To enter Ridley’s Scott’s 1492: Conquest of Paradise and its phantasmagoric fifteenth-century world, you will need to check your piddling prerequisites at the door. Historical scholarship, stylistic authenticity, narrative cohesion — attributes the dull, unsophisticated mind might expect in a portrait of Christopher Columbus and his times — are deemed…
I had the privilege of attending two Bob Marley concerts in my life. Both were in the Seventies and in England, an island not as far removed from Marley’s own, Jamaica, as their different climates and race denominations would indicate. The English worshiped Marley’s outsized personality and were equally captivated…
Admittedly, it’s helpful of the Miami Herald to separate theater listings into “Professional/Equity,” “Professional Non/Equity,” “Community,” “Dinner Theater,” and “In Spanish” (as if Spanish is a show-business category), but such divisions mean nothing unless they are defined. As South Florida gains a more vital, arts-oriented population and more refugees from…
“Ingmar Bergman is, in my most carefully considered opinion, the greatest filmmaker the world has seen so far.” (The italics are mine.) Those words were written by critic John Simon in 1972 in what remains the definitive book in English about the Swedish director, Ingmar Bergman Directs. But twenty years…
Pulitzer or no Pulitzer, David Mamet’s 1984 play Glengarry Glen Ross is not a masterpiece. Its salient metaphor, the ritualistic hard selling of worthless marshlands with quasi-poetic names such as Glengarry Highlands and Glen Ross Farms, is bludgeon-heavy in the extreme, this despite the recessionary economy of the Bush years…
Every molecule of my hyper-educated mind, every atom of refined artistic taste yearns to dismiss the old-fashioned, cornball 1950 John Patrick comedy, The Curious Savage, now transported through that ever-churning South Florida time machine to the stage of the Caldwell Theatre. This is not new, not moving, not powerful, and…
Mbongeni Ngema’s agitprop musical Sarafina! enthralled American audiences during its long Broadway run: The stark contrast between the infectious mbaqanga rhythms straight out of South Africa’s embattled black townships and the cruelties of apartheid made it a political placard you could tap yourfoot to. The movie version is admirable but…
With one Eighties-chic, progressively atmospheric TV series on his resume (Miami Vice), another (Crime Story) applying the music-video aesthetic to the Sixties, a feature film about a techno-burglar with a heart of gold (Thief), and another (Manhunter) introducing the cannibalistic serial killer, few in their right minds would offer Michael…
Of all the techniques used to teach acting, Sanford Meisner developed one of the most famous, practical, and, curiously enough, the simplest. Meisner and his Neighborhood Playhouse cohorts (count David Mamet among their graduates) believed that the key to the craft was found simply in the art of listening and…
The under-the-table political ethic of LBJ, Richard Nixon, and Watergate, the ascent of the Gipper in 1980 preaching the gospel of “morning in America,” the still unresolved legacy of Iran-contra, Bush and “read my lips,” right up to the current presidential campaign, with the models of Bush, Bill Clinton, and…
Despite the normally vapid state of TV, remote-control fast-forwarding does occasionally result in the unearthing of something worth staring at. Case in point: One night while zapping through the dreck I came across an interview, conducted by Dick Cavett, of the cerebrally luminous author/philosopher Gore Vidal. America’s internal conflicts, postulated…
Woody Allen has spent the past fifteen years since Annie Hall prolifically staking a claim for cinematic greatness. Hardly a year has gone by without one or two films from the myopic, diminutive writer/director/performer, who wants as much to be a great artist as Richard Nixon wants to be a…
With Mel Brooks on the skids, Eddie Murphy retooling as Mr. Romantic, and Woody Allen all tied up in divorce court, somebody in the movies had to pick up the slack…yukwise. Enter Andrew Bergman, the fellow New York Magazine dubbed “The Unknown King of Comedy” back in 1985. Unknown no…
First, an anecdote, since as most populations outside America know, a sense of humor can help to ease one’s pain. The story concerns nineteenth-century playwright Sir Charles Sedley, author of the comedy Bellamira. During the very first performance of the play, the roof of the theater caved in. Luckily, few…
The fictional hamlet of Lumbertown in Blue Velvet, with its “sound of the falling tree” radio jingle, Eisenhower-era veneer of community values, and visions of singing robins overcoming the real — though often surreal — forces of darkness as personified by Frank Booth, Dorothy Vallens, and their fetishistic underworld cronies,…
Made in 1980 on a shoestring budget — and looking every bit as dirt-cheap as John Waters’s deliciously trashy Baltimore chronicles of the early Seventies — Pedro Almodovar’s Pepi, Luci, Bom has the courage and outlandish invention of new discovery. For not only was Spain enjoying a honeymoon with life,…
Many ignorant critics have lately waxed enthusiastic over what remains a questionable kinship between E.M. Forster’s “Italian” novels — the early Where Angels Fear to Tread and later A Room with A View, both adapted to film within the past five years, and directed, respectively, by Charles Sturridge and James…
The great posthumously celebrated poet and recluse Emily Dickinson wrote: “One need not be a chamber to be haunted/One need not be a house/The brain has corridors surpassing/Material place.” I begin with this verse partly because Emily haunts the stage brilliantly through the efforts of Academy Award-winner Kim Hunter, in…
What was Vince Rhomberg at the Public Theatre thinking when he allowed the vanity production Yetta & Sophie In Miami Beach to occupy his space under his sponsorship? Despite the fact that I was told repeatedly by the management that it was a “hit,” and despite the fact that some…
There is a stateliness and repose, a stillness even, in the shots of the land in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven that persuasively evoke the pervasive mood of the film — melancholy — and help underscore its predominant theme: death. The majestic vistas of Alberta, Canada, have served Eastwood’s generous, retrospective glance…
The word “thespian” is derived from the name of the first actor who made history, Thespis, who dazzled the crowds at the festival of Dionysus in 534 B.C., but stirred up controversy simultaneously. According to Plutarch, the Greeks initially questioned the morality of drama; Solon, the great lawgiver, publicly denounced…
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…
