When folks in the crowd at an Uncle Kracker show tear up, usually it is for one of two reasons: Either they are powerfully moved by the Top 40 troubadour’s rap-rock-country songs or they are weeping at the tragedy of a musician that corny and bad being so popular on…
One might think in today’s less structured and morally rigid society, dating would have gotten easier. One would be wrong. Sure, the old constructs of traditional courtship were stifling and restrictive, but without the letterman sweaters, fraternity pins, and promise rings, we don’t know who is doing what to whom…
Valentine’s! You forgot all about it! At this point, even your most powerful exertions won’t result in the kind of really romantic evening your mate is pining for, and s/he’ll probably resent you till Christmas. Unless you shell out $125 for one of these picnic packages benefiting the Riverwalk Trust…
As renaissance festivals have risen in popularity, they have long since given up any pretension at historical accuracy — if they ever did strive for such. Ren fests have instead become an amalgam of historical periods, fantasy genres, and cultural subsets all coalescing in a mead-drenched bacchanalia of revelry and…
In the small brochure that accompanies “The Return of the Magenta,” German artist Henning Haupt calls his latest body of work “a color-space construction in which the three-dimensional physical form is generated out of a visual color space composition.” In person, walking through the large-scale installation, he says a little…
There’s no question that the 2012 edition of the Sundance Film Festival was stuffed with films in some way touched by the psychological and practical fallout of economic crisis. It was blatant in documentaries such as Lauren Greenfield’s Queen of Versailles, in which a nouveau riche time-share mogul’s gaudy lifestyle…
This film follows two parallel story lines: one featuring a thoroughly insufferable little girl, the other a pleasingly grumpy middle-aged widow. Scrawny, bespectacled, precocious 11-year-old Paloma (Garance Le Guillermic), disgusted by the futility of her bourgeois existence, plans to kill herself on her next birthday — a scheme announced, as…
Written by Max “Son of John” Landis, Chronicle playfully transcends its “Cloverfield meets Heroes” pitch. Brimming with passive anger over his mother’s terminal illness and his father’s drunken abuse, Seattle loner Andrew (Dane DeHaan) buys a cheap camcorder and records every banal whim with his cousin Matt (Alex Russell). Andrew…
Parade Productions, South Florida’s newest theater company, premiered its first show in Mizner Park last weekend, but signs indicated that even members of the team weren’t entirely happy with the result. During the intermission of Brooklyn Boy, a 2004 dramedy from Donald Margulies, an usher made a point to tell…
We know what the slimy, blood-pumping mechanism that hangs behind our sternum looks like, thanks to the efforts of many brilliant and nonsqueamish researchers. Luckily, though, this art show isn’t about the precious, tender, hard-working organ in our chest. The felt heart will be on display for the eyes to…
On the one hand, we get why you sit at the sidelines for football, soccer, and basketball — tickets for those seats are expensive but promise relative safety for you. Yes, indeed, you’re very safe while you watch hulks toss around their balls with practiced hands. Now, throw that all…
It’s a reptile show. It’s always a reptile show. Never in the storied history of the War Memorial Auditorium (800 NE Eighth St., Fort Lauderdale) has there been an amphibian show, for people do not care about them. It’s reptilia that fascinate us, with their disposable skin and ancient horrible…
We can put up with the used clothing piled on both sides of a driveway. We can understand the mothball smell coming from a couch that’s for sale. Heck, we can even forgive the screaming children poorly placated by whatever kid’s show their frazzled mother distracts them with while she…
If there were ever a holiday designed to make otherwise self-sufficient, independent, unattached women feel bad about themselves, it’s Valentine’s Day. But we say, single women, love yourself this Valentine’s Day. Get a massage, buy yourself a nice bottle of wine, and order takeaway from your favorite restaurant to be…
We’ve lived here for years, and we’ve watched the deterioration of the Hooters franchise. Flip a coin; half the world wouldn’t eat at a Hooters because those joints objectified women, and then the other half would eat there for exactly that. And 1 percent would go for the food. If…
The almost universally acclaimed Top Gun, the Musical isn’t actually a musical version of Top Gun. It’s a play about the musical version of Top Gun. This is the story of Billy Palmer, a Broadway producer in desperate need of a hit after the failure of his previous effort, Apocalypse…
Dutch artist Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was a master of the Dutch Golden Age, not a master of golden showers. Or was he? Probably not. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t create works that were considered risque for the 1600s. A collection of 20 of Rembrandt’s etchings, which historians, curators,…
The hero of the red-herring heist flick Man on a Ledge draws two reactions from the Manhattan throng beneath his 21st-floor perch on a midtown hotel. The first, of course, is the predictable “just get it over with” impatience of New Yorkers impeded by police barricades. The second is unlikely…
Fulfilling a mission that has consumed her for almost two decades, Glenn Close — as producer, cowriter, and lead — brings to the screen the titular character, a woman who passes as a man in 1890s Ireland. The result of this passion project? Getting to look like Bruce Jenner in…
If you crash Liam Neeson and six disposable buddies in the frozen Alaskan wilderness, there is the expectation — nay, the requirement — that Neeson punch as many wolves as possible. Tape pocketknives and broken glass to your fists, improvise other weapons from the plane wreckage — just do what’s…
As bluntly humanist and free-ranging as its subject, this brisk take on the life of poet, sociologist, educator, psychologist, and general pain-in-the-ass gadfly Paul Goodman is as much endangered-species doc as biography. Goodman may be the most influential 20th-century thinker you’ve probably never heard of — good luck tracking down…
If you’re pushing through those 20s or maybe into your early 30s, obviously you’re not looking to join a knitting circle or a shuffleboard league yet. But, yeah, it’s time to put away some childish things and walk among the adults. You’re calling yourself a professional now. You should meet…
