board. The board agreed with Venson that he had a disability: an addiction to gambling, which…
“It’s instant gratification,” says DB, a DJ from the UK who was instrumental in bringing across the Atlantic the fast-paced style of electronic music known as jungle. He’s talking on the phone from New York about the life of a DJ. According to DB, it’s the ideal career for restless…
Dogs can do so many things: perform tricks, guide blind people, sniff out anything from dope to death, pull sleds, catch plastic flying discs, hunt, provide security, rescue people, write stimulating articles for major metropolitan newspapers and national magazines. And if they should do something else — well, rest assured…
thursday 3 It may seem a bit early to listen to Christmas music and commune with Santa Claus, but that’s exactly what you’ll hear and be able to do when you hang out under the stars at the final Barnacle Under Moonlight concert of the year, taking place at 6:00…
“I just find it all so bizarre,” notes John Maybury, popping a cigarette in his mouth and lighting it in what appears to be one quick flip of the wrist. “All those issues of ‘being out’ and, ‘Are you in?’ We should have gone beyond that by now. I know…
JUMP INFORMATION APPENDED FROM FILE C:NEP32DAYS1203199812030101.NVT According to the sparse information available in standard reference books, Chilean expatriate director Raul Ruiz, still in his late fifties, has made more than 100 films since 1960; apparently only 50 or so are features, but that’s still an impressive stat. Although he’s been…
Imagine the results of a collaboration between Federico Fellini and Woody Allen? Let’s say it was years ago, before Fellini died and Woody stopped making funny movies. Hilarious, right? And how bizarre would it be if there were any justice for the oppressed of this sorry world? Would we all…
