Some of our northern brothers consider South Florida vacations to be trips to paradise. They fill up on ice cream at Jaxson’s in Dania Beach, drive their Le Cars slowly toward the Hollywood Broadwalk, lather coconut oil onto their bodies, and then squirm into their thongs. Yum — baked Québecois…
THU 12 Mark Curry grew up wanting to be like his hero, Richard Pryor (aside from that little freebasing mishap). Of course, achieving that level of comic godhead is unlikely for anyone — who can top Pryor? — but Curry has done pretty damned well for himself. Not many standup…
If you owned a hip, modern hotel and charged $99 to $200 for each of its 45 rooms, would you forego a Saturday night’s income so that a bunch of artists could commandeer the property and dress all the furniture in Saran Wrap? That’s why the proprietors of Hotel Biba…
Thou shalt not squeal like a pig FRI 5/13 The 1972 movie Deliverance introduced us to an emaciated, banjo-playin’ boy with a forehead the size of a satellite dish. The young George W. (just kidding) seemed strangely aware of the city slickers’ fate as audiences everywhere learned to associate “Dueling…
Put your sea legs on SAT 5/14 “If you haven’t seen Fort Lauderdale, which is called ‘The Venice of America,’ from the waterway, then you haven’t seen Fort Lauderdale,” says Jim Batchelor, owner of Club Nautico boat rentals. “We have great fishing, diving, and outdoor watersports, and renting a boat…
Art for reality’s sake FRI 5/13 Alexandra Nechita has spent the past 17 years eating, sleeping, and breathing art. So one might estimate, assuming she started in grade school, that the Los Angeles-based artist is about 30 or so. Er! Wrong! She’s only 19 — and she already has a…
One former VJ makes you love him THU 5/12 Bill Bellamy continues to do the unthinkable. As the former host of MTV Jams, he continues to have a flourishing career — thus disproving the notion that video jocks are destined for nothing more than commentary on VH1’s Best Week Ever…
If you’re expecting a psychological thriller out of Mindhunters and you buy a ticket for the movie, you will almost indubitably feel cheated. But break down the film’s title to its most literal sense — hunting for a mind, presumably because those involved were out of theirs — and you’ll…
It won’t ruin anyone’s experience of 3-Iron, the new film by Korean writer/director Kim Ki-duk, to reveal that it closes with a single epigraph: “It’s hard to tell that the world we live in is either reality or a dream.” Presumably, the correct translation would replace that with whether; even…
Kicking & Screaming might be the most predictable movie of the year, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Think about it: How many times have you gone to a movie and gotten far less than you were expecting? Here, that’s not a concern — you may not get more…
Jane Fonda comes from a good Hollywood family and used to be a pretty fair actress herself. Klute, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, and Coming Home were three of the better films of their time. So, after getting a look at herself in her first movie in 15 years, La…
Perhaps no filmmaker working today better exemplifies the great humanist tradition of Italian Neo-Realism than the gifted Kurdish-Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi, whose movies — A Time for Drunken Horses, Marooned in Iraq (a.k.a. Songs of My Motherland), and now Turtles Can Fly — deal with the plight of the Kurdish…
Lost Embrace, a new film by Argentinean director Daniel Burman, looks more like a handheld video by the purist Dogme school of Denmark. Centered in Buenos Aires, it’s an unevenly amusing comedy of family reconciliation that looks like a thumb in the eye and tastes of Europudding throughout. Ariel is…
First there was the 11 p.m. curfew. Then came the 21-and-over ordinance for bars and clubs. And now Spanky’s — Clematis Street’s long-standing venue for national, all-ages punk, and hardcore shows — is deader than disco. The message seems clear: The kids are all right — as long as they’re…
THU 5 It was a night just like this one, albeit many moons ago. An aspiring young comic named Arnez J took the stage and turned it inside out with a routine more animated than Daffy Duck. Among the crowd sat a few industry bigwigs, real heavy hitters — or…
When we get Margaret Cho on the phone and ask if she feels pressure to be funny even when she’s not on stage, she says, “No. The people that I hang out with are mostly artists; they don’t have expectations.” Sometimes, however, “People are surprised that I’m not a cutup.”…
Booze, babes, and… bulls? THU 5/5 Leave it to Seminole Paradise at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino to reel in the big enchiladas for Cinco de Mayo. The district is growing faster than a cactus on steroids, rounding out its ethnic food offerings with last December’s opening of…
Knock you out SAT 5/7 Boxers are pretty much the hip-hop stars of the sporting world. In fact, in a lot of ways, it’s hard to differentiate between the two. Both have huge entourages, flashy outfits, and colorful lifestyles — hell, LL Cool J rapped about being a boxer while…
Young art stars go lowbrow SAT 5/7 “The Miami art scene feels electric,” says Francesco LoCastro, the 28-year-old painter who is largely responsible for sticking the plug in the proverbial outlet and cranking up the juice. “The then-rundown Miami/Wynwood Fashion District was home to one gallery four years ago… It…
The Gore Gore Girls know a woman’s work is never done FRI 5/6 A milling clash of attendees piled into the dark, littered space, holding cigarettes over their heads to avoid burning others. A line of fans stretched around the length of the plaza’s closed storefronts, waiting impatiently to fork…
Much of Crash, an L.A.-stories portmanteau about the suffocating embrace of racism, is hard to watch, harder still to listen to. Its characters — the creations of co-writer and director Paul Haggis but also of people who live next door and perhaps even inside of you — say and do…
It is no great joy to review Palindromes, the latest film from writer-director Todd Solondz, who is loved by those who do not loathe him for such movies as Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness, and Storytelling. Advance word had Palindromes as Solondz’s most shocking film, which seemed impossible, given its…
