One of the most memorable images of Willem de Kooning has to be the 1986 portrait by the notorious Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s a straightforward black-and-white photograph in which the artist, 82 years old at the time, looks directly into the camera with a benign half smile. He’s wearing his familiar…
You’re just going to have to accept that Natalie Portman and Ashley Judd are far too glamorous for the roles they inhabit in Where the Heart Is. It’s an issue that probably won’t hurt the film’s reception: Remember Julia Roberts in Steel Magnolias? Your average moviegoer loves movie stars and…
A mildly retarded man who works in a grocery store believes he is Batman, the Dark Knight on a mission to free Gotham City from the clutches of The Joker. An actress playing the role of Wonder Woman becomes a spokeswoman, then scapegoat, for the Commie witch-hunters working for the…
About 18 months ago, the abstract artist formerly known as Dexter Dyer became DXTR Dyer. Ask the Boynton Beach resident about the no-vowels, all-caps transformation (after all, it’s hard not to), and his answer depends on his mood. He’ll say something like, “More economic. My mother was Scotch.” Or he’ll…
Until four years ago, avid scuba diver Dan “Red” Whiteman made his living setting up elaborate fish tanks in homes and businesses. But one evening a drunk driver changed all of that. No, Whiteman wasn’t hit by the intoxicated motorist. An inebriated young lady rammed her car into a palm…
Love & Basketball is divided into four quarters; thank God there’s no overtime. The directorial debut of writer Gina Prince-Bythewood, who once penned scripts for A Different World and Felicity, is a film built upon transitions so weak and obvious it’s astonishing the entire thing doesn’t collapse on itself. You…
In the rich mythology of The New Yorker, a periodical renowned for the quality of its writing and the quirks of its writers, no legend carries more weight than that of Joseph Mitchell. On the occasion of the magazine’s 75th anniversary, it is currently great sport among the literati to…
“The sort of life which I had previous to this popular success was one that required endurance, a life of clawing and scratching along a sheer surface and holding on tight with raw fingers to every inch of rock higher than the one caught hold of before, but it was…
Even if you have devoured every word about the cinematic adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ 1991 novel American Psycho, about a Wall Street yuppie obsessed with using skin-care products and devouring the entrails of prostitutes, you have not read this one particular fact. And it is a fact. No one…
Stepping up to tee off on a hole dubbed “Feedin’ Frenzy,” participants in the Second Annual Charity, Open Invitational, Orange Blossom, Westfair, Cowboy, Cow Pasture Golf Classic will quickly realize — if they haven’t already — why cowboy boots are the suggested footwear. Instead of a lake or sand traps,…
Bette Midler, Jewel, Kathy Mattea, and Donna Summer have sung her songs, so how come we’ve never heard of Julie Gold? The simplest explanation is that Gold, by her own admission, isn’t much of a singer herself, so the stars who turn her songs into hits seem to get credit…
Titus, Julie Taymor’s gorgeous film version of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, with Anthony Hopkins as the doomed title character, may be the most opulent release of the year… and also the most perverse, on nearly every front. It’s easy to see why there has never been a feature version of this…
In 1615 John Donne did something that changed the course of his life and, 400 years later, the life of Vivian Bearing, Ph.D.: He became an Anglican priest. As a priest and poet, he explored the barriers of mortality and immortality. As a professor of 17th-century English literature, Vivian Bearing…
It’s quite possible that American Psycho is a brilliant movie. It’s also quite possible that it’s a dreary, obvious chop-’em-up dressed in Alan Flusser suits and Ralph Lauren boxers, drenched in Pour Hommes aftershave, all to disguise it as bracing satire on the greed-is-good ’80s. The option audiences choose to…
“Anyone can cut and paste,” I overheard a museumgoer mutter while wandering among the pieces that make up “Bruce Helander: Survey of Collage Works,” one of two current shows at the Coral Springs Museum of Art. “Everything here’s a jumble.” His female companion quickly stepped in to correct his misperception,…
Steve Leveen and Lori Grainger were having the usual argument — about which one of them would get to use the couple’s sole reading lamp — when they hit upon the idea for a business. If they were battling over the good reading light, the pair figured, the problem might…
Author Michael Crichton based the speedy, smart dinosaurs in his book Jurassic Park on the ideas of scientist Robert T. Bakker, whose research put to rest the idea that dinos were dimwitted, cold-blooded lizards. In fact Bakker was on the research team that confirmed the find of a raptor in…
Beats, please. Claudia Schiffer, Claudia Schiffer, makes a fellow want to lean in close and sniff her. Putting up a gender fight in Black and White, she turns her tail on any man who’d treat her right. Rianne Eisler-esque, twaddle-spewing supermodel, into the arms of bad boys she’ll wantonly waddle…
What is it with filmmakers and mental retardation? It seems as though use of the differently abled as a central theme ranks second only to troubled childhood when it comes time to make a “personal” film. The connection between the two is fairly obvious: the artist as gentle innocent besieged…
What happens when you put Hot Lips Houlihan in yellow chiffon three sizes too tight on a roof with a ghost who looks like he could be a skinny second cousin of Elvis Presley? Paste this scene against a Technicolor blue sky reminiscent of those you see in toilet paper…
The group tiptoes into the empty auditorium at the Broward Center For the Performing Arts, which is dark except for a “ghost light” that throws light and shadow across the dormant stage. Standing amid the set pieces for the opening scene of Titanic, one of which is the large boarding…
Playing in and around his native Philadelphia during the mid-’70s, jazz multi-instrumentalist, composer, and arranger Vincent Montana, Jr. was having a tough time putting bread on the table with measly $25-per-week gigs. There just wasn’t a market for jazz. The music of the moment, Montana knew, was the danceable, groove-oriented…
