A great evening at the theater is composed of a whole host of elements, some obvious, some more subliminal. The basic minimum is an excellent script and superb cast. Then lighting, sound, costumes, and other technical effects — or the stark absence of them — contribute more. But what about…
Kim Basinger has amazing nipples. It’s a bad sign when you walk out of a movie theater and the thing that most sticks in your mind is some physical quirk of one of the lead actors. I exited The Bodyguard, for example, unable to get over Kevin Costner’s haircut. It…
“Let’s stop playing the dying fag!” exhorts Lawrence Helman, producer of the controversial movie Sex Is…, which opens at the Alliance Theater on Miami Beach this Friday. “Marc [Huestis, the film’s director] and I were tired of always seeing gays portrayed in the media as monogamous or abstaining — but…
In their infinite wisdom, Sony Pictures Classics, whose offices are in New York, decided to independently release the intricate French drama The Accompanist here in Miami on the eve of the Miami Film Festival. The Festival is an extremely popular and eagerly anticipated orgy of foreign movies that would sate…
Nick Nolte playing the lead in a musical — now there’s something you don’t see every day. Nor, for that matter, will you see it any day, thanks to the early test-screening audience that gave the musical sequences in I’ll Do Anything a thumbs-down — way down. Writer-director James L…
Remember the old scenario about describing a blind date? “Is she (he) cute?” you ask. “Well,” comes the halting answer from your friend. “She (he) has a great personality.” Of course this means a night with a refugee from the animal shelter. But let’s suppose we update that anecdote for…
Hotshot architect Vincent Eastman barrels down a slick mountain road in his classic 1968 Mercedes 280SL. He rounds a tight curve to discover a dilapidated VW van that has stalled while attempting to enter the thoroughfare ahead of him. Eastman swerves into the left lane to avoid the van –…
Let’s hope the L.A. earthquake didn’t claim any acting coaches. After viewing the latest outings by Madonna and Sharon Stone, Hollywood is going to need every last one. Madonna’s new film is director Abel Ferrara’s Dangerous Game, one of those self-indulgent film-within-a-film exercises. It’s hard to tell exactly where art…
Finally, the theatrical famine that plagued South Florida this year at Yuletide 0.is ending, and new shows are actually opening again. Barry Steinman, president of the Theatre League of South Florida, told me he isn’t sure why so many houses went dark over these holiday months (unlike last year and…
We live in a litigious world. Lawyers proliferate like locusts, except that the six-legged insects have a seventeen-year gestation period while the two-legged pests require only three. Yet no matter how many thousands of litigators law schools pump into the pipeline annually, the crime rate rises and the legal system…
From its opening scene of Richard Harris doing pushups in the nude, Wrestling Ernest Hemingway practically dares you to write it off as one of those feisty-but-lovable-old-folks-raging-at-the-dying-of-the-light movies. The Florida setting (in a fictional beach town called Sweetwater which bears as much resemblance to the municipality in West Dade as…
My mind is capable of doing a couple of things at once. Therefore, while watching Shirley MacLaine Live! at the Jackie Gleason Theater, my thoughts drifted to the current sorry state of the modern musical and the dramatic arts in general — but that is not a negative comment on…
Normally, the second half of South Florida’s theatrical season comes up rosier than the first; this is the time of the tourists, when artistic companies present their most interesting offerings and try to appeal to a broader audience in terms of age and interests. Unfortunately, this year — partly owing…
Warning lights ought to flash in every filmgoer’s head any time the words “based on a true story” or “adapted from a play” are used to promote a motion picture. A true story is one thing, but based on a true story — that’s like the difference between 100 percent…
One of my New Year’s resolutions was to avoid giving away the endings of films in my reviews. But sometimes a movie is so predictable I can’t help myself. I feel that old temptation and I end up writing something to the effect of: “You know from the moment you…
I can’t really say I knew Bill Cosford. I met him a few times at previews. He liked popcorn. He was usually the first one out of the theater when a screening was over, no doubt a pre-emptive maneuver designed to avoid becoming entangled in endless “So, whadjathink?” queries from…
Everyone has heard that shopworn saying, “The third time’s a charm.” But what if you’re successful the first two times you try something? Does that mean you’ll blow it the third time around? If your name is Oliver Stone and you’ve carted away Best Director Oscars for Platoon and Born…
Manifest Destiny. What a clever two-word rationalization for the indiscriminate slaughter of tens of thousands of indigenous peoples and the bald-faced theft of their land. On September 5, 1886, Chiricahua Apache warlord Goyahkla, better known as Geronimo (a moniker bestowed upon him by the 3000 or so Mexican soldiers whose…
To sum up South Florida’s theatrical menu in 1993, I must use one of the most famous — if rather cliched — passages in English literature, Charles Dickens’s opening of A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the…
Have you ever been to a party where someone you don’t like tells a long-winded story about some fabulous adventure they had and you know it’s a good yarn but you don’t enjoy it because you can’t get around the fact that the storyteller is a jerk? Welcome to Six…
One of my colleagues here at New Times who lived in Spain has asked me not to compare Bigas Luna, director of the anarchic sexual farce Jam centsn Jam centsn (one of the well-received offerings at this year’s Miami Film Festival), with Pedro Almod centsvar, Luna’s better-known contemporary. I feel…
Without a doubt, A Criminal Sorority provided me with one of the most entertaining evenings I’ve spent watching theater since I moved down here. Presented in a less than perfect location — Rose’s Bar & Lounge — where glasses clink, people shoot pool and bar patrons shout on the telephone,…
