City of Industry starts out promisingly and then turns into the kind of crime thriller only a pointy-headed postmodernist could love. Since a lot of critics these days have pointy heads, you might just want to brace yourself for a lot of steaming compost in the press about how “existential”…
The audience for the original opening night of Brigadoon — March 13, 1947 — passed by glittering Broadway marquees beckoning everyone to see Oklahoma!, Carousel, Annie Get Your Gun, Call Me Mister, Street Scene, and Finian’s Rainbow. Entering its golden age, the American musical theater offered postwar crowds intoxicating experiences…
Tie-dyed, graffiti-scrawled canvas huts and paint-spattered model kayaks have turned Fredric Snitzer’s new gallery off Bird Road into a funky tent city. Wooden rods suspended from the ceiling support the sunset-colored, vaguely Bedouin-style structures; visitors can enter one titled El Gran Canibal through an open flap and see a childish…
thursday march 13 Dade County Fair and Exposition: They’ve got daredevils who’ll take your breath away. They’ve got plants and animals from forests and farms. They’ve got food, games, magic shows, art exhibitions, vendors, and loads of live music. But let’s face it: Those super-loud, ultra-illuminated, fabulous puke-inducing rides are…
thursday march 6 Julia Alvarez: It’s no secret that when writers write what they know, they usually end up writing about people they know. And sometimes those people may not be thrilled by what’s been written about them. In her latest book AYo! (no, the title has nothing to do…
Waiting for Guffman is such a funny mess that it keeps you laughing even when you realize it’s not much better directed than a cable-access talk show. Christopher Guest’s is-this-where-I-point-the-camera? auteurism, last seen in The Big Picture, is redeemed by the performers — himself most of all — and the…
During the first few minutes of Howard Stern’s romp through his inexplicable life, he spells out his mission: Private Parts will both convert the nonbelievers and entertain the cult. Stern wants to give you plenty of hot lesbian action (and freed from FCC restrictions, he takes real pleasure in saying…
Originally opened in 1956 as a lavish restaurant, the Coconut Grove Playhouse’s Encore Room was reborn in the early Eighties as a jazz hot spot with its own house band, attracting the young and the hip to the Grove years before CocoWalk was built. Converted into a 130-seat cabaret theater…
thursday february 27 The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged): Playwrights Jesse Borgeson, Adam Long, and Daniel Singer have done the unthinkable: They’ve compressed the works of the Bard into a wild, 97-minute romp. Wllm Shkspr (Abridged) features Hamlet performed backwards, Titus Andronicus as a cooking show, and a Nineties…
Marvin’s Room, starring Diane Keaton and Meryl Streep as estranged sisters, is one of those movies about people who confront the choices they’ve made and become better people for it. Adapted by the late Scott McPherson from his popular 1992 play and directed by Broadway veteran Jerry Zaks, the film…
The ingredients are familiar: Donnie Brasco stars Al Pacino as a Mafia soldier and Johnny Depp as an FBI undercover agent who infiltrates the mob. But there’s a twist. Based on a true story, the film is a grunt’s-eye view of the Mafia, and it’s not remotely “operatic” or Scorsese-ish…
In the two decades since Eraserhead, David Lynch has established himself as American cinema’s premier surrealist, our own Wizard of Weird. Although his first two Hollywood projects — The Elephant Man (1980) and Dune (1984) — had room only around the edges for the sort of spooky shit at which…
The Archives of American Art in Washington, D.C., contains more than 13 million letters, diaries, sketchbooks, photographs, press clippings, and other materials that document the lives and work of U.S. artists since the Eighteenth Century. Founded to preserve artists’ personal effects and make them available for research, the archive has…
thursday february 20 The Colored Museum: Florida International University’s theater department presents George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum as part of the school’s Black History Month celebration. The award-winning play, which premiered in 1986, is a double-edged spoof of black and white America. Tickets cost ten dollars. Performances run today…
Like a black Jay Gatsby with a bulging build, Muhammad Ali possessed a special radiance in his championship years that came from his ability to realize his wildest dreams. Nobody expected that his attention-grabbing line “I am the greatest” would prove to be the expression of a pride so enormous…
Irvin Kershner’s The Empire Strikes Back, the continuation of George Lucas’s Star Wars, is a classic fantasy in its own right, and I vastly prefer it to the first film. Its textures are richer, its emotions deeper, and it’s an honest-to-Jedi movie — not a dozen jammed-together entries of a…
Smallpox, cholera, and polio — diseases that a century ago killed or disabled hundreds of thousands of people — have all but been eliminated from the Western world by virtue of vaccinations, antibiotics, and improved sanitation. Such eradication has created an illusory sense of immunity among people in the First…
thursday february 13 Anti-Film Festival: For those who’ve had their fill of premiere parties and Top 40 soundtracks, Alliance Film/ Video Co-op offers a little art from emerging and experimental filmmakers and video artists. The fourth annual low-budget-film celebration at the Alliance Cinema (927 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach) and the…
In Absolute Power, Clint Eastwood plays Luther Whitney, a master thief who burgles on little cat feet. He’s as stealthy as the Pink Panther pilferer, though not nearly as amusing. Luther, you see, is presented to us as an artist. We first see him at the National Gallery, dutifully copying…
Robert E. Howard, the subject of Dan Ireland’s wonderful debut film The Whole Wide World, created the sword-and-sorcery genre with his Conan stories. Howard had a grand yet coarse-grained consciousness. His Conan tales, set in a fictitious primordial age full of demons and killers, boasted swift, cartoon-flavored action (“He moved…
Billy Bob Thornton’s richly observed Sling Blade opens with a prologue that can only be described as its own small film, a laconically eerie sequence that, as the rest of Sling Blade unfolds, begins to take hold in the memory like a particularly dense nightmare. As Daniel Lanois’s quietly atmospheric…
Move over, Medea. Drama’s quintessential bad mother, who killed her children to take revenge on her husband, has some serious competition in the title character of Nicholas Wright’s Mrs. Klein. Closely based on the controversial therapist known for her theories about child psychology, Wright’s Melanie Klein did not actually murder…
