Thursday February 26 Just about everyone had pretend sword fights when they were kids. Both kids and adults are now stepping up to the real thing — well, almost. Fencing is like sword-fighting without the bloodshed, and twenty-year veteran Miguel deDiego teaches the sport three times a week. Beginners start…
A black washerwoman gives her life savings to a local college. In a prison for the old and infirm, a man suffers from Huntington’s disease. “He was a kidnapper, but now he has trouble holding a spoon,” New York Times reporter Rick Bragg writes in an article that helped him…
The science-fiction writing of the late, great Philip K. Dick hasn’t been particularly well served on screen. The most recent adaptation of one of his works, Screamers (1995), was junk; Total Recall (1990) had its moments but was less ingenious by half than the short story on which it was…
Back in the ’60s and ’70s, when its animation unit was in the doldrums, the Disney studio made a number of live-action “family” comedies (1976’s No Deposit, No Return and 1977’s Freaky Friday, among them) that were, within their limited ambitions, genuinely funny. The studio’s most recent film, Krippendorf’s Tribe,…
Nothing brings theater to life like a little death. Let a doctor say someone has only a few months to live, and you’ve got drama. In recent years some of the best productions have posted alarming mortality rates. Gay characters, in particular, have struggled through the final stages of AIDS…
In a professional career that lasted just more than a decade, Keith Haring not only proved to be one of the most prolific American artists of his generation, he also forged one of the most instantly recognizable, unmistakable styles in contemporary art. With thick, bold strokes, he created a series…
Adam Tobin of Davie hasn’t gone hunting in about eight years. When would he have had the chance? Most weekends, the 33-year-old manager of the technologies division for Fisk Electric in Miami is at Markham Park in Sunrise, where he does plenty of shooting, but no killing. Sporting a camouflage…
Thursday February 19 Dr. Ruth Westheimer has been around. America’s favorite little sex therapist was born in Germany in 1928 and by age sixteen had moved to Israel, where she fought for that country’s independence. Next she was off to Paris to study psychology at the Sorbonne, and after immigrating…
Imagine Albert Einstein hanging out in a Paris nightspot, trolling for mademoiselles, his huge mane freshly washed, and a brand-new pocket protector in his vest. Then add a club-cruising companion — say, Pablo Picasso. Sounds like it could be funny. Actor-comedian Steve Martin figured as much when he sat down…
This period tale of two gamblers — Oscar, a failed minister, and Lucinda, a glassworks owner — is too wispy to be an objet d’art and too clumsy to be a toy. Its key symbol is a tiny glass teardrop known as the “Prince Rupert drop,” which can withstand a…
Palmetto is a film noir set in a torpid seaside Florida town. It’s based on the 1961 James Hadley Chase novel Just Another Sucker, and when we first see Harry Barber (Woody Harrelson), he fits that description exactly. He looks dazed and confused — a sucker incarnate. Suckers are, of…
Having to wait for one month out of the year to buy candy hearts with cute sayings imprinted on them is no big deal. After all, those hard little wafers have lost much of their appeal now that they’re more likely to break my aging molars than attract a valentine…
Puritan modesty has guaranteed genitalia a place in comedy — a forum where it’s OK to discuss and laugh at the so-called taboo. Thing is, it’s been overdone. So when the Second City cast requests audience input for its improvisational riffing, originality is appreciated. “There’s always someone in the audience…
It’s gotten so a kid can’t plop down on the bedroom floor with a fresh stack of comic books and a sticky candy bar to see what new adventures the superheroes are up to. The chocolate might (gasp!) ruin the investment. So instead, the unread comics — with their bold…
Thursday February 12 It doesn’t have the melodrama of Tonya Harding putting out a hit on Nancy Kerrigan, but the ice-skating show The Memory of All That… Gershwin on Ice should appeal to fans of the composer brothers. The performance celebrates the centennial of American composer George Gershwin’s (18981937) birth…
In these paradox-ridden times, producers in search of cutting-edge fantasies look back — they visit their boyhood or girlhood rooms and ransack their old books and videos, or peruse their studio’s property list for works that scored well in other media. In the mid-’90s, the English company Working Title Films…
His eye trained on the manic collision of Catholicism and consumerism, Spanish director Pedro Almodovar has made some of the liveliest, most genre-bending films of the past two decades. The guru of a visual style that emphasizes bright primary colors and bold geometry, he’s in love with the glittering surfaces…
In an example of last-minute housecleaning before the February ratings sweeps began, ABC network executives pulled the plug on the cop drama Cracker. While I liked the few episodes I saw about the raffish psychologist who solves homicides, I’m glad it’s gone. One of the series’ writers, Steven Dietz, doesn’t…
If you’re wearing condoms for protection from AIDS — or insisting your partner wear one — there’s something Peter Duesberg wants you to know: You’re wasting your time. Sure, prophylactics protect you from sexually transmitted diseases; it’s just that AIDS isn’t one of them, according to the molecular and cell…
Thursday February 5 He’s known as B.B., but he was born Riley King in 1925. And although his name suggests otherwise, he’s probably more of an “ambassador” of the blues than its “king.” B.B. King has gotten a lot of flak for recording with everyone from rockers U2 to rapper…
Leave it to a bunch of grown-up skate rats to turn a dance club into a part-time skateboard park. And leave it to club management to turn the concept into a marketing tool. “When you walk into a club, you think how cool it would be to combine that music…
The fifteenth Miami Film Festival continues apace Thursday through Sunday with two works by Japanese director-actor Takeshi Kitano, a star-studded entry from venerable new-wave filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, and the most recent movie made by playwright David Mamet. Not forgetting a closing-night screening of Italy’s Il Ciclone, which has become that…
