This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks

THU 25 In any other business, when someone calls you a wanker with lots of problems, well… them’s fightin’ words. Of course, comedians take pride in such comments, especially when they come from Angus Young, AC/DC’s legendary ax-wielder. Having played a construction worker in one of the band’s music videos,…

Good Luck!

Bring cash, show skin FRI 8/26 This weekend, you might want to put on your South Beach best and roam Collins Avenue with your cell-phone camera. Of course, plans will shift and updates will be Blackberried across Miami, starting with Friday’s BMI Awards at the Fountainebleau Resort and continuing through…

Buc the Trend

‘Phins look to turn around pre-season BY PAUL A. LEONE | MAKKADA SELAH SAT 8/27 Pre-season football is the ultimate tease. On one hand, giving fanatics any football after a long off-season is like letting a crack fiend get just a tiny taste of the rock. On the other hand,…

El Hip-Hop

From Havana to Miami THU 8/25 When director Lisandro Pérez-Rey was 5 years old, Fidel Castro opened Cuba’s harbors, and 130,000 Cubans fled to Miami. This six-month-long event in 1980 was known as the Mariel Boatlift, chronicled in the opening scene of Scarface and elsewhere. Twenty years later, Pérez-Rey began…

Finally!

A chick who really does rock THU 8/25 In the song “The Best Thing,” Abby Gennet, singer/guitarist for the band Slunt, steals a dude’s money, steals his car, blows out its stero system, and makes off with homeboy’s best friend and later, his dad. The tune will make you remember…

Black Forest

Terry Gilliam’s last film featured the former Monty Python troupe member as an eccentric, demanding, and difficult director prone to destroying his ambitious projects before a single frame of footage was ever shot. “If it’s easy,” he says in the movie, “I don’t do it.” Alas, this was not a…

Southern Discomfort

Like hundreds of creative southerners before them, Phil Morrison and Angus MacLachlan have Thomas Wolfe in their bones. The media notes for Morrison’s first feature, Junebug, don’t mention Wolfe, and the 37-year-old NYU Film School graduate makes a point of distinguishing between literary inspiration and what he, like Paul Schrader,…

Stagebeat

Misery:Horror meister Stephen King certainly knows a thing or two about the vicissitudes of fame. Like many a writer before him, King draws on personal experience for his short novel Misery, a grim fairy tale about a famous novelist held captive by his “number one fan.” The 1992 play is…

To Be a Ringmaster

Call it a noble experiment. Call it seeing how the other half lives. Call it a lesson in humility. Call it whatever you want, but when I was invited to share curatorial responsibilities for an art exhibition earlier this year, I jumped at the chance. The invitation came courtesy of…

Artbeat

“Beauty’s where you find it,” as that great pop philosopher Madonna observed in her dance classic “Vogue.” So, too, with art. And if that means venturing into a dance bar to find it, so be it. Visit the new Wilton Manors bar Circuit, for instance, and you’ll find the work…

Shout to the Top

You’d think that after mainstream rock critics had finished fellating Conor Oberst, the glum-faced troubadour in Bright Eyes, they’d forget all about the aging punks in Green Day. After all, didn’t their 15 minutes end five years ago? And besides, what could a three-chord rock band offer in 2005 that…

I Heart PvD Too

What are they putting in this, this trance music that makes its adherents so suspiciously positive? Paul van Dyk, the most famous DJ in the world, was nice enough to give us a hint in a telephone talk from Ibiza, Spain. “Electronic music,” he says in a hyper German accent,…

This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks

THU 18 Tammy Pescatelli gets around more than a 14-year-old on MySpace. The Cleveland-born comedian was a finalist on Last Comic Standing (seasons two and three) and a fashion cop for Us Weekly and played poker against the pros on GSN. Somewhere in the middle of all that, Pescatelli managed…

I Heart Surfers

If you want to become a surf filmmaker, 28-year-old Jessie Marley has this advice: “Good luck. You’ve gotta be friends with [the pro surfers]. A lot of them have that too-cool attitude. I met a lot of them when I rode for Volcom. I put in my time with all…

Got Goth?

Vampire games at Rose & Crown FRI 8/19 For the past two years, the walking undead have gathered together at Sonar Nite Club in Hollywood to dance, drink, and be dark. But now tanned, bureaucratic big shots have decided to keep Goth and fetish fanatics from having any fun. Recently,…

Open Spaces

Sandhill cranes migrate to Delray FRI 8/19 It’s hard to understand sandhill cranes if you’re a city dweller. With that in mind, photographer Diane Farris moved to rural Gainesville three years ago, where, in a mood of poetic reverie and vivid beauty, she captured their subtle interaction. The results can…

A Comic Update

Nealon’s back on the road THU 8/18 For every Saturday Night Live star who finds success post SNL (like Rob Schneider), there’s an equal number who leave the cast only to embarrass themselves (Jimmy Fallon). Then there’s the case of Kevin Nealon. After the longest stint of any SNL performer…

Flight Risk

Red Eye may not seem to be your typical Wes Craven movie. It’s not really horror, there are no marketable monsters, and unlike Cursed, Scream 3, and other recent Craven offerings, it’s actually an enjoyable time at the movies. But heroine Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams) is very much in the…

November Mourn

Sure you want to be inside Sophie Jacobs’ head? The poor woman’s cabeza is so stuffed with guilt and fear, so tormented by grief and what might be delusions, that to spend even five minutes in there poses an obvious risk to your own sanity. At least, that’s the way…

Artbeat

New Art 2005 at the Museum of Art culls an array of recent and older creations by nine winners of the South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship. Not only does the fellowship benefit the artists in terms of exposure and money ($15,000 to each artist, to be exact) but it also…

Big Wheels

These trucks could eat you FRI 8/19 When Tom Meents, the six-time world champion monster truck racer, built a new house, he wasn’t quite sure what to do with the old one. “I built a ramp in the backyard,” he says, then got in his truck (named Maximum Destruction) and…

What Really Happens in the Ladies Room

A play called If We Are Women in a place called the Women’s Theatre Project? Shocking but true. What sounds like scary Lifetime television, though, is actually entirely satisfying, even if you happen to sport one of those crazy penis things. It’s so satisfying that you should be prepared to…