Fifteen minutes into Velvet Goldmine, director Todd Haynes’s love letter to England’s glam-rock scene of the late Sixties/early Seventies, the film already promises to be many things: a missing-person mystery, a meticulous period piece, an essay on sexually liberated dandyism, a quasi-musical, a portrait of a Machiavellian as aspiring pop…
Fascism is in the air. Well, at least it’s on movie screens. In a two-week stretch we’ve seen old Nazis (Life Is Beautiful), old Nazis training neo-Nazis (Apt Pupil), book burning (Pleasantville), and now, with The Siege, a story of full-blown military rule on American soil. Still in the wings:…
From the works of Edgar Allan Poe to Hollywood’s The Fly, classic American horror stories indulge our fascination with the decay of the body. They’re overrun with maggoty cadavers, tell-tale hearts, and monsters that stalk us through dark alleys, graphic reflections of our fear of death. European tales, on the…
If you’re tempted to shout “Hello, gorgeous!” when you see Steven Brinberg onstage, go ahead. He won’t mind. Having impersonated Barbra Streisand for the past five years, he’s used to it. “I’ve been a fan of hers since I was a kid,” says Brinberg, who once imitated several stars in…
thursday october 29 Up for a Roman holiday? You’re more apt to get heartburn than Audrey Hepburn at this event, but who cares? You’ll have fun taking gondola rides, playing bocce, tasting wines, observing pasta- and cheese-making demonstrations, and watching local musical and comedy acts at the Italian Heritage Festival…
Promoters promise burning, throbbing excitement as top local chefs hungrily lust to score the award for Most Passionate Chili. Steaming, dripping hot. Yes, yes, yes, oh yes! The sixth annual Hot Pursuit Chili Cook-Off, which benefits Planned Parenthood of Greater Miami, is a blend of seemingly unrelated elements — the…
You don’t have to give a damn about sports to find Without Limits engrossing. Like all the best films, it is really about character. In this case the character is that of Steve Prefontaine, the legendary track star of the 1970s who held every American running record between 2000 and…
When Montoya, one of the fearless vampire killers in John Carpenter’s Vampires, tells another character that nobody believes in the title creatures because nobody wants to, there’s no mistaking the ancestry of the line. It comes down, through two generations of horror films, from the moment in the original Dracula…
Nobody knows if Scott Joplin knew Irving Berlin. In The Tin Pan Alley Rag, Mark Saltzman’s well-meaning musical, however, the two composers not only meet cute (Joplin, disguised as a composer’s agent, appears in the office where Berlin works as a sheet-music publisher), they reminisce, play tunes, and dip together…
Love may indeed be a fragile thing, but its clumsy male and female protagonists can’t help “endlessly crashing into each other like two bumper cars.” That’s the observation of one character in the musical revue I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, an affable if not particularly insightful commentary on…
thursday october 22 Don’t be surprised if you see a man walking around town in a ten-gallon hat. It’s probably Augusta (Georgia) State University professor of history Michael Searles, who enjoys dressing like a cowboy and talking about them too. Tonight at 8:00 “Cowboy Mike” delivers his lecture “African-American Cowboys…
Thanks to Robert Pinsky, poet laureate of the United States, thousands of people can experience a fresh taste of Hell. A stage adaptation of the writer’s ambitious 1994 translation of Dante’s Inferno comes to South Florida this week as part of the Miami Book Fair International. Count Ugolino will devour…
What do you get when a huge, fun-loving, and deeply religious nation is surrounded by neighbors who speak a different language? Great art, says Mary Luft, a local events producer and director of the Florida/Brazil festival who is working to bring more attention to a culture she believes is special…
A riveting but darkly disturbing thriller, Apt Pupil isn’t easy to sit through. The subject matter itself proves deeply unsettling, while two brief acts of sadism are so horrifying as to be unwatchable. And yet this brutal film borders on the brilliant. Beautifully structured and edited, with a chilling central…
The first time we see Ray Joshua, the young black hero of director Marc Levin’s impressive feature debut Slam, we get a vivid taste of the conflicting forces that rule him. His olive-drab pants, so hip-hop baggy that you could fit two rail-thin Rays inside, are stuffed with bags of…
At the beginning of Gary Ross’s Pleasantville, fraternal twins who are unhappy suburban teenagers (is there any other kind?) fall down the rabbit hole of their television set and find themselves trapped in a parallel universe: a Fifties sitcom of the same name in which the family is more idealized…
For some people the thought of stepping into a museum full of works they may not understand is frightening enough. But try stepping into such a museum when it’s full of costume-clad artists and art lovers. Since 1995 North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art has been scaring people and stimulating…
What Miami needs is a real professional sports team. The Dolphins are paper tigers; watching their playoff hopes fade doesn’t qualify as high-grade sports entertainment. The Marlins are, of course, the worst team in the major leagues and possibly in the minor leagues as well. The Heat has no players…
thursday october 15 Look out! Pope-rah, oops, that’s Oprah, as in Winfrey, strikes again. The preachy talk show host/producer/actress who wants to recast the world in her new image — fit, slim, spiritual, and well read — is starring in the movie version of Beloved, Toni Morrison’s powerful, haunting novel…
The Jonathan Demme-directed Beloved runs nearly three hours, and it’s a long slog. This adaptation of the 1987 Toni Morrison novel bursts with ambition. On one hand it tries to get inside the fevers of the African-American slave experience, but it also wants to be an epic family saga and…
The hero of The Mighty — the title character, in fact — is an eighth-grader known by the nickname Freak (Kieran Culkin). His might isn’t physical; he’s a small, frail boy who suffers from a degenerative birth defect. His spine curves painfully, and he can walk only with crutches and…
Nobody who has seen the off-Broadway version of The Fantasticks at New York City’s Sullivan Street Playhouse will recognize the set of the appealing new production at the Hollywood Playhouse. (That’s a lot of us, given the 15,000 or so performances the show has racked up since it opened on…
