Speaking of genres, the woman-in-jeopardy movie has been getting quite a working-over lately, from Sleeping With the Enemy to A Stranger Among Us. Whispers in the Dark is a fairly fluent example of this stereotypical crowd-pleaser: The film is tension-packed, mystery-laden, and ably acted. And there’s a bonus: Psychiatrists will…
Bill Cosford of the Miami Herald, a dependable critic who has had to sit through his share of turkeys over the course of a long tenure covering movies in this area, hinted at a pervasive problem when he assessed 1992’s films in a column last Thursday. After dutifully clumping together…
As a zesty summer alternative, I’ll take a few weeks off here and there from slicing, dicing, and stroking to discuss more important issues in South Florida theater than Goldilocks and the Three Bears, or another revival of Neil Simon. And without a doubt, the new Theatre League of South…
The title sequence of Robert Zemeckis’s Death Becomes Her promises a much funnier and more adept black comedy than what eventually comes to pass. On the Broadway stage in 1978 (the year is important), Madeline Ashton (Meryl Streep), a waning theatrical diva, stars in a musical production adapted from Tennessee…
In this business, the snappy little cliche “he stole the show” seems to be used ad nauseam to describe any performance that displays even a smidgen of talent. But the number of times any show-stealing actually occurs continues to dwindle as the years go by. Waning stage opportunities force many…
Never having been a great admirer of Jean-Luc Godard, aging daddy of the French nouvelle vague, I was rightly suspicious with his showering praise on the little-known Jon Jost, naming the latter the current best among America’s independent directors. Given the source, it is certainly a dubious tribute, as complimentary…
In an article called “Critical Condition,” published in the June 1991 edition of American Theatre, the great playwright A.R. Gurney, himself a survivor of some nasty reviews, editorialized on the role of critics and the importance of a concept called “bestowal” in considering a work of art. “An example of…
Some of the best singing, dancing and musicianship I’ve seen at the Coconut Grove Playhouse this year now occupies the main stage — and the occupants are a group of local teen-agers and the Playhouse’s young apprentices, presenting an original work called The Sun Drum. Although it deals with loads…
To any casual moviegoer, it comes as no surprise that a starlet now growing quite long in the tooth like Melanie Griffith should show up in an embarrassment such as A Stranger Among Us. From 1988’s passable Working Girl to this year’s abominable Shining Through, Tippi Hedren’s problem child has…
When it opened in 1989 — the same week as Batman — I was delighted by Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and its Lilliputian adventure set in a suburban back yard teeming with giant blades of grass, ants, puddles, bumblebees, and scorpions. “An adventure yarn in the tradition of Fantastic…
Having just learned from a reader’s letter that one’s perception of art is fact and not opinion, a whole new world of commentary has opened up for me. In case you don’t remember the missive sent to me by one of Pia’s musicians, it stated: “That’s how good our performances…
When Sinclair Lewis received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930, one bemused onlooker, George Bernard Shaw — a winner of the same award in 1925 — made the following observation: “I have defined the hundred percent American as ninety-nine percent an idiot.” No doubt Shaw’s scintillating wit would be…
Want to hear an AIDS joke? A one-liner about crack addicts? Okay, how about the riots in L.A.? That’s a knee-slapper for sure. Maybe you think I’ve finally crossed the boundaries of sane Homo sapiens taste — well, not yet. I don’t believe these subjects lend themselves to wry humor,…
Eddie Murphy’s metamorphosis from foulmouthed ghetto comic into suave leading man is now almost complete, but so far it’s been about as successful as Woody Allen’s bumbling reincarnation as a lox-and-bagel Cary Grant. Because at least when Murphy was talking dirty and raising feminist hackles, he brought some hyperkinetic energy…
Set in a hazy, non-specific, post-apocalyptic future, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s black-hearted satirical comedy from France, Delicatessen, makes no attempt to conceal its sources of inspiration, pictorial and thematic: A predominant one is Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (which, of course, drew from wide literary sources such as Orwell’s 1984 and…
In my Spanish-English dictionary, the following words are translated in sequence: machacar (or machucar): to pound, to crush machete: heavy knife macho: male animal, male part, manly Sometimes, in learning a language, one can glean meaning from other words with similar root sounds. The connection seems to hold true in…
One False Move is a knuckleheaded title for a diminutive detective thriller — particularly as, both in its plot and the filmmaking in general, there are about as many false moves as barbecued ribs at a wild hog jamboree. Directed by former actor Carl Franklin and written by another actor,…
When reviewing a mixed bag of theatrical offerings such as the Seventh International Hispanic Theatre Festival, a Spanish-speaking Anglo reviewer (such as yours truly) could easily fall into the trap of generalizations. Latin theater reflects these beliefs, portrays this, says that in certain typical ways, et cetera. But such flat…
A work of mesmerizing lyrical power and profoundly human dimension, Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust celebrates the bond of women, the richness of culture and tradition, and the mystery of nature with bracing, impressive authority. Unlike so many of our contemporary media products passed along the popular-culture conveyer belt,…
“An opera – a gothic, Teutonic, thickly textured hybrid of various theatrical and cinematic conventions. To call this film Wagnerian would be understating the case, because even the Ring has its light and shade…[it] recalls the elliptical and symbolic world of Strauss-Hoffmannsthal’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, with its somber metaphysical…
After viewing the current New Theatre production of George Bernard Shaw’s Bonaparte: Man of Destiny, I was instantly reminded of a recent dinner conversation with a colleague on this paper. He commented that regrettably, there remain few good Shavian actors. I agreed, but added that Shaw would prove a challenge…
As Goldie Hawn traipses through it early in Housesitter, the fictional New England town of Dobbs Mill (Concord and Cohasset, Massachusetts) is a patch of retro-colonialist Americana: star-spangled flags hang over modestly ornamented homes, the wood-panel architecture recalls the idealistic haze of Norman Rockwell’s illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post,…
