When did movie heroes turn into such whiners? The recurring trend in big-budget mainstream fare goes like this: Characters act like jerks, and then demand the viewer’s sympathy as their behavior deteriorates. Earlier this summer, the talking-animal farce Zookeeper had the temerity to show Kevin James, the King of Queens himself, acting like – let’s [...]
The annals of international cinema are mired with the wreckage of lousy movies about Puerto Rico. My teeth ache, for instance, when I think about the 1990 thriller A Show of Force, which starred Amy Irving as a dogged TV reporter determined to blow the lid off my home island’s Cerro Maravilla incident, in which [...]
Maus Gets Meta The universe “is not an ethical place,” said Art Spiegleman to the LA Times’ David L. Ulin. But does that mean we must be ethical creatures? That’s some “conundrum,” and one he’s not willing to let be “the take-away” from his mighty Maus. The whole “God has a plan even if I [...]
James C. Clark Recounts the 1950 Pummelling of Claude Pepper From 1963 until he died in 1989, Claude Pepper represented Florida’s 18th Congressional District, which included Key Biscayne, Bal Harbour and Coral Gables, as well as all of Miami Beach. For the last decade of those 26 years, Pepper was so popular with his constituents [...]
From contemporary Iran to rural Georgia, authority figures don’t fare very well in the current crop of new releases. Maybe it’s all that rampant, headline-grabbing activism currently dominating the news cycle. It may not have been intentional, but three of the titles making their way to local theaters this week couldn’t have been more perfectly [...]
Bound Deborah Reed Knows What Makes a Heart Grow Fonder Life’s funny. Not funny ha-ha, of course — but funny peculiar. What’s especially funny are the things that normally make up a life. Take love, for instance, which only a Mencken would consider to be laugh-out-loud. Love is something that pretty much everybody has spent [...]
What is it with doctors and their recorders? They’re too busy stating their findings into those gadgets to notice the patients sitting in front of them. I’m guessing Bedside Manner wasn’t a popular course during med school. An early scene in the acutely observed dramedy 50/50, one of two new fall releases I’m reviewing this [...]
By Steve Hofstetter On stage, Tommy Savitt is simple. His delivery is slow and measured and his character is the id run amuck. “You know how many marriages I’ve saved?” Savitt asks on stage. “Once you cheat on him with me, you’ll never do it again.” Savitt finishes the bit with his trademark question, “Who [...]
Telling the Tall Tale Behind the Ballad of Tom Dooley On May Day, 1868, in the town of Statesville, North Carolina, a man named Tom Dula was hanged for murder. The victim, a slip of a woman named Laura Foster, had been stabbed to death and hastily buried on a ridge in nearby Wilkes County. [...]
The new Straw Dogs, writer-director Rod Lurie’s contemporary remake of Sam Peckinpah’s button-pushing 1971 thriller, is utterly reprehensible, a misbegotten affront to the movie gods guaranteed to lower your IQ as you’re watching it. It’s the worst kind of stink bomb: trash that thinks it’s art. I enjoyed it thoroughly. Not in a guilty-pleasure, this-is-actually-kind-of-fun [...]
By John Zur For nearly two decades, the Miami Beach Cultural Affairs Program has been making strides in assuring the community receives a healthy, and diverse, dose of arts and culture. With the third installment of the successful Sleepless Night coming this November, the department is excited to deliver the 13-hour cultural arts event as [...]
Miami City Ballet will perform a a trio of signature works for Great Performances that will air at 9pm on October 28, as part of the PBS Arts Fall Festival on PBS Television. The program will showcase the company’s critically acclaimed performances of George Balanchine’s Square Dance (music by Antonio Vivaldi and Arcangelo Corelli) and [...]
