The “Size Does Matter” marketing campaign for Godzilla is far more ingenious than the actual movie. It’s also highly annoying, and has spawned a spinoff: The ads for a new film called Plump Fiction inform us that “Width matters too.” Perhaps the best thing about the much-ballyhooed arrival of Godzilla…
Of all the theatrical hams that have wandered across the stage of American pop culture, none have endeared themselves as much as the tiny papier-mache morsel that wanders home atop the legs of Scout Finch near the end of To Kill a Mockingbird. She has just appeared in a school…
One thing South Florida probably doesn’t need: more hot air. You got your embattled politicians proclaiming innocence. You got your drag queens loudly signifying up and down Washington Avenue. You got Cuban Americans of every political stripe huffing and puffing in each other’s faces. Well, prepare for a bit more…
“The world sucks sometimes. The world is great. Then it sucks again. But you’ve got to be able to laugh.” So declares Charlotte Glover, writer, actress, and ad hoc publicist for Punch 59, which bills itself as South Florida’s only skit comedy troupe. “Mentally imbalanced for your amusement,” proclaims the…
thursday may 21 So what’s with all these lawyers turned authors? Brad Meltzer, who grew up in North Miami Beach, joins brethren Scott Turow and John Grisham as attorneys who now spend most of their time pecking out fiction rather than worrying about billable hours. Meltzer has already enjoyed a…
It’s the tail end of the 1996 California primary election campaign and incumbent Democratic senator Jay Bulworth (Warren Beatty) is having a nervous breakdown. Sleepless for days, famished, he channel-surfs aimlessly in the darkness of his office. In a rare moment of lucidity, he has an inspiration: He arranges to…
In director Barbara Kopple’s new documentary Wild Man Blues, we follow Woody Allen around Europe as he takes part in a whirlwind concert tour with the New Orleans-style jazz band with which he plays. He kvetches from the get-go. “I would rather be bitten by a dog than fly to…
Roughly the size of a double-wide trailer, the performance space at the Hollywood Boulevard Theatre is so small you can stare into the eyes of the actors, size up their varicose veins, and follow the trajectories of their spit with dumbfounding intimacy. As it happens, intimacy, or the spitting image…
Thirty-eight bands, three dance troupes, and a fire-eater are slated to perform at this weekend’s Miami-Little Haiti Roots & Culture Festival. But for Albert Jean Alexis, one of the festival organizers, the crowd is the main event. “What we’re trying to do is bring unity to the community,” explains Alexis…
“You don’t see a lot of it, not even in Egypt,” admits Jihan Jamal. “They think of it as a dying art.” Dressed in a black leotard with a long scarf-like affair tied at the waist, Jamal (her professional name) could be any dance instructor in any mirror-lined dance studio…
thursday may 14 Since 1985 the folks at Louis Wolfson II Media History Center have been collecting, preserving, cataloguing, and making the public aware of film and video materials about Florida’s history and culture. The center has grown into one of the largest and most active institutions of its kind…
Most disaster movies would be a lot better if they featured more disaster and less human drama. In Deep Impact the impending obliteration of much of the Earth by a pair of comets is merely the sideshow. The main event is a lot of goopy human-interest stuff: the daughter who…
The Horse Whisperer, the latest from Robert Redford — and the first of his directorial efforts in which he also stars — could almost serve as a compendium of Redford’s best and worst filmmaking tendencies. It features his eye for gorgeous, pictorial vistas, his straightforward narrative approach, and, most important,…
Of the potentially kooky types of people that could be dumped into a play — lawyers, clairvoyants, fast-food servers, and dying parents — the most unwieldy are the clairvoyants. Even if an audience buys the notion of second sight, the playwright is still stuck with a peculiar problem: how to…
If you sat through three hours of the Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning, mega-publicity-hyped musical that promised to change the face of Broadway forever only to wonder, “Is that all there is?” — read on. If you heard about the ballyhoo last week at Miami Beach’s Jackie Gleason Theater of…
Henry Jaglom offers everything that Americans hate about French cinema — the foppish characters, the glacial pace — but with little of their philosophical depth or visual daring. Additionally, he regurgitates the annoying qualities of Woody Allen’s films — the self-absorption, the feigned feminism, the pretentiousness — without remotely approaching…
The flimsiest hustle in movie promotion today is that independent films are starved for mainstream attention. The truth is that such films often have an open field when it comes to big-city media. Major studios are usually unable to deliver a finished print of a would-be blockbuster until two or…
In the production notes for Spike Lee’s new He Got Game, the filmmaker is quoted as saying, “I don’t think I’ve ever done a film that is just about one thing….” That’s true: Usually he’s able to cram in two or three things. In He Got Game, for example, there…
For more than a century, her adherents and admirers have characterized her as being ahead of her time. Way ahead. Light-years ahead. Maybe. She was certainly of her time. Studied extensively with Tibetan monks. Tramped all over the Far East, Middle East, Europe, and what was still considered the New…
thursday may 7 Pre-Millennium Tension, the most recent release from Tricky, is classic trip-hop: cut-and-paste soundscapes made up of elements borrowed from dance music, rock, electronica, and hip-hop — all of it suffused with haunting angst. In truth, Tricky virtually birthed trip-hop in the late Eighties with Massive Attack and…
As a singer and keyboard player with the folk-pop band Legacy, Ellen Bukstel Segal learned long ago how to work a room. Unfortunately most of the rooms in which her band performed were not exactly conducive to listening to music — even playing it, for that matter. They were cramped,…
Just what we need: another film festival. As if we weren’t already drowning in them. Miami Film Festival. South Beach Film Festival. Latin American Film Festival. Italian Film Festival. Brazilian Film Festival. Anti Film Festival. And the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival, which runs for approximately seventeen weeks, being international…
