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…
“To step from the critical domain to the curatorial takes some courage,” writes former Miami Herald architecture critic Beth Dunlop in the catalogue for Art + Architecture = Miami, now on view at the Center of Contemporary Art (COCA) in North Miami. “An exhibition tests abstract ideas by examining them…
Why do men still run the world? Look at their track record: Millenniums have passed and they still haven’t figured out ways to avoid warfare, clean up the environment, eradicate poverty, and generally make the planet a better place to live. Along the way, technological advances have rendered their edge…
Rade Serbedzija, the actor who plays the doomed photojournalist Aleksander in Before the Rain, is quick to point out the irony of the powerful antiwar movie’s setting. The first major film about the ethnic conflicts that have torn apart the former Yugoslavia, Before the Rain takes place in Macedonia, which…
Writer-director J.F. Lawton is on the verge of creating a whole new subgenre of films: action movies for people who don’t really like action movies. Lawton authored the screenplay for 1992’s Under Siege, which accomplished the nearly impossible feat of making Steven Seagal look good. As a Cajun chef, no…
New ideas, new inventions, new fashions, new freedoms. A world on the verge of incredible medical and technological breakthroughs, yet still struggling with timeless bugaboos such as poverty, prejudice, and overpopulation. A rising tide of intolerance toward immigrants. Cynics, mystics, reactionaries, and charlatans vying for power, publicity, and pocket money…
The late Joseph Papp, visionary impresario and driving force behind the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater, once said, “There will never be another A Chorus Line.” Indeed. First produced by the Shakespeare festival, A Chorus Line was handed over to Broadway entrepreneurs, and the money generated by…
