Just what the world needs — another girl-meets-girl movie. The chicks-who-dig-chicks love story minigenre has pretty much played itself out since go fish made a splash at the Sundance Film Festival nearly three years ago. Last year’s Heavenly Creatures was probably the category’s apogee; the new When Night Is Falling…
Horny commanders-in-chief are nothing new. Nor is the sight of Michael Douglas playing a WASPy Everyman whose dick gets him into trouble. However, the concept of a widowed president playing the dating game under the constant scrutiny of TV cameras, opportunistic political opponents, and religious zealots sounds like a fertile…
In his elegantly directed production of A.R. Gurney’s Later Life, director Rafael de Acha tellingly gives Cole Porter the last word. As the lights dim at the end of this wistful comedy, “Begin the Beguine” drifts over the sound system at New Theatre in Coral Gables. Porter’s rhapsody to romantic…
With Designing Modernity, the Wolfsonian museum’s much-anticipated inaugural exhibition, Mitchell (Micky) Wolfson, Jr., finally reveals his infamous private obsession to the public. Wolfson’s massive assemblage of furniture, household appliances, books, architectural maquettes, prints, paintings, objets d’art, and ephemera tells the story of modernism through “The Arts of Reform and Persuasion”…
“It’s a date-rape movie,” declares first-time filmmaker Douglas Tirola. The 27-year-old writer-director of A Reason to Believe doesn’t beat around the bush; neither does his smart, well-intentioned movie. A Reason to Believe tells the story of Charlotte (Allison Smith, who played Jane Curtin’s daughter on Kate & Allie), a cute,…
Is the world ready for “a heterosexual film by Gregg Araki,” as the twentysomething writer-director-editor-producer’s new project, The Doom Generation, bills itself? Araki, already a pioneer of queer new-wave cinema (The Living End, Totally F**ked Up), moves into the world of big-time 35mm moviemaking with this, his fifth film. Those…
Relationships between mothers and daughters are never simple. Whether they lean on each other, dominate each other, envy each other, criticize each other, reject each other, or seek each other out, mothers and daughters find themselves enmeshed throughout their lives. The dramatic possibilities in such attachments have not been lost…
Movies about attractive twentysomethings sitting around talking about themselves have been all the rage lately. You could take everything that happens in Slacker, Reality Bites, Clerks, Before Sunrise, Bodies, Rest & Motion, Sleep With Me, and Barcelona and pack it into one movie and you still wouldn’t have as much…
On the surface, Arthur Miller’s 1950 adaption of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 An Enemy of the People seems theatrical proof of the French adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Set in a nineteenth-century Norwegian town, the drama’s subject matter mirrors headlines in the 1990s: poisoned…
One morning last month, Gustavo Matamoros arrived at Miami International Airport to find that his flight to Tampa had been canceled. For Matamoros, the director of the South Florida Composers Alliance, the two-hour wait for the next plane to Tampa was not so much an inconvenience as it was what…
Some nights you get lucky. Writer-director John Rubino’s debut film, Lotto Land, sneaked into town as quietly as a balsero. I attended the preview screening not because I particularly wanted to see the film — I knew nothing about it and the title didn’t make the movie sound promising –…
Blaine Dunham began her career in theater down by the docks in Coconut Grove. Now 23 years old, the two-time Carbonell Award-nominated actress and artistic director of Lunatic Theatre Company arrived in Miami at the age of 6, making a dramatic entrance by sailing into the Grove’s Dinner Key Marina…
I live in South Miami. The Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival has always bugged me because it presents a nasty dilemma: I love movies, but I hate to drive. In the past, my I-95 aversion has usually won out. And I’m fairly comfortable making the assumption that I’m not the…
“Look at that woman,” muses Hattie, as she watches a contestant dressed in a chicken suit lose everything during a rerun of Let’s Make a Deal. “Disappointment is carved on her face.” Of course, Hattie (Meredith Marsuli), a character in James McLure’s one-act comedy Laundry & Bourbon, has already seen…
Purvis Young, known for his fiery mixed-media paintings of Overtown crowds and streaming boat people, recently visited the Bass Museum, where his works are included in Passionate Visions of the American South: Self-Taught Artists from 1940 to the Present. Young headed straight for the selections from the permanent collection located…
At one point in the witless but well-acted Copycat, Sigourney Weaver’s character, a criminal psychologist named Helen Hudson who specializes in serial killers, delivers a lecture on mass murderers to a packed auditorium. Hudson says, “The FBI estimates there could be as many as 35 serial killers cruising for their…
It’s always nice to see a local gal making a name for herself in the world of big-time professional filmmaking. Coral Park Senior High and UM drama department alumna Mel Gorham has had, in her own words, “nothing but great luck with directors.” After acting in only six pictures (the…
First came the innovative 1976 novel by the late Argentine writer Manuel Puig, followed by his 1981 stage adaption. Then came director Hector Babenco’s much-ballyhooed 1985 film. A musical rendition flopped when presented by New Musicals at SUNY Purchase in upstate New York in 1990; however, when resuscitated by the…
Angela Bassett cuts a striking figure in Strange Days. Defiant, chiseled facial features. Sculpted bod. Feral sensuality in her eyes and the confident grace of an athlete in her movement. But once you get past that fierce, riveting appearance and the novelty of a woman playing the strongest, toughest character…
After a short deliberation, I have reached a verdict: This fall movie season, though barely half over, already has acquitted itself as one of the most successful in recent memory. Led by The Usual Suspects (my early frontrunner for movie of the year), with the current fall crop Hollywood has…
We safely can assume that Hollywood will experience shortages of UV rays, earthquakes, and Porsche-driving studio executives before the town runs out of formulaic crap plots for pseudo-trash murder mysteries. Lately, however, a disproportionate share of the cinematic flotsam seems to flow from the prolific pen of a single writer:…
We live in an era of easy confession, a time in which stories of abuse and neglect make the rounds of talk shows, support groups, and the evening network news programs. Because we’ve grown accustomed to the public disclosure of personal trauma, the plays of Tennessee Williams, often structured around…
