About one-third of the way through Jean Bach’s hourlong 1995 documentary A Great Day in Harlem, the photographer Art Kane notes, with a slight air of exasperation, “To control this group was near impossible.” The group to which he refers was composed of 57 jazz musicians — some already legends,…
To dance the rumba you don’t have to wear a flouncy skirt or a shirt with big old puffy sleeves. You don’t have to be learned in Santeria. You don’t even need an ounce of Cuban blood. You just need a little bit of rhythm, assures Elena Garcia, a former…
Do we really need to see the great Kevin Spacey fuming and fussing in one of those we-do-things-my-way-or-we-don’t-do-them-at-all roles? In The Negotiator he plays Chris Sabian, an expert hostage negotiator for the Chicago police whose job it is to talk down Samuel L. Jackson’s Danny Roman, another expert police hostage…
Theresa Connelly’s feature directorial debut, Polish Wedding, is a complete misfire. What is meant to be a somewhat farcical — but also fairytale-like — midsummer night’s sex comedy ends up a tedious, uninvolving affair, burdened with a slim premise, grating characters, and poorly realized humor. The film concerns the various…
Walt Disney Pictures has a smart and highly profitable business strategy: Re-release the studio’s proven hits every seven years or so, thereby reaching a new generation of kids — and making another tidy bundle of dollars in the process. Well, this time around the Mouse House has decided to remake…
Summer theater is the sort of oxymoron that conjures up sarcastic epithets such as “dramatic hot dog stand,” to use the term coined by George Jean Nathan, the esteemed late American theater critic. Or “straw-hat trail,” the term used by others to denote the sartorial choices of the supposed morons…
One board, two players, 361 stones. Behold the ingredients of Go, the ancient Asian game that, despite its deceptively simple rules, many players consider more challenging than chess. Though little known in the West, Go is played by more than 25 million Asians, who consider it one of the four…
thursday july 23 “It’s always merengue, merengue, merengue,” laments Miami-based Dominican artist Charo Oquet, who is bent on letting local audiences know there is more to her native culture than that hyperactive Latin-radio sound. The third annual Dominican Youth Arts Festival features a performance by musicians from the Dominican Republic…
The word detachment has never been part of Cesar Becerra’s vocabulary. Until now. Becerra, a 25-year-old local historian known for his celebrations and newsletters honoring everything from the centennial of Miami to the 50th anniversary of Everglades National Park to the 40th anniversary of Frankie’s Pizza in Westchester, is also…
The last place you want to visit in midwinter is gray, freezing Buffalo, New York. The last people you want to see in the last place you want to visit are Jimmy and Janet Brown, a pair of comic demons so indifferent, so surreally out of touch, that they scarcely…
The first shot in Steven Spielberg’s remarkable World War II epic Saving Private Ryan is of an American flag with the sun behind it. The image is somewhat diaphanous, the fabric having the transparent delicacy of a chrysalis. This is the perfect introduction to a movie about the fragility –…
The most startling scene in Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde — having its Florida premiere at the Caldwell Theatre Company in Boca Raton — opens the second act. It’s set on the stage of a twentieth-century talk show on which a fatuous TV host and a self-important…
Writer-director Ernest Goodly laughs heartily as he ticks off his financing sources for his debut feature-length film, Love Bizarre. A grant from the National Black Programming Consortium provided the bulk of the cash. A few private investors kicked in some more. “And my credit cards are totally maxed out,” he…
thursday july 16 Difficult to believe, perhaps, but wooden, one-note actor Sam Shepard is considered to be among the most influential playwrights of his era. The author of works such as The Tooth of Crime, Buried Child, Fool for Love, and True West, Shepard received the Pulitzer Prize in 1979…
For the serious soccer fan nothing compares to the excitement of the World Cup, but that event occurs only once every four years. Fans who now find themselves in withdrawal after France’s victory will be relieved to know that South Florida is fast becoming a soccer mecca. Broward has the…
Unlike Hollywood fare such as Dances with Wolves (1990), the new Smoke Signals is that rare drama about modern Native Americans that was actually written and directed by Native Americans. It feels genuine and heartfelt, quirky and whimsical, with a deft understanding of the characters’ problems. But the film is…
In The Mask of Zorro, Anthony Hopkins plays the eponymous masked man as if he were doing Shakespeare. He’s trying to turn a kitsch hero into a real one, and his efforts are so weirdly off-key that you don’t know whether to cheer him on or titter. This dolorous Don…
In his five-decade career, Cole Porter wrote songs for Fanny Brice, Fred Astaire, Ethel Merman, Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Durante, and Bert Lahr, just to name a few. One measure of his virtuosity as a composer, however, is that no one singer really owns a Porter tune. Not even Frank Sinatra,…
Now that punk rock is dead and all so-called independent record labels are actually controlled by international supercorporations, underground music is as uncool as mainstream. Next big thing: underwater music. Okay, maybe not. And frankly, the music itself is somewhat beside the point. The fact that it’s being broadcast beneath…
“So much of what we are all about is what we see.” This according to Judith Ann Graham, a professional image consultant and a member of the Association of Image Consultants International, a nonprofit organization made up of men and women who specialize in working with individuals, groups, or corporations…
thursday july 9 In 1947 twenty-year-old Antonio Carlos Jobim left behind his dreams of becoming an architect and opted for a career in music. Vocalist, composer, arranger, pianist, guitarist, and one of the founding fathers (along with Jo‹o Gilberto and Vinicius de Mor‹es) of the bossa nova movement, Jobim became…
High Art is a low-budget, American independent movie about junkie-lesbian photographer Lucy Berliner (Ally Sheedy), who spends most of her time looking romantically mournful. She’s famished and abrasive and oh-so-world-weary. When she smokes cigarettes, she exhales in a way that can best be described as existential; the smoke curls out…
