Holiday In!

Memorialize your weekend at the Hard Rock Hotel SAT 5/28 There’s something for everyone at the Memorial Day weekend celebration held by the Seminole Paradise, the block of shops, bars, and restaurants at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino (1 Seminole Way, Hollywood). For the kids, bounce houses and…

Summer Swing

Mets and Marlins tangle for four THU 5/26 As expected, the National League East has seen a close race through the first couple of months of the season. Four teams have been bunched near the top, with two to three games separating the lot day to day. That the Nationals…

Censor This!

Art in your eye THU 5/26 The Broward Art Guild has never been in the business of dumbing down its exhibits to suit the overly sensitive or intellectually bankrupt. But when the guild rolls out its annual taboo-testing exhibit “Controversy,” the envelope is not just pushed — it’s run through…

Red Dirt Woman

Country music with a conscience SUN 5/29 Way before all the girls in your family sang “Redneck Woman” karaoke-style at the last family barbecue and every boot-scoot joint in town praised the outspoken wit of Jo Dee Messina’s “My Give a Damn’s Busted,” Emmylou Harris was holding a seat for…

Long Bomb

Adam Sandler cast as a former pro quarterback — that laughable setup is about the only funny thing about this pointless, witless remake of The Longest Yard, which wasn’t intended to be taken as a comedy in 1974 and won’t be mistaken for one in its latest incarnation. (It was…

Thick and Rich

Layer Cake, a new British crime drama from first-time director Matthew Vaughn, is a block of granite struggling to liberate the statue inside it. Vaughn (producer of Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) has plenty of dark threat and compelling visual style, but his ambitious trip into the…

Animal Crackers

It’s fair to say that Madagascar, directed by one man who made Antz and another who used to work on Ren & Stimpy, is virtually plot-free — nothing more, really, than a scene or two from The Great Escape cut and pasted into an episode of Survivor. Its threadbare storyline,…

War Bonds

Where does inspiration for war literature come from? Well, mull over this recent comment reported by National Public Radio from a jaded U. S. Army sergeant stationed in Baghdad: “When I get off of patrol, I sit around base and smoke a lot of cigarettes. Then, I try to think…

Stagebeat

Here’s a musical that overcomes an uninspired, predictable storyline with solid songs and vibrant production. Originally staged off Broadway in 1997 and making its South Florida debut, The Last Session tells the story of Gideon (Gary Waldman), a singer/songwriter who’s given up his fight with AIDS. All that’s left to…

Pale Faces

On a recent Sunday-afternoon visit to the Boca Raton Museum of Art, I discovered quite a few people competing for viewing space at “Seeing People: Paintings from the National Academy Museum,” an exhibition of 45 works from one of the oldest arts organizations in the country. It made for a…

On the Dark Side

It’s a question to which the response should be more than a shrug, but it’s the only thing I can offer anyone who asks, “So, how was it?” The final installment in the mostly irrelevant second Star Wars trilogy is far superior to its immediate two predecessors, The Phantom Menace…

Death Pool

Before AIDS was about drug therapy cocktails or the wholesale devastation of sub-Saharan Africa, it was about the mysterious absence of loved ones spirited away by a sudden plague. Adding to the anguish of those early AIDS years was the fact that our infected loved ones, more often than not,…

Artbeat

Google Rudolf Bauer and you’ll discover two things: He was a German-born abstractionist, and he’s compared frequently to Russian painter Vasily Kandinsky. True, both Bauer and Kandinsky abstracted their subjects in that same, soft, there-but-not-there style impressionists used on landscapes, with a shake of cubism thrown in for good measure…

Fire and Surf

Deerfield’s Beach Blowout, which started eight years ago to prepare folks for hurricane season (think shutter displays and storm checklists), has since morphed into a weekend-long testosterone fest of hardy coed lifeguard and firefighter competitions. No, it doesn’t pit lifeguards against firefighters. Dream on, soft-porn people. During Friday’s lifeguard competitions,…

This Week’s Day-by-Day Picks

THU 19 Luckily for the Philadelphia Eagles Cheerleaders, they’ll compete only in tame sports like volleyball and tug-of-war today. If the Battle on the Beach were more of a Fear Factor-style throwdown, the lovely ladies would be in trouble. “Worms terrify me,” says Janipher, one of the squad’s 38 pom-pommers…

Splash and Burn

Summertime is upon us again, and we know what to expect — thunderstorms, power outages, more thunderstorms, and getting your legs stuck to the car seat. And, of course, enormous star-filled concerts like the Y-100.7 Summer Splash. While the show’s musical fare leaves something to be desired — it’s Top…

Master Plan

Who’s afraid of the big, bad b-boys? THU 5/19 At a real b-boy jam, “you’re not going to be dancing and pour Skittles on somebody,” says DJ Trails of Hip Hop Elements, referring to a recent TV commercial and to the fact that big companies are always trying to capitalize…

Sidelines

And tan lines SAT 5/21 When was the last time you took off your shirt and shoes and made a good kill? Never? Recently? Either way, here’s your chance to do it right. Since 1993, more than 100 teams have met on the beach by the Hollywood Broadwalk (A1A and…

Cool Effects, Man!

Best of the best at AIFL THU 5/19 Here’s a prescription for disaster: It’s 8:30 in the morning, and you’re late for work. You’re done with breakfast but still have to shave, brush your teeth, and phone in to tell your boss about having “car trouble.” Attempting all three things…

More Murph

Eddie’s big brother is a big hit FRI 5/20 When Chappelle’s Show first hit Comedy Central in 2003, it was an instant hit, but it wasn’t until the show’s second season that it truly became a cultural phenomenon. All of a sudden, the streets of suburbia from Albuquerque, New Mexico,…

Sith Is It

“Somewhere, this could all be happening right now,” spoke the narrator in the trailer for the first Star Wars movie (thereafter known as Episode IV: A New Hope), and to those who were small children then, it rang true. For an entire generation, the Star Wars trilogy could never be…

Good Guys, Bad Guys

Ever cruised the drama section of your local public library? Oftentimes, you’ll find collections of plays from the 1940s and ’50s entombed on a back shelf, scripts that are well-crafted and thoughtful but rather timeworn and unlikely to pack much punch on a modern stage. That’s the feel of David…