Am I the only viewer in America who has a problem with the recent spate of slacker movies? From Slacker to Singles to Dazed and Confused, a trend seems to be emerging, the salient characteristic of which is the romanticization of sloth and navel contemplation. Not that I have anything…
Even though it’s my usual task to comment on the work of playwrights, directors, and performing artists, I must open this review with a barb directed toward a fellow critic. William A. Henry III recently wrote an impossibly ignorant paragraph in the February 14 issue of Time magazine. In discussing…
The drug dealer with a guilty conscience — has there ever been a phonier Hollywood invention? That’s what Sugar Hill, which debuted locally at the Miami Film Festival, is all about. Wesley Snipes stars as Roemello “Ro” Skuggs, a heroin dealer who wants out. Of course, he doesn’t want out…
Truly satisfying basketball movies are rarer than celibate NBA players. From Drive, He Said to White Men Can’t Jump, Chu Chu and the Philly Flash to Hoosiers, the essence of the game has eluded Hollywood’s grasp. It’s not just the fact that removing the elements of competition and unpredictability takes…
Johnny is a bitter but brilliant guy with a taste for rough sex, the quintessential angry young man drifting through a London netherworld of emotional cripples. He’s got no shortage of places to go, but he’s searching for a warm place to stay. When he finally finds it, he leaves…
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…
