“This is contrary to how we grew up,” Stacy Peralta is saying a few minutes after getting dropped off at a newspaper office by a limo driver. The 45-year-old Peralta, still SoCal handsome and boyish beneath a ball cap and behind a well-trimmed beard, grins long and hard–a real hell-yeah…
Summer evening in South Florida and the setting sun beats down like the last angry glare in a dying man’s eyes. But this wasn’t any summer’s eve, nor was this any angry glare — there was a mystery to be solved. You could feel it in the air, thick as…
The thoroughly unlikable heroine of Life or Something Like It is a vain, actressy bleached blonde in the employ of a Seattle TV station. To call her a “reporter” is to defame reporters. Her hair spray outweighs her brain, and everything in her life — from her obsessive workouts at…
From the get-go, there has been an appealing pugnacity to the Friday the 13th horror movies. Sure, this enduring franchise was launched in 1980 as a marginally clever knockoff of Halloween and Black Christmas, but in the annals of American pop cinema, the sequels revealed a devil-may-care brattiness all their…
Peter Bogdanovich, maybe the last man alive who wears a neckerchief without irony, holds a copy of a newspaper article in which his old friend Larry McMurtry is saying nice, or not nice, things about him–Bogdanovich can’t tell which. “He’s kind of risen from the dead,” McMurtry was quoted as…
Your foot itches. You want to push your pedal to the metal and zoom off at speeds that defy legal limits. But, as drag racing is verboten in these parts, you stay within the speed limit — and sulk a little. But there is a place you can go when…
On excursions to a wildlife refuge in his native South Africa, David Hochstadter goes straight for the cheetahs. Since he was a boy, he’s been fascinated with the slinky, polka-dotted cats, along with conservationists’ efforts to protect them. As an artist, he’s using his creative talent to pitch in. Hochstadter,…
When asked if South Florida in general — and Miami Beach specifically — served as an inspiration for the ticky-tacky resort setting of his “The Last Single Days of Don Viktor Potapenko,” one of 12 short stories in his just-published collection My Life in Heavy Metal (Grove Press), Steve Almond…
The perpetrators of the new Sandra Bullock vehicle, Murder by Numbers, could be hauled in on any number of charges, including plagiarism and child abuse. But their most obvious crime is first-degree dullness, giving us a thriller without thrills and a mystery devoid of urgent questions. This merely bloody piece…
Say this about World Wrestling Federation Entertainment head honcho Vince McMahon: He knows what his fans want. Few movies have ever been as specifically tailored to an existing audience as The Scorpion King, in which McMahon’s prize champion, the Rock, portrays the Rock wearing a loincloth and going by the…
The last time I visited New River Gallery, in the heart of the busy Las Olas Boulevard area in Fort Lauderdale, the gallery was showcasing a substantial collection of works, mostly graphics, by Salvador Dalí. The spirit of that ambitious but uneven show still lingers at the gallery in the…
What’s your pleasure, the sizzle or the steak? The Coconut Grove Playhouse offers both in its latest production, a musical revue called The Soul of George Gershwin: The Musical Journey of an American Klezmer. It’s a studious, educational show that also happens to offer some outstanding vocal and instrumental artistry…
On a Friday night in March, it was hard to tell where to look: at the flickering movie screen, where The Band was wrapping up a 16-year career with a farewell concert, or at a still Robbie Robertson, who was sitting in the audience at the Paramount Theater in Austin…
Buffeted by the area’s post-9/11 economic woes, which cut into the county revenues that help underwrite it, the Palm Beach International Film Festival at one point last fall considered postponing its run dates until December of this year. The show goes on as originally scheduled, however, beginning this Thursday and…
West Palm Beach is not what you call a center of higher learning. There’s Northwood University, in the western suburbs, where you can take a degree in car sales (“automotive marketing,” they call it). And there’s Palm Beach Atlantic College, downtown, a Christian school founded in the late 1960s with…
It is possible to admire Frailty, directed by Texas-born actor Bill Paxton, without actually liking it. It’s not, strictly speaking, a gratifying movie: Too dependent upon twists, both excruciatingly obvious and irritatingly ludicrous, it never fully satisfies; what you can’t guess you won’t see coming, because it’s too outrageous even…
Wending through the summaries of this year’s forthcoming blockbusters — dudes fight evil; chicks keep yanking up their trendy hip-huggers while fighting evil — it’s immediately refreshing to note a movie about furry freaks and saucy geeks whose primary goal is just to, you know, do it. In Human Nature,…
Bee-luther-hatchee (noun, African-American slang, 1920s-1940s): a far away, damnable place, the next station after the stop for Hell. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. But in Florida Stage’s intriguing new production, Bee-luther-hatchee, hell isn’t the final destination. There’s another torment ahead, so dreadful it doesn’t…
On a good day, Mark Cuban might respond to a journalist’s query with a terse, unpunctuated e-mail that reads like something dashed off by a hostage while his captors are in the can. It’s understandable: The man’s running the Dallas Mavericks, investing in movie distribution and exhibition companies, sticking it…
Have you been longing for a lazaretto, hankering for a halyard, perhaps burning for a binnacle? Well, this is the weekend to make those yearnings come true. The 24th annual Dania Marine Flea Market opens today, and more than 500 vendors take over the Dania Jai-Alai Fronton parking lots for…
In what must be just a strange coincidence, a recent rash of big-name comedians have given up the television world that made them household names to hit the stage and get back to their roots. Jerry Seinfeld had a staggeringly successful comedic tour recently. At National Car Rental Center, it…
On September 10, Barry Sonnenfeld’s Big Trouble, a slight comic caper drenched in the sweltering muck of Miami, was a nagging chore to be tended to by film critics — one more mediocre, multimillion-dollar, all-star fiasco in which you can almost hear the filmmakers giggling behind the cameras. On September…
