Without a single, thriving downtown core or distinct enclaves — such as Miami’s Little Havana — many Broward County residents may never have experienced fully the rich cultural diversity of our sprawling community. Margarita Fellman is out to change that. Formerly the art director of Exemplary Folk Song and Dance…
Like a SWAT team getting ready to pounce on some unsuspecting bad guys, a troop of teenage to twentysomething males gets into position behind a stack of barricades. Armed with paintball pistols, they’re sporting military-style fatigues, menacing black facemasks, and goggles. With beads of sweat trickling down their foreheads, fingers…
When John Waters is at his best, as he is in his latest, Cecil B. Demented, he can drive you in in a way few filmmakers have ever managed to do. But recognizing that fact can sometimes be difficult in today’s market-driven context. In fact, for the first half hour…
“Be cool, get chicks.” While that’s paraphrased and boiled down, it’s nonetheless the essential creed of Dex (Donal Logue), the corpulent connoisseur of carnality who lumbers through this debut feature from Jenniphr Goodman as if he’s Paul Bunyan and every woman in sight is a tree. Overweight and underemployed, Dex…
In Douglas Carter Beane’s As Bees in Honey Drown, Evan Wyler (Mark Heimann) learns a little something about the facts of life and even more about life’s fictions. After nine years of sacrifice, the young writer finally publishes his first novel and becomes an overnight sensation. Soon the mysterious and…
I have never read The Odyssey, A Tale of Two Cities, Pride and Prejudice, or, for that matter, the Bible. But I have read, from cover to cover, Occupation: Skateboarder, the just-published autobiography from Tony Hawk. I have never seen most of the films of Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, or…
It isn’t exactly the X Games, but local boarders and in-line skaters will tear it up this weekend at Brian Piccolo Park’s Skate Park, which celebrates its one-year anniversary with an In-line Skate and Skateboard Competition. Most competitors are already familiar with the facility’s layout, since a majority are among…
If John Waters and Martha Stewart had a love child who grew up to open a novelty store, J. Miles would be the place. Jerry Miles would be the mongrel. For some 20 years, Miles has sold the smartest, sassiest T-shirts, toys, and home furnishings in a shop that screams,…
As any Klump family member can tell you, this has been a hot summer for black comedians. New movies starring Martin Lawrence, the Wayans brothers, and Eddie Murphy have already pulled down more than $300 million at the box office, and by the time Chris Rock’s remake of Heaven Can…
Irish charm and British eccentricity are hot properties on this side of the pond — especially among U.S. moviegoers. Witness the phenomenal success here of The Secret of Roan Inish, in which a ten-year-old Irish girl finds her lost brother living among seals off her country’s rugged western coast, or…
It’s no myth that one of the first constitutional rights for which U.S. settlers fought after freedom of speech was the right to bear arms. Americans have an undeniable fascination (indeed, a love affair) with the gun as phallus — an insatiable attraction to the romance of the Bonnie and…
Credit Max Schacknow with persistence, if nothing else. In 1994 the feisty millionaire artist gave Coral Springs $1.5 million to name the museum section of its Coral Springs City Centre after him, with a provision that he be allowed to display his works in some of the galleries there. Four…
“Please hold for Tammy Faye.” The few seconds between those words and those that follow, uttered by the woman who once haunted pay-to-pray TV like a mascara-ed harlequin, are interminable. Until a month ago, the notion of talking to Tammy Faye Bakker-Messner, once the most adored and reviled figure in…
The mirrored ball spins slowly, casting sparkling light on the walls and ceiling of the intimate club and illuminating local blues mama Juanita Dixon with its dappled light. She’s waiting to belt out torchy blues for technicians from Palm Beach County’s WXEL-TV (Channel 42), who are preparing to tape a…
Most people know Delray Beach for its newly renovated downtown, a district along East Atlantic Avenue with a sprinkling of novelty stores and restaurants where people enjoy their meals outside, pleasantly chatting while palm trees sway in the ocean breeze and luxury cars gleam curbside. But this summer the most…
There’s no explicable reason for the existence of The Replacements, which is to the football-film genre what Major League was to the baseball movie: sports rendered as sitcom (or Police Academy sequel). The Replacements, which takes as its cue the 1987 National Football League players’ strike, is stocked with every…
In a perfect world, any documentary about televangelists narrated by RuPaul and a couple of sock puppets would be hailed as the unquestionable conceptual masterpiece of the year. Alas, those stodgy Academy voters just don’t understand cross-dressers, religious broadcasting, or foot warmers made to look like dogs. And so the…
The forms of entertainment competing with live theater seem to grow every year, from IMAXes to e-books to women’s basketball. And now there’s even a new form on stage. “The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction,” wrote Jean Cocteau, and South Florida, being the capital of contradiction and…
I am Vlad the Impaler, Joe Eszterhas’ penis. You know Joe, right? Bigfoot-looking son of a bitch, like Jerry Garcia after he swallowed Brian Wilson on an Acapulco Gold high? The guy who wrote Basic Instinct and Showgirls and Flashdance and a whole lotta crap for which he was paid…
You’d think a couple of film festivals with overlapping content would be at odds, but the six-year-old Asian Pacific Film Festival of Florida (APFFF) has coexisted peacefully as part of the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival (FLIFF) while hosting its own periodic screenings of movies by Pacific Rim filmmakers. In…
It’s a pleasure to say that Clint Eastwood reverses his recent downward slide — A Perfect World (1993), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Absolute Power (1997), and True Crime (1999), each of which has seemed less satisfying than its predecessor — with Space Cowboys, his latest. It isn’t an…
For most Americans, the social and political issues underlying José Luis Cuerda’s Butterfly may seem remote at best. The tensions between republicans and fascists in Spain after the fall of that nation’s monarchy in 1931, as well as dictator Francisco Franco’s victory in the bloody Spanish Civil War, may have…
