For the kids in Death Becomes You, Halloween is the most wonderful time of the year. “This is like our Christmas, our Hanukkah, our everything. Totally,” rants DBY drummer Christopher Lee, on the phone from the fifth ring of hell. Halloween, after all, comes only once a year. And when…
Not long ago, this paper did a cover story on the plight of three Broward County art galleries that had closed after a relatively short time in business. All three were on my list of to-see places, but I never got around to visiting them. I was pissed. So I…
Perhaps you’d like to buy a boat. But you’re curious — could any floating accommodations really suit your Bill Gatesian standard of living? Say hello to Patricia. In this oceangoing plaything from the Italian company Benetti, you’ll step across a marble floor in the lobby to an elevator that connects…
Now that the Boca Mini Fest and the Asian Film Festival are out of the way, the main body of the 17th-annual Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival officially gets under way. Never mind that “The Main Event,” as the program refers to it, started on Wednesday, October 30, and opening…
When you go to a Mad Cat show, ya rolls yer dice and ya takes yer chances. The risk-taking theater ensemble in downtown Miami makes sure that the audience takes some risk just to get in the door. Company policy establishes a “$12 plus the roll of one die” policy…
“I view this library as a bridge,” Broward County Library Director Samuel F. Morrison says of the African-American Research Library and Cultural Center, “a bridge from the past across time and cultures and an introduction to a world in which knowledge is the true power.” The facility, which opens its…
Although most people remember Leonard Nimoy for either blue shirts and pointy ears or Rod Serlingesque commentary before documentaries regarding the paranormal, the man’s first love was photography. In fact, it is also his latest. The photography bug sank its teeth into Nimoy while he was still in his teens,…
I’ll start with a disclaimer: The Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival has grown so gargantuan — more than a hundred movies and related events — that it would take an insanely ambitious writer (or one plied with massive doses of amphetamines) to cover it in its entirety. Even festival organizers…
As any wine lover can tell you, an excellent vintage is really two wines in one. When first opened, it may have a lovely, fresh bouquet and a satisfying taste. But allowed to breathe, a great wine will develop subtle complexities, new depth, and lingering flavors. That’s an apt analogy…
Few great writers are as closely associated with the era in which they worked as is F. Scott Fitzgerald. He so perfectly captured the temper of his times that his very name conjures images of flappers dancing the Charleston, streams of bathtub gin being poured down willing throats, and a…
With Comedy Central’s Insomniac, Dave Attell, set to perform for three days at Uncle Funny’s in Davie, New Times decided it would be a good idea to give the man a buzz at his hotel room in Boston to discuss his show, his standup, and life on comedy time. Q:…
Much like a psychic, a cinema critic must look through a movie and see the other side. In the case of the new thriller The Ring — remake of the 1998 Japanese hit, Ringu — the formative forces swim into focus without effort. There’s a DreamWorks boardroom, some executives exclaiming…
As pharmacologist Elmo McElroy in Formula 51, Samuel L. Jackson initially sports a seriously silly fake afro along with hippy-dippy threads that make him look like some sort of flower-power cult leader. When next we see him, it’s 30 years later, and he’s got cornrows and is inexplicably wearing a…
An air of melancholy hangs over much of the work in “Reality and Figuration: The Contemporary Latin American Presence,” one of two exhibitions of Hispanic art now at the Boca Raton Museum of Art. It’s evident in the three acrylic cityscapes by young Cuban artist Gustavo Acosta that greet you…
There has been a lot of talk lately about the so-called Law of Unintended Consequences: that any course of action will produce an array of surprise results. I can’t be certain exactly what the Actors Playhouse in Coral Gables was intending with its season opener, Comic Potential, but the results…
Although it may not measure up to the real Theresienwiese in Munich, South Florida’s very own Oktoberfest does happen to be one of the largest of its kind in the United States. More than 25,000 souls pack the grounds of the American German Club of the Palm Beaches each October…
By the end of 1940, Alberto Vargas was riding high. Each month, one of the artist’s signature “Varga Girls,” as they were then known — impossibly idealized, full-figure, watercolor portraits of American female pulchritude — appeared in Esquire magazine. Not surprisingly, the Varga Girls proved enormously popular with the publication’s…
Ordinarily, it would seem pretty odious to put so fine a point on this, but what the hey: Gather up your gay friends, because here’s a movie they’re going to dig, dig, dig. Well, probably, anyway. That general demographic seems to be the target audience of the radical, whimsical French…
In the past few years — more or less since the failure of his embarrassing Joan of Arc epic The Messenger — former wunderkind director Luc Besson has become a fantastically prolific writer/producer. His latest, The Transporter — a swift if sometimes ridiculous action film, with venerable Hong Kong director/action…
One of the fascinating oddities of theater in South Florida is the offbeat locations where it turns up. Local theater companies are found in some of the least likely places: The Caldwell Theatre and Florida Stage are in strip malls, the Broward Stage Door Theatre sits behind an IHOP. The…
Enthusiasts say there’s no better way to put to sea than in a kayak, likening the whole experience to walking on water, singing the praises of the breeze across their cheeks and the sea water trickling off an oar to soak their shoes. Are they right? If you want to…
Women and motorcycles. Plenty of men, mesmerized by the subtle science of well-engineered curves, have gone broke pursuing their love of one or both. “You could say they go hand in hand,” says Mitch Steinberg, director of Godzilla VI: The Pacific Rim Extreme Bike & Music Fest. “A beautiful bike,…
