Ever notice how you can never wager on really interesting propositions? For example, you could have made a fortune betting that Fernando Trueba’s Two Much would be a mess. If only some bookmaker had offered odds against the made-in-Miami movie’s success. All the ingredients for a flop were in place…
Mike Nichols’s The Birdcage has a lot in common with Two Much. Both contemporary comedies make extensive use of bustling Miami Beach as a location. Both stories center on characters who pretend to be somebody they aren’t. And neither Birdcage director Nichols nor Two Much star Melanie Griffith has enjoyed…
At first glance the premise of Jane Martin’s bizarre 1993 play Keely and Du seems to be the product of a hot-wired, somewhat paranoid imagination: A group of extremists abducts a young woman from an abortion clinic, spirits her away to an underground cell, and keeps her there against her…
Fans of black comedy and fiendishly frisky film noir rejoice: The Coen brothers are back! The savagely funny Fargo is a vicious sidesplitter, easily the drollest, hippest, sweetest satire Joel and Ethan Coen have dreamed up since 1987’s Raising Arizona. The film marks a return to form for the sick…
A bottle rocket is little more than a glorified firecracker on a stick. You point one upward and light it, but you can never be sure that it’ll fly in the direction you want it to go. Sometimes bottle rockets just fizzle out. At best they sparkle, streak skyward, and…
Mutiny Aftershock 2005 (Black Arc/Rykodisc) Of all the spin-off satellites orbiting George Clinton’s Parliafunkadelicment mothership, Mutiny was arguably the best A and one of the few to distance itself from its former employer. The group was formed in the late Seventies by drummer Jerome “Bigfoot” Brailey, the coauthor of several…
Sometimes it takes an outsider’s perspective to appreciate the nuances of a culture in ways that the members of the culture itself cannot appreciate. That certainly seems to be the case with the magnificent revival of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s 1945 American masterpiece, Carousel, in its current production by…
The first time I saw the feisty Pajama Game, I was prompting my high school’s early-Seventies production of the show, almost twenty years after its 1954 debut on Broadway. I sat through scores of rehearsals until I could recite the book and the lyrics blind. I remember the musical as…
The Museum of Contemporary Art’s (MoCA) new 23,000-square-foot space in North Miami is a triumph. Opinions may differ on architect Charles Gwathmey’s multicolor building, a geometric study painted in earthy colors. But strictly as a physical space, MoCA offers what Miami’s other major art venues lack. For starters it’s in…
At the risk of coming off like some stodgy codger bemoaning the passing of the good old days of American cinema, it really does seem to me that these days they don’t make quality American movies like they did in the Seventies. The Godfather (I and II), Five Easy Pieces,…
Belinda and Philip Haas’s (she produced; he directed; they both wrote the screenplay) slow but absorbing production of Angels & Insects reminded me of Peter Greenaway’s 1982 The Draughtsman’s Contract. Both films are English period pieces, although Greenaway’s film is set in the Seventeenth Century, while the Haases’ takes place…
Surely by now the cinematic love triangle has become one of France’s most enduring exports. Nobody plays more variations on the old three-part harmony than the French. Heck, most English-speaking countries don’t even have an equivalent for the phrase “menage a trois.” It’s kind of ironic then that while we…
Last fall Coconut Grove Playhouse was all set to conclude its 1995-96 season with Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women. But at the last minute the show’s New York City-based producers booked the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama on a 1996-97 national tour, precluding its being presented at regional theaters such as the…
If British playwright Rod Dungate’s 1992 Playing by the Rules has an intelligible point of view, a consistent focus, or even a story worth telling, it’s impossible to discern from its current production at Edge/Theatre on Miami Beach. Adapted for the American stage (reconstituted into a South Beach version) and…
Just as too many chefs spoil the broth, too many screenwriters spoil the script. In the case of the disappointing City Hall, a roster of four heavyweights — three from the world of movie writing and one from the world of high finance — contributes to a muddled screenplay that…
I have a confession to make: I haven’t watched the annual orgy of stupidity, vanity, and self-congratulation popularly known as the Academy Awards in years. The Oscars are a farce, an abomination, a laughingstock, a repugnant folly, an insult to the intelligence of any moviegoer with even a modicum of…
David French’s two-character gem Salt-Water Moon contains few dramatic revelations. Less than one-third of the way into the 90-minute one-act, the author has already played out most of his narrative hand: Boy loves girl; boy leaves girl; girl gets engaged to another boy; first boy returns and attempts to win…
Last November the New York City-based artist team Leone & McDonald placed a classified ad in New Times: “Ever passed for something you’re not? Celebrated NY artists need story for video on Miami.” The responses the pair received confirmed their perception of Miami as the perfect place to create a…
Like the world itself, world music can be a scary place. When you don’t know a djembe from a darbukah, when nothing ever sounds even remotely like “Hot Blooded,” it’s easy to give up and play Graceland again. As the curious titles of its pair of recent releases might hint,…
The dreaded date movie. Snotty critics such as myself hate the genre because real-life moviegoers tend to hold date movies to a different standard: “Did you like it?” “Well, there was no story, the jokes weren’t funny, and the characters talked like somebody lifted their dialogue straight out of Cosmo…
If cynicism breeds contempt, obscurity can often breed cynicism. This is common knowledge in the blues world, which for decades has been overpopulated with hard-bitten also-rans untouched by the hand of popularity. For all the B.B. Kings, Robert Crays, and Buddy Guys out there who have parlayed their years of…
That Shakespeare fellow is all the rage at the cineplex these days. But as more filmmakers translate the Bard’s plays to the screen, the adaptions stray further and further from their source. Kenneth Branagh broke into the movie biz with his faithful version of Henry V in 1989, but his…
