Fishermen of the world, make room for a new generation of fisherwomen. Betty Bauman, founder of Ladies, Let’s Go Fishing!, vows she and her staff can teach women how to become anglers in one weekend. The 44-year-old blonde with the determined look calls herself an everyday angler who went to…
Science fiction can wow us with gadgetry, but only the truly ambitious stuff lights up our imaginations with disturbing and unshakable aberrations, be they incredible shrinking men, 50-foot women, or Sting’s winged panties from Dune. In this vast genre, it figures that the ultimate human construct — time — proves…
Over the past half-century, countless filmmakers great and obscure have stood in serious debt to The Bicycle Thief. But for my money, no one has borrowed so cleverly or shifted the weight of Vittorio De Sica’s 1947 masterpiece so gracefully as young Wang Xiaoshuai, whose Beijing Bicycle embodies the spirit…
At first glance there is much to celebrate in Out of Season, Elinor Jones’s new comedy now receiving its world premiere at the Caldwell Theatre. The play itself gives voice to five mature female characters, a welcome counterpoint to the general scarcity of roles for women, even in this so-called…
“Are we gonna play chicken here, Robert? Who’s gonna go first?” That’s Chris Moore talking, from the other end of a cell phone–the preferred means of communication for the Hollywood producer too afraid of standing still. Moore–a producer of Good Will Hunting and the American Pie films, partner with Ben…
If you’re looking for fresh perspectives and new voices from Florida’s own film incubator, then you want to head out to the Palm Beach Gardens Independent Film Festival, which starts Friday. The inaugural launch of this off-indie film series is the brainchild of a group of local filmmakers headed by…
Spectacular sets, fancy lighting, and extravagant costumes wow the crowd at some theatrical productions, but not this one. In West Boca Theatre Company’s “Evening of Staged Readings,” the actors, scripts in hand, work with a table and chairs against a plain wall. The focus here is on powerful dialogue and…
If We Were Soldiers smells at all familiar, perhaps you’re confusing it with the stink emanating from a nearby theater screening Black Hawk Down. After all, on their shiny, blood-drenched surfaces, they’re damned near the same movie: Both are based on books that recount true-life battles that claimed the lives…
For an industry notorious for its test screenings, focus groups, and obsession with what will play best in the heartland, the movie business occasionally and spectacularly drops the ball with respect to its mainstream entertainment. Last year, someone decided that what the public most wanted to see was America’s Sweethearts,…
Last year, the Boca Raton Museum of Art opened in its new location with “Picasso: Passion and Creation — The Last Thirty Years.” Now, almost a year later, the museum presents two retrospectives focusing on another 20th-century giant: “Chagall: From Russia to Paris — Drawings and Watercolors 1906-1967,” displayed in…
When I think of Edward Albee, two particularly pungent quotes come to mind: “I have a fine sense of the ridiculous,” says American theater’s perennial bad boy, “but no sense of humor.” If you catch Albee’s witty, challenging The Play About the Baby, which is receiving its Florida premiere at…
Just last week, the makers of a film called Pendulum gathered in a brand-new Dallas movie theater to screen their picture. The event was a fund-raiser for both the Susan J. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation’s Race for the Cure and the trust fund for the children of Pendulum co-star Alissa…
By definition, nostalgia is hopelessly uncool. After all, whatever’s hip is usually whatever’s new — unless the current hip trend is retro, in which case what’s hip is what people think might have been cool a few decades ago. Confusing, huh? But being trendy is a full-time job. In the…
After years of constant touring, the fine folks from Southern Culture on the Skids have ascended to become the kings (and queen) of white-trash rock. Surprisingly, considering the band released its first full-length album in 1991 and remained well under most all radar until 1996’s Dirt Track Date, the recorded…
To call a movie the most accessible Dogme 95 film ever made is not merely damning with faint praise. It also threatens to alienate the two segments of the population that might consider going to see such a film in the first place: fans of the back-to-basics, no-frills-of-any-kind Danish filmmaking…
“If you build it, they will come.” That line from the Kevin Costner flick Field of Dreams could easily serve as the motto of artist Max Schacknow, whose privately owned Schacknow Museum of Fine Art opened in Plantation not quite two years ago. Anyone who has followed the local cultural…
Theater comes in all shapes and sizes, from loud, lavish, traditional musicals to small-cast, single-set dramas. The most intimate of all, the solo performance, offers a chance for direct audience/actor connection and an opportunity to take on material that might be too risky for a larger venture. Two such shows…
“Pray for us.” So ends a note Judd Apatow sent out last week to television critics who have been supportive of his series Undeclared, among the few half-hour comedies to debut last fall with any modicum of acclaim and expectation. Set at a northern California university and populated by awkward…
If the fall of the Taliban has you feeling shamefully joyous, here’s a stark little oasis of misery to remind you that America sometimes sucks and its denizens aren’t all heroes. Featuring painstaking attention to the copious warts of this big, proud country, Monster’s Ball moseys down South to issue…
There’s an old joke about Deadheads that if anyone ever took their pot away, they’d wonder why the music was so crappy. The same could be said of Parrotheads, only with alcohol instead of weed. (Well, maybe just a little weed.) Both concert events have a “scene” — the parking…
Ever wanted to own an old, hand-tinted map of terra incognita, lovingly bordered with colorful savages and sea monsters? Believe it or not, such treasures remain readily available, says Dr. Joseph H. Fitzgerald, collector extraordinaire and founder of the Miami Map Fair. At a Valentine’s Day seminar at the Bienes…
Hart’s War, like most mediocre films, is little more than a movie about the movies. Set in a POW camp during the final months of World War II, it owes much of its existence to far superior films, chief among them La Grande Illusion, Stalag 17 and The Great Escape;…
