Calendar for the week

thursday october 23 Writers Harvest National Reading: Like a good book? Like it even better when the author reads it to you? Then you’ll love this. Tonight is Writers Harvest, the nation’s largest literary benefit. At 600 bookstores nationwide, 2000 of your favorite authors read from their works simultaneously. Attend…

Cliche-spotting

Stylishness without substance can become wearying real fast. Twenty minutes into A Life Less Ordinary, the new movie from the producing-directing-writing team of Trainspotting and Shallow Grave, I was already into overload. It’s not that director Danny Boyle doesn’t have imagination. It’s just that occasionally imagination is all he has…

Faking Away

The true-life story of the Cottingley fairies is so full of possibilities, so thought-provoking and hilarious at once, that it’s amazing it has never been filmed before. Making up for lost time, two films have suddenly appeared, on the 80th anniversary of the purported sighting of these ethereal creatures. Photographing…

Private Plays, Public Access

During the intermission of Private Lives, being staged by downtown Miami’s Ramsay-Hutchison Players, a dance professor from the New World School of the Arts asked me if I review college theater. I said no and went on to explain that I am reluctant to write in-depth reviews of performances by…

Calendar for the week

thursday october 16 Guitar Greats: The rock guitar pantheon brings its traveling exhibition of flying fret virtuosity to the Sunrise Musical Theater (5555 95th Ave., Sunrise) for a four-hour rock and blues bash. The promoters of the G-3 Tour, whose uninspired title presumably translates into “three guitarists,” need to check…

Raging Ball

Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights opens with a sinuous, breathlessly extended tracking shot that swoops us into a San Fernando Valley disco and then does a curlicue around a succession of faces. In the discotheque’s low-lighted luminescence, these people pop out like jack-o’-lanterns. They have the look of trashy…

A Fistful of Dolor

Jennifer Jason Leigh follows up one of her smallest, and weakest, roles (in A Thousand Acres) with a far more challenging, and formidable, performance in Washington Square, the new film version of Henry James’s 1880 novel chronicling the courtship of a wealthy girl with no obvious attractive qualities. But the…

Parker’s House Role

It’s hard to fault The House of Yes, the wry toast of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, for its limitations as a film. In fact, it’s hardly a film at all — rather, it’s a barely staged, five-handed farce that trails its amiable cast around a looming Victorian mansion over…

The Road Not Taken

Forty years after his playwriting debut, Harold Pinter ranks in the top five of living drama scribes in at least two categories: most acclaimed and least understood. His works delight academics, who find existential metaphors for the Atomic Age in his characters’ random actions and disjointed dialogue. Those very same…

Calendar for the week

thursday october 9 Celluloid Vampires: This lecture sucks — blood, that is. With Halloween just around the corner, the Wolfsonian (1001 Washington Ave., Miami Beach) has gotten a bit ghoulish and invited a professor (no, not Van Helsing, Dracula’s nemesis) to talk about vampire films tonight at 6:30. Bill Rothman,…

Living in a Spiritual Void

Seven Years in Tibet feels more like Seven Days in the Movie Theater. It refuses to come to life — even when Brad Pitt, hirsute as a yak, wanders the frozen Himalayas with an Austrian accent that probably gave his dialogue coach the hives. The film’s an epic about how…

Coming Home

The Seventies were so awash in Fifties nostalgia that it’s surprising Going All the Way, the 1970 best seller by South Beach resident and FIU writing professor Dan Wakefield, is only now turning up in big-screen form. Of course, not all Fifties coming-of-age stories are the same: Unlike The Last…

Play It as It Lays

Despite the weekend’s steady rain, more than 50 people join me as I wade into the Hollywood Boulevard Theatre on a recent Sunday night. After reaching into soaked pockets and purchasing five-dollar tickets, we quickly fill up the rows of the tiny storefront playhouse. The view from our seats, however,…

Calendar for the week

thursday october 2 Maluala: Oh, what a paradise the Cuba of yore seemed. Except for one thing (no, not Castro): slavery. Yes, Cuba was not always so libre; plenty of Africans were oppressed there too. Regarded by some as the father of black Cuban cinema, Sergio Giral, now a resident…

Stone Cold

Oliver Stone’s low-budget, hopped-up film noir U-Turn is being billed as a change of pace for the Conspiracy Dude, but actually it looks quite at home in the maestro’s hothouse. After all, aren’t conspiracies and the workings of fate what noirs are all about? Stone’s JFK pulped history with the…

Damp Yankee

Janeane Garofalo plows right through The Matchmaker with the same disgruntled sarcasm that typifies her testy, standard-bearer-for-the-underdog persona. Yet, try as it might to cast “America’s favorite anti-star” in a “romantic comedy for people who don’t like romantic comedy,” this film is a wholesale retread of Local Hero (which, in…

Chairman of the Boards

Living up to his reputation as a consummate gentleman, Bill Hindman asks for permission to loosen his tie as he settles into our booth at a little out-of-the-way Chinese restaurant near Dadeland. I find it amazing he is even wearing a tie during this break from his preparations to portray…

A Bedia Bestiary

“Those, like poets, who have not distanced themselves from their childhood will remember that as children they believed that animals thought and behaved like men,” wrote the late Afro-Cuban folklorist Lydia Cabrera in her book Animals in the Folklore and Magic of Cuba. “In the inner world of childhood, insects,…

If the Shoe Fits

When High Button Shoes premiered on Broadway in 1947, its name and 1913 setting conjured nostalgic images of more carefree days. Its title still brings to mind visions of a bygone era, and one yearns for the golden age of musical comedy when boy wooed girl through exhilarating dance numbers…

Calendar for the week

thursday september 25 The Castro: Castro in Miami? Who could have imagined? Well, not that Castro. This Castro is the neighborhood in San Francisco — once a serene working-class enclave, now a bastion of gay liberation and the subject of a documentary, which will receive its East Coast premiere at…

From France, with Bite

Critics and audiences outside France have been going on for so long about the decline in French cinema that it’s fun to see a French film — Irma Vep — that says much the same thing. The rap is, of course, somewhat unfair (most raps are), but there’s no question…

Where Have All the Russkies Gone?

This summer Air Force One kicked off the post-Cold War thriller derby. The Peacemaker, the first feature from DreamWorks, the studio headed by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen, picks up the hot potato and carries it another nine yards. Once again we’re watching thickly accented Russians bemoaning the…