After a summer filled with third-rate pulp, Blade arrives with a pedigree that suggests first-rate pulp: characters and situations lifted from Marvel Comics; a screenplay by David S. Goyer, who earlier this year gave us the transcendent pulp masterpiece Dark City; and the presence (as star and producer) of the…
Actor Peter Haig embraces his role as Vincent Vincent, the pivotal character in the British farce Natural Causes, as though he were gorging on the theatrical equivalent of Thanksgiving dinner. Making his way through each savory episode, Haig samples multiple comic possibilities, devouring each morsel served up by playwright Eric…
Even performers of world music have trouble describing it. “It’s really a pretty generic overview that offers a lot of things,” ventures Sean Dibble, a percussionist who plays in two local bands that fall into the broad category. “It includes, basically, music from around the world.” Duh. If the concept…
thursday august 13 He’s witty, charming, intelligent, and a snappy dresser. He’s also grossly indecent. No, not your ex-boyfriend but trendy it-boy Oscar Wilde. Although he’s been dead for a good number of years, people can’t stop talking about him; tales of the tart-tongued Irish playwright are everywhere these days…
In 1947, when Thelma Anderson was living in Tennessee, she applied through the mail for a job as a nurse at Jackson Memorial Hospital, hoping to work in the operating room. When she arrived at Jackson, owned then by the City of Miami, to begin her job, management discovered she…
The timing couldn’t be better for How Stella Got Her Groove Back. The dog days of summer are upon us, and few prospects could be more welcome to asteroid-weary moviegoers than a light romantic-comedy that includes a trip to Jamaica as part of the package. Director Kevin Rodney Sullivan may…
Hollywood is openly neurotic about its hatred of psychotherapy. Witness, most recently, Barbra Streisand’s ridiculous Dr. Susan Lowenstein in The Prince of Tides who aggressively mischaracterizes the entire profession with each flick of her nails. In the theater, however, obnoxious psychotherapists tend to appear when a playwright is trying to…
Johnny Calderin and Cesar Hernandez-Canton wanted to put the glamour back in going to the movies. So they did what any self-respecting cineastes would do: They bought their own theater, the Alcazar Cinematheque in Coral Gables, which they rechristened the Absinthe House Cinematheque. Calderin, age 23, and Hernandez-Canton, age 25,…
James Randi is the sort of guy who has to have the biggest asteroid in the room. Without him, we might do something ridiculous like walk into Sharper Image and buy a laundry ball, a great leap forward in alchemy that purports to eliminate the need for Tide. Without him,…
thursday august 6 The most popular characters on kids’ TV are no longer turtles, purple dinosaurs, or color-coordinated crime fighters. They’re babies, stars of Nickelodeon’s Emmy Award-winning cartoon Rugrats, and they’re tops with the grade school set. The show’s star, Tommy, a brave, diaper-clad one-year-old, leads the talking tots through…
Nicolas Cage has never seemed more dazzling than he does in Brian De Palma’s new thriller Snake Eyes. Playing Rick Santoro, a corrupt Atlantic City cop who likes to think he’s “everybody’s friend,” Cage boogies to his own inner beat for almost two continuous hours. It’s like watching a great…
Objectively speaking, there isn’t all that much to be said about Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss. Written and directed by Tommy O’Haver, this very low-budget romantic comedy about gay photographer Billy (Sean P. Hayes) attracted to a model/actor/waiter (Brad Rowe) — whose sexual orientation Billy can’t quite fathom — should please…
Judging by the number of uninspired and derivative films we see these days, creating something truly fresh and imaginative on-screen is more difficult than turning a pumpkin into a carriage. But that’s exactly what director Andy Tennant and his marvelous cast and crew do in Ever After, the most magical…
Simpatico may be the funniest play about losers in Sam Shepard’s entire prolific output. Long before we meet them, these characters have lost the loves of their lives, aged without grace, and in some cases suffered devastating reversals of fortune. In the course of the play, some suffer even more…
thursday july 30 When famous writer Wilkie Walker is stricken with depression, devoted wife Jenny takes him to Key West for a change of pace. What follows is pure chaos as the couple mixes in with local loonies. So begins Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alison Lurie’s latest offering; her other works…
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…
