Despite its out-of-the-way location, one of South Florida’s newest concert halls has become an unexpected enclave for great world cinema. Earlier this month, the Aventura Arts and Cultural Center launched its three-part 2011 Foreign Film Series with the heartfelt Swedish drama As It Is in Heaven. The series continues Tuesday…
The Romani people are a fairly misunderstood culture, shrouded in myth, a semi-self-imposed isolationism, and secrecy. But you wouldn’t know it listening to the Gipsy Kings. There’s nothing secret about those salsa rhythms bubbling over with rumba and funk, making bones rattle with pulsating dance vibrations. If you don’t know…
George Lopez is a successful Mexican-American comedian and actor with his own late-night talk show on TBS. But his most outstanding characteristic is that he understands white people and their sensitivities. “When white people get E. coli, the whole world fucking stops… ‘I have E. coli. I couldn’t go to…
There’s something deeply satisfying about finding a little nook of South Florida artistic activity before it’s been besmirched by a commissioned Shepard Fairey graffiti piece, a glut of guided art student tour groups, or a handful of gleaming New York Times write-ups. So goes the feeling when you take a…
What a way to end a festival! ArtsUnited’s 11th annual, 15-day ArtExplosion LGBT fest concludes Saturday at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts with a guest lecture from Dan Savage. The pioneering sex advice columnist (“Savage Love” is his frank, edgy baby), author, and gay activist is on most…
There has perhaps never been a more deceptively innocent movie tagline than My Dog Tulip’s: “The story of a man who rescues a German shepherd and how the two become fast friends.” This animated feature, based on British wordsmith J.R. Ackerley’s memoir of the same name, is no saccharine, Disneyfied…
Genre-unto-himself Nicolas Cage’s latest displays much the same tattoo-parlor hellfire imagery as Ghost Rider, but this is the hard-R version, with Johnny Blaze’s jellybeans from a goblet in the earlier film now replaced by a cold after-work beer drunk from a human skull. Cage plays a black-denim God’s Lonely Man,…
In Grey Gardens, The Musical, a mother and daughter both named Edith Beale inhabit a tumbledown mansion in the Hamptons filled with raccoons, vermin, fleas, and up to a thousand bags of garbage. But these women aren’t crackhead squatters. The elder Edith is Jackie Kennedy’s aunt, the younger her cousin,…
In Dinner With Friends, two married couples form a fragile social molecule that threatens to disintegrate in a chain reaction of divorce. The play begins with one of the wives, Beth, confiding over dinner to her married friends, Gabe and Karen, that she’s splitting with her husband, Tom. When Tom…
Ghost. The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. Casper. Poltergeist romances can make it seem that the only way to find a man with a good heart, is to find one with no pulse. But Ghost-Writer, the play by Michael Hollinger, is more than just another inter-dimensional love story or a good…
It’s Girl Scout Cookie time. They’re everywhere: on street corners, at tables outside grocery stores, and lurking just outside the doors of your gym. With their cute faces and deliciously evil snacks, who can resist them?! It’s for a good cause, right? Yes. But good cause calories will make your…
Here’s your quiz: What is a lost art? It’s not basket weaving, marble carving, or silk-screening. The answer is hand stitching. That’s right: Your grandma’s hand-stitched, framed “Home, Sweet Home” piece hanging by her door is beautiful, and we bet you’ve never taken the time to appreciate all the hard…
South Florida has long been the mecca for snowbirding seniors and so there has never been any shortage of activities for grandma and grandpa. And no one can deny how the once Spring Break capital of the world has also catered to the very young, hard-partying crowd. But those in…
Consider the opening scenario of An Irish Curse: A priest, a jock, a fat man, a gay man, and an Irish immigrant walk into a church basement. Yes, the play begins like a joke, and not the good kind of joke. It’s more like a joke of pre-P.C. standup comics,…
Of the two new exhibitions at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, one appears to be a sure-fire crowd pleaser, while the other yields unexpected pleasures that prove ultimately more substantial. Put another way, maybe I’m just not that keen on looking at women’s dresses. “CUT! Costume and the Cinema”…
In past years, the theatrical release of the Oscar-nominated live-action and animated shorts has provided a fun peek into intriguing, bite-sized cinema from across the globe. But for the 2011 edition, the series is at last making room for the five nominated documentary shorts as well. Unfortunately, this year’s nonfiction…
Despite the biodoc implication of its title, Bhutto is not just a portrait of the late Benazir Bhutto but also a chronological recap of Pakistan’s anarchic history. Duane Baughman’s nonfiction film pays reverential tribute to Bhutto, who, after the 1979 execution of her prime minister father, became the first woman…
In her tale of a brusque, prickly young Dutch woman who inexplicably cuts herself off from the world, except for a heavily circumscribed relationship with a man whose isolation is less voluntary, writer/director Urszula Antoniak hits a lot of expected notes. But she does so with a gracefulness that makes…
Hold on to your beaded necklaces: It’s time for the 26th-annual Arti Gras Fine Arts Festival. The much-celebrated blowout will gather more than 150,000 art fanatics in Abacoa Town Center this Saturday through Monday, but unlike that other “gras,” don’t expect to find drunken dudes coercing women into disrobing for…
This generation’s ironic posturing seems obsessed with previous generations’ habits and trends. Sometimes the imitation isn’t even ironic; it’s more of an homage. Hipsterlicious schmoozers really relish the ’80s; easy, breezy, lazy types still identify with characters in Dazed and Confused; and Phish fans idolize the ’60s, their nostalgia conveniently…
There is a Clyde Butcher gallery in the middle of the Everglades. In fact, there are two Clyde Butcher galleries in Florida, one in Venice, the other, Big Cypress Gallery, located in the heart of the swamp at 52388 Tamiami Trail in Ochopee. A man made famous for his piercing…
Remember Andrew Dice Clay? No? C’mon! You know, the Dice Man — he’s the Brooklyn Jew who dressed like Mr. T except with the gall to wear sunglasses indoors. Still nothing? But he was the only comedian in history to sell out Madison Square Garden two nights in a row!…
