The recent referendum creating Miami-Dade County is just the latest sign the area is suffering from an identity crisis worse than Sally Field’s in Sybil. While the county government proffers the Miami moniker as an all-purpose consumer label, many residents would be hard-pressed to describe themselves as typical Miamians. It’s…
He calls them his “cop pictures.” Viewers might call them something else. California artist Chris Hero is referring to a series of paintings — graphic, large-scale oils — that illustrate his vision of how police and other institutions of power affect the world in ways that vary drastically from their…
Thursday January 8 With Behind the Broken Words: A Tale of Two Voices, Emmy Award-winning actors Roscoe Lee Browne (Falcon Crest) and Anthony Zerbe (Harry-O) have created a moving mix of satiric, comic, and lyric poetry by culling the works of modern masters such as e. e. cummings, Dylan Thomas,…
“I started collecting when I was about six years old,” says JoAnn Van Scotter. “That was 60 years ago. Let’s just bring it right out in the open.” The Tropical Post Card Club of South Florida member isn’t shy about revealing her age or talking about her hobby-turned-avocation. Relatives gave…
In the twisted game plan of Barry Levinson’s scintillating political satire Wag the Dog, presidential aides concoct an election-eve war with Albania in the hopes of torpedoing charges that their boss improperly touched a teenage girl. Hollywood and Washington work together to create that greatest of diversions: an international crisis…
Where would Irish filmmakers be these days without “the Troubles”? In just the past couple of years we’ve seen The Crying Game (1992), In the Name of the Father (1993), Michael Collins (1996), Some Mother’s Son (1996), and now The Boxer, the latest collaboration between director Jim Sheridan, screenwriter Terry…
The convoluted political negotiations surrounding Pope John Paul II’s trip to Cuba next week seem facile compared to the grave-robbing, relic-switching, and sundry ecumenical dirty tricks attendant to a papal visit in playwright Michael Hollinger’s farce Incorruptible. Even though the play’s setting in France sometime around 1250 A.D. is inarguably…
Thursday January 1 The nightclub neighbor of the Kings Park Condominium complex in Oakland Park is wasting no time in helping more than 100 tenants displaced by the raging fire that destroyed 51 units there December 18. A portion of the proceeds from tonight’s Kings Park Benefit at Roxy Nightclub…
About 70 years ago in an American bookshop in Paris, the great Irish novelist James Joyce was introduced to a young aspiring writer named Ernest Hemingway. If any performer is qualified to portray both men in a reenactment of that moment (okay, if would be difficult to play both), it…
Almost three years ago — January 22, 1995, to be exact — the four-year-old gray colt Holy Bull cantered out onto the racing strip at Gulfstream Park to run in the Olympic Handicap. Head bowed, he looked extraordinary. Muscular. Intense. Intelligent. Imposing. He fairly glowed, the embodiment of an altogether…
While not a movie year to go down in infamy, 1997 was still mostly full of hype and holler. If the annual yield is judged by how many great films came out, 1997 was a loser. If you factor in the number of films that brought fresh talents and fresh…
I try not to use the word I. I try not to be too “self-referential” or self-consciously “literary.” But 1997 wasn’t exactly the kind of movie year that made me feel “cinematic.” As I looked over my writing for the past year, I was struck by how often I used…
Some people call it the Black Box of Hollywood, a theater so tiny that its lobby consists of a table and two chairs located outside on the sidewalk. So tiny that the actors, working on a stage 27 feet wide by 15 feet deep, virtually perform in the laps of…
Don’t take the term “historical novel” at face value as it refers to The Legend of the Barefoot Mailman, warns the book’s author John Henry Fleming. “I call the book a historical novel only in that it tries to re-create the character and the themes of those times [1880s], rather…
Thursday December 25 Families in search of a new holiday tradition could do worse than the Christmas Day Picnic and Cruise to Deerfield Island Park. The day of Intracoastal cruising begins at 9 a.m. with hourly pickups by boat from Sullivan Park, which is located on Riverview Road at the…
“Some of us leave at five, some of us at six, and so on,” says birding enthusiast Howard Langridge — and he’s talking a.m. “We try to encourage them to get out as early as they can, so they can catch some of the owls.” After all, Langridge adds, nocturnal…
With 1994’s Exotica, Atom Egoyan secured his reputation as Canada’s leading director; his new film, The Sweet Hereafter, based on a celebrated novel by Russell Banks, should solidify Egoyan’s hold on that title. Egoyan’s work, in general, is small-scale enough to seem arty and plain enough to be accessible. The…
The new Gus Van Sant film Good Will Hunting is like an adolescent’s fantasy of being tougher and smarter and more misunderstood than anybody else. It’s also touchy-feely with a vengeance. Is this the same director who made Mala Noche (1987) and Drugstore Cowboy (1989)? Those films had a fresh…
Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry is a film made by a free man — free certainly in a good way and perhaps also in a not-so-good way. Liberated, for whatever reason, from the need to play a nice guy, playing the bad man he does here frees Allen of the optimistic…
If Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown didn’t arrive weighted with post-Pulp Fiction (1994) expectations, it might be easier to see it for what it is: an overlong, occasionally funky caper movie directed with some feeling. It’s derived from Elmore Leonard’s 1992 bestseller Rum Punch, with the location shifted from Palm Beach…
By anyone’s measure, Margaret Bourke-White was extraordinary, both as a photographer and as a person, although the two wrapped inextricably around each other like a DNA double helix. As a staff photographer — a photojournalist, really — for Life magazine (her image of Montana’s Fort Peck Dam graced the publication’s…
A full-limbed evergreen flush with lights and trinkets. An electric model train chugging around its base on a circular track, disappearing momentarily behind brightly wrapped boxes before coming back around the bend with its whistle cheerily declaring its return. The nostalgic tableau could be right off of a holiday greeting…
