Jonathan Brandis hanged himself 10 years ago this week (November 12, 2003) at Sixth and Detroit in Los Angeles, in the second-floor hallway of an apartment building south of Hollywood near a decent doughnut shop and a cat groomer. He was 27 years old. And he was my first big…
How about a Sunday brunch with a side of mystery? No, not of the mystery-meat variety, because that would be way too scary. Instead, the suggestion here is to feast on a good meal while live theater is performed tableside. This Sunday’s Murder Is Served at Knights Inn in Hallandale…
There isn’t much that is more rewarding than getting to exercise and help others at the same time. Working toward your own health through runs, walks, or rides while raising money for others has become common. But throw in some free food? OK, we’re sold. The American Diabetes Association’s Tour…
November is officially the month of the mustachio — or it should be, at least. To help raise awareness and funds for testicular cancer, Kapow! Noodle Bar and the Dubliner are hosting a November Mustache Party with a raffle, mustachio contest, live music, and more on Saturday, November 30, from…
After all the capitlistic crap of the past decade, many of us are over the whole corporate consumerist holiday ideology; however, we still like to buy stuff, and we like to eat. In celebration of small business Saturday, the Ancient Olive is offering samples and demos on Saturday, November 30,…
Weight-loss and weight-gain performances are tricky things. Robert De Niro’s heavily mannered turn in Raging Bull just has to be great — he gained 60 pounds for it, didn’t he? For his role in The Machinist, Christian Bale dropped to a sub-skeletal 122 pounds; he looked like a walking, talking…
The great sins of the 20th Century are already too many to list, but let us note one more: the abduction of infants from mothers deemed unworthy or undesirable by governments and religious institutions. Thousands of children were kidnapped from leftist parents during Argentina’s and Spain’s respective dictatorships, while children…
The title All Is Lost promises despair, especially with Robert Redford looking so stolid and weathered and still-got-it golden on the poster. Could this near-silent, you-are-there survival story be another of Redford’s yawps of boomer gloom? Another complaint, like The Company You Keep, about the realization that the world we…
Richard Curtis has so much to tell us about life. Seize the day! Show people you love them before it’s too late! Don’t let the right one get away! His movies — those he writes, directs, or both — are so packed with info-feeling that they become restless jumbles of…
Among the Avengers, Thor should reign supreme. Sure, Captain America is the de facto leader, but even he — like the others — is just a jacked-up human. Thor is a god. Or if not quite a god, as he demurs, he’s the next best thing: a flying titan with…
Sister artists Monica and Natasha Lopez de Victoria have worked together the past 12 years creating contemporary multimedia installations that boast what they call an “electro-tropical” aesthetic. In person, the women, who have gained an international reputation as the “TM Sisters,” exude both playfulness and openness. Their work captures the…
One of the tragedies of the internet age is that sometimes movies get attention for all the wrong reasons. When Abdellatif Kechiche (Secret of the Grain) debuted Blue Is the Warmest Color in Cannes in May, the festival jury was so taken with the film and its two lead performances…
She was a lonely princess. He was a cocky civilian. And after she escaped the palace, the unlikely couple fell in love. It’s the plot of Roman Holiday and — according to this soapy romance from director Oliver Hirschbiegel — the true-enough story of the last two years of Princess…
While guest-hosting a TV variety show in 1964, Dean Martin ridiculed a hot new rock ’n’ roll act with his trademark blend of cocksure innuendo, aw-shucks buffoonery, and inebriated syntax: “Now, something for the youngsters — five singing boys from England. . . . They’re called the Rollin’ Stones. I…
The zombification of America got its start in 1968, when George A. Romero and a bunch of his friends and colleagues released Night of the Living Dead, the scrappy little horror movie that could not only serve as patient zero in the ongoing pop-cultural zombie apocalypse, it also revolutionized horror…
It’s almost a relief that Ender’s Game has turned out to be a glum bore onscreen, a far-future cadets-in-space military drama whose pretensions to moral inquiry boil down to the guilt a kid may feel after stepping on an anthill. If the film had turned out grand, like the best…
Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale is about to wow the masses. With the museum’s newly appointed, internationally acclaimed curator and director, Bonnie Clearwater, and a sweet, whopping $1.5 million grant donated recently by the David and Francie Horvitz Family Foundation, stellar arts programming is on the way. Up next on…
Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave is the movie for people who think they’re too smart for The Butler. The story it tells, a true one, is horrifying: In 1841, Solomon Northup, a free, educated black man from Saratoga, New York, was kidnapped, sold into slavery, and transported to Louisiana…
First-time filmmaker Norry Niven’s Chasing Shakespeare is full of instantly iconic images. Lightning rods reach for the heavens atop a prairie homestead. Two lovers, the girl delicate and long-haired, the boy wide-shouldered and bare-chested, ride toward sunset-lit hills on their white stallions, the animals so majestic they might well be…
When life is “cheaper than cigarettes,” compassion becomes all too costly. It soon joins diamonds and caviar in the club of unthinkable luxury, and anyone who gives it away freely is immediately suspect. That’s the fate of Pauline (Lindiwe Ndlovu), a train station snack vendor who finds a bloody, unconscious…
Greek-born French filmmaker Costa-Gavras has gone after “isms” — fascism, Nazism, imperialism — in vivid political melodramas like Z and Missing, as well as less-accomplished though watchable movies like Music Box and Amen. The director’s latest tackles capitalism, and the title, Capital, is essentially the only apt thing about it…
Is hell really “other people,” as Jean Paul Sartre so succinctly put it in No Exit? Or is it the absence of people — the deadening loneliness of isolation, with nothing but time’s inevitable march to keep you company? That’s one of the questions inherently posed in The Timekeepers, Dan…
