Any credibility the film version of Jim Carroll’s raw, seditious, autobiographical 1978 book The Basketball Diaries may have hoped to establish flies right out the window the first time you see Carroll’s Hollywood surrogate, Leonardo DiCaprio, attempt to dribble a basketball. In the literary Diaries, Carroll lives for the game…
South Florida is not a region that takes many theatrical risks. A quick study of the current season’s lineup for theaters from Palm Beach to Miami makes one thing perfectly clear: Reluctant to strain audience loyalty by introducing what hasn’t passed a viewer test somewhere else, most artistic directors tend…
Like many artists educated in Cuba who have moved to Miami over the past few years, Consuelo Castaneda speaks only a little English, communicating with Anglos through a translator. The clever, slickly executed paintings in To Be Bilingual, Castaneda’s current exhibition at the Fredric Snitzer Gallery in Coral Gables, explore…
Forrest Gump’s momma said it best: Stupid is as stupid does. Too bad Pauly Shore didn’t grow up under her care, as well. Stupidity is not just another word to Totally Pauly. It’s a vocation. Dumber than Dumb and Dumber, Pauly’s latest exercise in pointless poppycock and narcissistic nonsense is…
The Tennessee Williams-style Southern family, at its liquor-soaked, lust-ridden, and venal best, rises again in Kendall this month in a spirited production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Actors’ Playhouse presents Williams’s modern classic in all its comedic and Southern Gothic glory, 40 years after its Broadway debut. The…
“Gluttony is not a secret vice,” lamented the late great writer-director-actor-bon vivant Orson Welles, a man as well-remembered for his prodigious girth as for his oversized talent. Marlon Brando, who vies with Welles for the distinction of being the most feared, respected, influential, and caricatured figure in post-World War II…
Far be it from me to second-guess the platinum-plated producing tandem of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. Money talks, and nowhere does its voice carry more weight than in Hollywood, where the Simpson-Bruckheimer team churn out sleek but vapid entertainments that regularly rack up spectacular box-office returns. Since their initial…
Angels in America has been hailed as vast, miraculous, and sweeping, the broadest, deepest, most searching American play of our time. Whether such superlatives are justified or not remains to be determined, but one thing is certain — the two-part drama subtitled “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes” has been…
The Sum of Us is an Australian vessel from stern to bow. David Stevens, an award-winning Aussie screenwriter (Breaker Morant) and filmmaker (the TV miniseries A Town Like Alice) scripted it. Jack Thompson, a fixture in Australian cinema as well as a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for Refugees and a…
Straight, middle-age widower Harry Mitchell just wants to make his gay son, Jeff, happy. Nothing wrong with that. But Harry tries so hard to encourage Jeff’s alternative lifestyle that he becomes a well-meaning nuisance. Eventually Harry learns that no matter how pure your motives or how badly you want to…
Shortly before New York City’s Guggenheim Museum opened the first major American exhibition of the work of Joseph Beuys in 1979, the institution’s then-director Thomas Messer sent a letter to members of his board of trustees, warning them that the work would not find favor with the general public. Indeed,…
Here’s my fatal flaw as a film critic: After more than three decades of moviegoing, I still walk into a theater expecting the filmmaker to show me fairly quickly why I should give a damn about his protagonist. Experience has taught me that if I’m not hooked within the first…
During a question-and-answer session with the audience following the screening of the film Exotica at the Miami Film Festival in February, someone asked writer-director Atom Egoyan whether a closing shot of a troubled young woman entering an ominous-looking house signified that the woman was a murderer. Egoyan raised an eyebrow…
The Pope Theatre Company’s production of Steven Dietz’s Lonely Planet took me by surprise. Partway through the two-character play I found myself squirming in my seat, consulting my watch, and wishing something A anything A would happen in the long-winded, overly anecdotal, and slow-moving drama. By the end, something does…
As a sculptural element, wood is warm and inviting to the touch. Humble yet elegant, naturally marked by time, wood sculpture connotes a long-standing tradition of noble craftsmanship. But sculptor Ingrid Hartlieb often employs wood to recall an archaeological legacy wrought from other, more monumental materials. In her current exhibition…
Akropolis Acting Company’s current production of Bent brings to mind a quote from writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. Assaulted by indisputable horrors upon arriving at Auschwitz A skeletal prisoners, frightened screams, whips, dogs, guns, pits where children were being burned alive A Wiesel still did not believe that such…
“I grew up in a town like Porpoise Spit,” confides Muriel’s Wedding writer-director P.J. Hogan. The Aussie auteur, who got his start in TV commercials and short features before landing a job as second-unit director on the 1991 gem Proof (which was directed by Hogan’s wife and Muriel producer Jocelyn…
Oh, to be the Dancing Queen. You can dance, you can jive, having the time of your life. See that girl! Watch that scene! Digging the Dancing Queen. Forgive me. I just get so carried away every time I hear those magic words, and I heard them a lot in…
Say this for Bye Bye, Love: A quick look at the title and the cast list and you have a very good idea of exactly what to expect A a glorified TV sit-com wrapped up in feature-film clothing. Paul Reiser, flush from the success of his popular TV series Mad…
How could anyone not pull for earnest, do-it-yourself filmmakers such as John Sayles and Maggie Renzi? Sayles tackles serious, challenging subjects — a coddled actress rediscovering her will to live after a paralyzing accident, violent labor union-management conflicts in West Virginia coal-mining country during the Twenties, the “Black Sox” World…
Playwright Jeffrey Sweet gives a great lecture. I heard him speak when he was in town recently to lead a playwrighting workshop, and I filled my notebook with useful maxims and seasoned insights provided by this articulate theater professional. He poked holes in the assumption that one’s personal life provides…
Being a teenager is hard enough. What if you also happen to be gay and living in Middle America? If you have any survival instincts at all, you head for either coast as soon as you can. That’s exactly what happens with the characters in the monologues “Dream Man” and…
