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…
Somehow, it’s not surprising that Salvador Dalí was one of the pioneers of an art form that didn’t even have a name until near the end of his long, notorious career. In 1939, the flamboyant Spanish surrealist created a pavilion for the New York World’s Fair that was a prototype…
The two slacker antiheroes of Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También (And Your Mother Too) come furnished with all the usual glitches of late adolescence: raging hormones, impatient wanderlust, contempt for elders, and a jones for dope and beer. In fact, Julio (Gael García Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna) seem…
Here’s a question for you: When does a theater company become “significant”? Is it a question of the number of seats in the auditorium? If so, your average high school produces “significant” theater. Is it a question of the company’s annual budget? Or the number of shows produced? In the…
The Easter Bonnet Stroll is an all-frills event, and everyone is welcome. Even turkeys, pigs, and goats. Dogs, cats, and parrots too. Dress them up in Easter finery and they can stroll right along with you — similarly decked out, of course — along Delray Beach’s Old School Square to…
Fans of backwoods, down-and-dirty swamp funk and soul have a new savior in Florida’s own Mofro, even if they don’t realize it yet. And according to Mofro’s lead singer and songwriter, J.J. Grey, the masses’ ignorance is hardly surprising. “The only thing you hear on the radio is teen rock…
With Panic Room, about the night Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) and her teenage daughter, Sarah (Kristen Stewart), are home-invaded by a trio of burglars seeking hidden treasure, dyspeptic director David Fincher reveals himself as little more than a derivative visionary. For some, this will be plenty enough: As mainstream, studio-financed…
Before he died of congestive heart failure in March 1992, Richard Brooks, director of The Blackboard Jungle and In Cold Blood, used to tell this story. It takes place sometime in the late 1940s, when Brooks was ascending royalty in Hollywood; after all, he’d written John Huston’s Key Largo, starring…
If you’re a fan of feel-good, upbeat musical theater, you have to like what Barbara S. Stein and the Actors Playhouse have been doing for lo these many years. Stein and her artistic director, David Arisco, regularly serve up well-produced, tightly staged shows that could more than hold their own…
It’s readily apparent that Danny DeVito’s Death to Smoochy deals with a thoroughly debauched children’s television host (Robin Williams) who plots, amid much dark zaniness, to destroy his squeaky-clean successor (Edward Norton). It’s also quite easy to proclaim it the greatest movie ever made… about a singing vegan in a…
Some might say Boynton Beach doesn’t have a lot going for it. Like Lake Worth or Delray Beach, it’s one of those stopover points between West Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale, a small part of the great South Florida megalopolis. But Boynton Beachers (Beachites? Beachians?) would say otherwise. The city…
Kissing Jessica Stein ends several times — which likely explains how a film with so short a running time, 94 minutes, feels as though it lasts much longer — and each conclusion satisfies; each feels real, natural, and, best of all, inevitable. That is, except for the actual finale, which…
Some theaters, like some people, have a clearer sense of self-identity than others. The New Theatre and its artistic director, Rafael de Acha, certainly know what they are about, presenting plays with emotional texture, poetic resonance, and often a welcome dose of sociopolitical thought. Such is the case with Mario…
For a lot of people, the name Joan Baez is a bit like that of Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars movie: Young people have never heard it, and older people nod their heads knowingly and say things like, “Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long,…
Cell phones and silk saris, dot-coms and arranged marriages — Monsoon Wedding, the latest film from Indian-born director Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala) captures the heady mix of old and new, rich and poor, traditional and modern that defines contemporary India. A sort of Father of the Bride set…
Is there anything in the world of jazz-funk that Robert Walter can’t do? Following a five-year stint as keyboardist of the seminal club/dance/acid-jazz/impossible to categorize Greyboy Allstars, Walter tossed out a deceptively simple solo album, Spirit of ’70, which featured the unfortunately underrated sax skills of Gary Bartz on such…
In the so-called mundane world (what some would call reality), they’re everyday folks — teachers, artists, computer experts, librarians. As members of the Society for Creative Anachronism, they take on another name, another persona — a character who would be at home in the Middle Ages. The Society for Creative…
To say that Showtime is the year’s best glossy studio entertainment film thus far may be the ultimate in faint praise. The first quarter is always pretty bad, following the majors’ traditional end-of-the-year marketing/release orgies, but 2002 has been several degrees worse than usual. From the dual Pearce-ings of The…
Ice Age posits a heretofore unfathomable question: Is it possible for computer-generated characters to go through the motions? Everything about this endeavor — from 20th Century Fox, playing cartoon catch-up after 2000’s Titan A.E., which smelled like something stolen from Saturday-morning television — feels pilfered and stitched-together. There’s not an…
The introduction posted at the beginning of “Picturing the Century: One Hundred Years of Photography from the National Archives,” now at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, asserts: “Photographs are time machines. They allow us to look back in history, freeze a moment in time, and imagine ourselves as…
What’s South Florida’s most overlooked cultural resource? I’d vote for the variety and depth of children’s theater on the local scene. With little public notice and less media fanfare, a number of busy stage companies are finding a huge audience base hungry for live entertainment suitable for the younger set…
