At the risk of being a Debbie Downer, watching Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer is akin to being trapped in the ADHD-addled mind of an adolescent hopped up on too much Ritalin. Adapted from Megan McDonald’s kids’ books, John Schultz’s tale mistakes hyperactivity for humor in recounting the…
If there’s a more complicated place than Italy to be a beautiful woman, the filmmaking world has yet to identify it. The First Beautiful Thing, Paolo Virzi’s winsome family melodrama, begins with an alluring young mother named Anna (Micaela Ramazzotti) being reluctantly crowned the evening’s belle, “Miss Mamma,” at a…
Every year, LGBT people in South Florida look forward to June. Besides the fact that June is Pride Month, the auspicious beginning of summer also brings us Out in the Tropics, “a different kind of performing arts festival.” And by different, it means gay, queer, transgendered, bi, and flexible. The…
Two Boys in a Bed on a Cold Winter’s Night is an allegory about the one-night stand. Set in New York in 1987 amid the dead heat of the AIDS epidemic, the acclaimed play follows two hunky, middle-aged near-strangers, Daryl and Peter, as they plunge into a night of fraught…
Possessing a flexible, octave-skating baritone, Kurt Elling is among today’s most-talented jazz singers. The Chicago native consistently tops the jazz-mag polls and has earned Grammy nods for damned near every album he’s recorded — although he didn’t collect one until 2009’s Dedicated to You, a tribute to John Coltrane and…
Standup comedian Joel McHale is arguably best-known for his role as celebrity taunter extraordinaire on E!’ Network’s The Soup. He spends a majority of his time in front of a green screen cracking jokes about the dumb shit that Miley Cyrus, Gary Busey, and other semi-A-listers say when the cameras…
Avian attacks, Miami’s glitzy Latin flavor, and uncanny wordplay are among just a few of the offerings during this weekend’s Wynwood Second Saturday shindig that promise to draw buzz-seeking culture vulture’s loudest squawking. Beginning at 6 p.m., Taro Hattori conjures a vision of a post-apocalyptic world in which menacing clouds…
Sure, you may have left behind your wild-child, club-kid days for the peaceful beatitude of parenthood. But we all know better. Under the wet wipes, the diaper bag, the toddler language-building DVDs, and the puréed organic carrots, there still lies a heart that thumps to a four-four beat. Luckily for…
Grammy-nominee Lisa Loeb has done a lot since her cool, dorky mug serenaded us with her breakthrough hit “Stay” in 1994. A reality show on the Food Network, launching her own line of eyewear, having a baby (with husband Roey Hershkovitz, not Dweezil Zappa), and creating children’s books are a…
It’s sunny, humid, and tropical. There are sandy beaches, rolling waves, and hundreds of shoreside bars serving frosty drinks with little umbrellas. South Florida might not actually be Hawaii, but it’s so damned similar, who cares? For the past ten years, the Hukilau! has been claiming to be the East…
Two old men sit on a back porch. They talk. They drink bourbon. One of them shoots down a ceiling fan. The other one thinks he’s having a heart attack. They watch a lunar eclipse. Curtain up. It all takes about 70 minutes. This is Ages of the Moon, the…
When Katherine Helmers McCauley passed away last fall, she left behind a body of work that was vast and varied. That conclusion is based on the sprawling and generous retrospective on display at the Broward County Main Library. It takes up all of Gallery Six, covers more than four decades,…
A nebbishy screenwriter who longs to publish a novel, Gil (Owen Wilson) is tentatively working on a book set in a nostalgia shop — much to the open frustration of Inez (Rachel McAdams), his all-too-modern, rich-girl fiancée, who has a tendency to talk about him in catty, judgy tones as…
Danish artist Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity documents an anti-monument to negativity. Admirably forward-thinking if undeniably quixotic, Finland’s government has undertaken the task of digging a hole in which to bury nuclear waste deep in the Earth. Located 100 miles northwest of Helsinki, Onkalo (Finnish for “hiding place”) is intended to…
Stage 84 pushes aside the usual punk-rock and hipster community of South Florida in favor of the funkier hip-hop genre Saturday. “It’s Hard to Hear a Vision Part II” is an art, fashion, music, and car show seemingly meant to appeal to locals who know how to get down and…
You recycle. You buy organic. You even vote for the Green Party candidates every once in a while. (The thought of ever voting Republican is, somehow, at once laughable and vomit-inducing.) But if you think you’re some true bleeding heart, you should meet the young men and women behind the…
South Florida has become boxing’s new U.S. hot spot outside Las Vegas, thanks to the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino (1 Seminole Way, Hollywood). It was there in March that Cedric Boswell defeated former heavyweight champ Oliver McCall by unanimous decision after ten rounds. This Saturday, Boswell returns for…
E-readers make you cringe. You wax rhapsodic about the way books smell. Borders declaring bankruptcy was the first sign of the coming apocalypse. If you nodded to yourself while reading any of these statements, you might have a condition called bibliophilia. Fortunately, there’s no cure, but you can treat the…
What, no fireworks? For sure there should be some when the Broward Art Guild joins the renaissance that’s taking place at the Galt Ocean Mile neighborhood in Fort Lauderdale. Let’s introduce you to the North Beach Art District. The fun and quaint urban shopping center North Beach Shoppes that is…
That’s right — Naked… Dance… Party. Here’s how it works: The Rooftop Resort is South Florida’s only “lifestyle” hotel, which means it caters to nudists and swingers. Now, for the first time, Rooftop is opening a nightclub, Club Eden. That’s everything you’d get at any other nightclub: thumping beats, flashing…
For nearly a century in the U.S., it was illegal to send anything through the mail deemed “obscene, lewd, and/or lascivious.” That included certain novels now considered classics (hello, Ulysses), educational material on birth control and female reproduction, and, yes, pornography and erotica. Anyone who broke these laws faced federal…
The Music Man, Meredith Wilson’s 1957 Tony winner about a traveling swindler who ignites a controversy in a fictional Iowa town, is an oddball sort of musical, which is why it’s accrued more cult acclaim than many Broadway shows. Its musical palette is eccentric, from jazzy scat rhythms to jubilant…
