thursday may 22 KRS-One: In a little more than ten years, Lawrence Krsna Parker has risen out of utter poverty to become one of the most respected and prolific rap artists around. His ninth album in eleven years, I Got Next, was released a couple of days ago, the latest…
The appearance of The Lost World: Jurassic Park carries a double burden. Not only is it the sequel to the most popular movie ever made, but it is also the first film Steven Spielberg has directed since 1993’s Schindler’s List. Now that he has finally won his Oscar and achieved…
Although the ancient Egyptians probably had some form of theater as early as 4000 B.C., most of our information about drama’s origins comes from the Greeks. I once knew an uproarious stage manager who, disillusioned by countless tours with theatrical turkeys, insisted that an important part of theater history had…
thursday may 15 Happy Birthday, ArtCenter-South Florida: The ArtCenter-South Florida celebrates a dozen years of providing a haven for local and national artists on Lincoln Road with a new name (it used to be called the South Florida Art Center), a new look (the galleries have been revamped), and a…
Judy Davis is often at her ravaged best when she’s playing women pulled apart by their own warring impulses. Torn between their isolating desire for freedom and their need for solace, the women in films such as High Tide, Husbands and Wives, The New Age, and A Passage to India…
Sidney Lumet has had enough ups and downs in his long, prolific career that it’s never safe to count him out … even after two disappointing films in a row, A Stranger Among Us (1992) and Guilty as Sin (1993). Even the greatest directors frequently falter in their seventies, so…
My earliest impressions of the American judicial system came from listening to earnest civics teachers and from watching reruns of Perry Mason; combined, they convinced me that courtrooms hold more drama than any Broadway stage, with lawyers playing for life-and-death stakes as they heroically defended the nation’s civil liberties (this…
Kenny Scharf was eight years old when he first saw the work of Salvador Dali. While playing at a neighbor’s house in Hollywood, California, Scharf, best known for his use of cartoon imagery in his paintings, must have been watching TV when he spotted a heavy book on the coffee…
thursday may 8 Celebrity Golf Challenge: A bevy of celebrities, including Denzel Washington, Halle Berry, Dawnn Lewis, Malcolm-Jamal Warner, Drew Bledsoe, and Barry Sanders, will take a swing at sickle cell anemia at this weekend’s Celebrity Golf Challenge. Among the events taking place this weekend are a celebrity bash at…
In The Fifth Element, the all-knowing, all-powerful Supreme Being of the Universe turns out to be Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), an orange-haired babe in a skimpy, Band-Aid-thin mod outfit who speaks in a kind of Slavic scat and cries a lot. It’s as if the filmmakers started out to make a…
Humorist Russell Baker once wrote that he wished he could travel through time whenever he slogs through a Henry James novel — that way he could determine if the book offered any plot development that would make it worth finishing. Having waded through several of James’s 112 short stories and…
If you’re hankering to see a movie that sends up swinging Sixties London and Carnaby Street and vintage James Bond movies, don’t bother to check out Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. What the movie mostly sends up is its star and screenwriter, Mike Myers. That’s not all bad: Myers…
On the savvy festival-and-promo tour that helped the necrophiliac Kissed net advance praise everywhere from the Atlantic Monthly to Newsweek, writer-director Lynne Stopkewich said she thought independent films should be judged on their ingenuity and daring rather than on the size of their budgets. As arts-world stump speeches go, it’s…
The title track of Jimmy Buffett’s 1980 Coconut Telegraph album busts gossips who “can’t keep nothin’ under their hat/You can hear ’em on the coconut telegraph sayin’ who did dis and dat.” Last September when Coconut Grove Playhouse producing artistic director Arnold Mittelman announced that he would present a world…
On a postcard from Tel Aviv, bathers wade at a crowded Mediterranean beach shadowed by a stretch of resort hotels and condo towers. Artist Hilla Lulu Lin has blown up and manipulated this typical shot of Israel’s modern secular attractions, replacing the perfect blue sky with a slab of marbled…
thursday may 1 New World Symphony: Artistic director Michael Tilson Thomas leads the New World Symphony in a season finale weekend of concerts. The music begins tonight at the Gusman Center for the Performing Arts (174 E. Flagler St.) with a “Baton Night.” Conductor Felipe Iscaray leads a preconcert conducting…
New-to-movies subjects are hard to come by, but Traveller has one: the inbred world of Irish grifters living in the backwoods of the American rural South. Clannish con artists descended from the Irish Tinkers, they fan out across the countryside pulling bogus home-repair jobs on unsuspecting, mostly elderly, folk and…
thursday april 24 Chris Smither: As both a rough-voiced singer of his own evocative songs and an interpreter of others’ works, Chris Smither makes the A-list of traveling troubadours currently finding an audience among disenfranchised rockers and country fans looking for something a little more complex than the garden-variety Nashville…
No one has exploited the historical-epic form better than David Lean. At his peak he used its spaciousness and breadth to develop characters with conflicting points of view, so that audiences could feel viscerally swept away, emotionally engaged, and mentally sharpened, all at once. With the help of inspired actors…
John Woo has often cited the films of Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-1973) as among his greatest influences — particularly 1967’s Le Samourai — and it’s easy to see the connection. Even in France, Melville spent most of his career as a cult director: His series of gangster films, starting in 1956…
When I was a teenager, my widowed grandmother left Vermont to live with my family in Florida, where, separated from her friends and other family, she turned to television for companionship. Unfathomable to me, her favorite hour each week was spent watching Lawrence Welk and his clean-cut cast stroll down…
Volcano is set in Los Angeles, and for L.A. haters, it could prove a peak experience. You don’t even have to hate L.A. to enjoy it — love/hate will do. That’s why the film closes with Randy Newman’s mock-anthem “I Love L.A.” (which, of course, makes it L.A.’s true anthem)…
