Every year the Montreal World Film Festival runs for ten days (through Labor Day), and the Toronto Film Festival picks up a few days later and carries on for another ten. Twin colossi of the Great White North, they unspool some 300 movies each, and, for in the past three…
In 1964, when I was five years old, my father told me that Patty Duke didn’t have a twin. Naturally I recognized this information for what it was: a bald-faced lie. Every week on The Patty Duke Show anyone could see there were two teenage girls, not one actress and…
Forty-five active members of the Miami Rugby Club, including priests, lawyers, firefighters, teachers, and ambassadors, train hard, play hard, and always greet each other with an upbeat “Cheers!” These dedicated members meet three times a week during regular season, which runs from the end of August until May, to sharpen…
thursday october 1 So you’re totally bummed about missing the WCW Monday Nitro at the Miami Arena a few weeks ago? Well, wrestling lover, you can still get your fill of pumped-up guys and gals with funky names and bizarro costumes jumping all over each other tonight at 7:30 when…
Sounds a bit like a script for a superfreaky porn flick: idol with breasts on its head; idol with breast on its belly; tube or pipe with incised decoration. But the really obscene thing about the legacy of Bolivia’s archeological past is the fact that the civilizations themselves have disappeared…
As a professional lamenter of how “they just don’t make ’em like they used to,” I am always thrilled on those rare occasions that someone even tries to make ’em that way. So I am doubly thrilled that, with The Impostors, writer-director Stanley Tucci has tried and richly succeeded. Those…
The ants in Antz show a lot of personality. The film is the best example yet of how a fully animated computer-generated feature can delineate facial movement. Toy Story (1995), the first such feature to be released, was brasher and more child-friendly, but Antz is more of a — how…
Have adultery, murder, and greed all moved to the sticks? Once firmly rooted in the big city, the seven deadly sins have taken on a distinct country-western twang in recent years, thanks to noirish, tough-minded scamfests such as John Dahl’s Red Rock West (1992) and The Last Seduction (1994), James…
Twelve years ago Lily Tomlin opened her mouth and launched a thousand monologues. The 1986 Broadway success of The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe spawned a generation of self-styled storytellers, from the cutthroat visionary portraits of Eric Bogosian and the neurotic ramblings of Spalding Gray to…
Say the word folklife and many people can’t help conjuring up visions of cross-eyed hillbillies who live in Appalachian hollows with their stills and slobbering hounds. No surprise there’s more to it than that. The folks at the Historical Museum of Southern Florida are trying to break through people’s stereotyped…
“Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism, and Self-Representation,” now at the Miami Art Museum, features paintings, photographs, sculpture, and film by some of the most notable artists of this century. Not coincidentally, they are all women. The 22 artists in the show represent three generations, from names associated with Surrealism to contemporary…
thursday september 24 Foreign correspondent Michael Z. Wise comes to the Wolfsonian-FIU (1001 Washington Ave., Miami Beach) this evening at 6:30 p.m. to talk about Germany and its search for a new national identity through architecture. Wise has been studying the controversial $12 billion redesign of the newly unified Berlin…
Leelee Sobieski is a mouthful of a name (40 years ago studio moguls would have made her change it to something short and unassuming) but get used to it because the young actress behind it is going to be getting a lot of attention. She almost single-handedly carries A Soldier’s…
As a director of action thrillers, John Frankenheimer has been a peerless stylist for nearly four decades — without leaning on a pile of glitzy special effects. What’s more, his most memorable movies, from The Manchurian Candidate (1962) to The Birdman of Alcatraz (also 1962) to 1986’s wickedly entertaining, unappreciated…
Back in the early Seventies, when John Waters made his first splash with low-budget gross-outs such as Pink Flamingos and Multiple Maniacs, who would have guessed that someday he’d be making a Hollywood film as benevolent as Pecker? In retrospect, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. If any director has ever…
Adapted from a memoir of the same title, which was written by a guy named Jerry Stahl, it’s a guided tour through the Los Angeles television studios by day, various drug dens by night, and its protagonist’s troubled skull all of the time. To hear him tell it, Stahl was…
Music, as a theater insider once put it, is the food of love. Opera, on the other hand, is a series of naughty sexual escapades, repeatedly slammed doors, and horny bellhops. At least, those are the elements that drive Lend Me a Tenor, Ken Ludwig’s 1989 Tony Award-winning farce about…
Of all the things your mother specifically told you not to do — talk with your mouth full, go out with married men — chances are she didn’t mention the following: running off into the snow in your wedding dress. But if you did happen to desert your fiance at…
Slums of Beverly Hills is the first feature by the young writer-director Tamara Jenkins, and it has its mild amusements. It’s one of those movies that get bonus points for being “personal,” bopping along from episode to episode as if the filmmaker were discovering her subject as she proceeded. Jenkins…
One True Thing, directed by Carl Franklin, is trying to be the Terms of Endearment of the Nineties. Scripted by Karen Croner from the 1995 Anna Quindlen novel of the same name, One True Thing pushes the same high-gloss homilies about making peace with your family, and it caps everything…
Jackie Chan’s American fans (and I include myself among them) have suffered through a nervous 1998 so far. The momentum the star earned with the 1996 release of Rumble in the Bronx has seemed to dissipate steadily: An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, the first American production to employ…
Pedro Pablo Pena, founder and artistic director of the Miami Hispanic Ballet, likes to think of Miami as the door to the Americas. And so we might consider the three-year-old International Ballet Festival of Miami, another Pena creation, as one of the many entryways to cultural exchange. Pena, a former…
