When marching-band director Tyrone Brown asks his Jackie Robinson Steppers, “Are you motivated?” he’s not so much inquiring as presenting a challenge. In the middle of a sweltering summer in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood, tensions, temptations, and distractions are omnipresent. Synchronizing 60 players (while diverting some of them from becoming…
Only committed horticulturists and compulsive readers of The New York Times obituaries (this writer falls into the latter category) likely noticed the recent passing of Rosemary Verey, an aristocratic Englishwoman whose sophisticated but egalitarian approach to gardening took some of the stuffiness out of what previously had been a rather…
For a space junkie like me who came of age during NASA’s glory days, news that “2001: Kyle Barnette’s Space Odyssey” would be staged at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood generated great expectations. I approached it hoping for something as stirring as, say, For All Mankind, Al Reinert’s…
America’s only pop-culture image of autism is that of Dustin Hoffman counting cards in Rain Man; real autism is both far more common and much different than the Hollywood version. Casi’s Quest, the Florida chapter of the Autism Autoimmunity Project, brings two internationally known researchers to the Marriott Marina in…
Few bands are fully collaborative. Most have some charismatic leader who, whether intentionally or not, tends to take the hog’s share of the limelight and the credit. More often than not, this person is the lead singer or guitarist. But when the ego gets too big and he or she…
A year after Cameron Crowe climbed back aboard the tour bus for one last spin through rock’s golden days of giddy hedonism and phony heroism comes a film set in the mid-1980s, when the parties got harder, the music louder, and the musicians prettier. The world of Rock Star is…
Festering somewhere between an after-school special and kiddie porn lies this frank but melodramatic open wound from veteran Canadian director Léa Pool (Emporte-moi). Adapted by Judith Thompson from Susan Swan’s novel The Wives of Bath, Lost and Delirious is about girl joy and girl sorrow, girl solidarity and girl insatiability…
Judd Apatow tries not to think of what became of Sam and Lindsay Weir, Neal Schweiber, Bill Haverchuck, Daniel Desario, Nick Andopolis and the other freaks and geeks Apatow knew back at McKinley High School. Those kids were his family, the children born when Apatow and writer Paul Feig created…
It’s turtle season here in South Florida, but not in the same sense as, say, duck season or wabbit season. This is the time of year when baby turtles bust out of their shells and flipper their way to the sea. Alas, the vast majority of the babies don’t even…
The American Indian Movement, an organization of Native Americans, began more than 30 years ago in Minnesota and quickly became a militant thorn in the side of the United States government. The group took over Alcatraz in 1969 and a dam and an abandoned naval air station in 1970, marched…
What is it that people get from Shakespeare’s plays? Is it the flowery dialogue? The author’s ability to capture a time and place that is foreign to us yet familiar via the emotions of the protagonists? It probably isn’t the stories; Shakespeare often used preexisting ones. More likely the timeless…
Tran Anh Hung’s beautiful meditation on family ties and family traumas, The Vertical Ray of the Sun, marks a captivating new chapter in the career of the writer-director who gave Americans their first glimpse of Vietnamese filmmaking. In 1994 Tran’s The Scent of Green Papaya made its way here, and…
Not long ago I complained that a Museum of Art (MoA) summer show — “Coming out of the Dark: Seldom-Seen Selections from the MoA’s Permanent Collection” — was a dreary little assemblage of mostly unimpressive works that seemed designed to take up empty space. Now, only two months or so…
Far too often, those who work in the music industry are so concerned with making a living they often forget they’re capable, at their best, of making history as well. They sacrifice art and artists in the name of commerce, then sleep soundly wrapped in bedspreads made of silk and…
To think, it’s been more than 30 years since the Summer of Love. Where has the time gone? All that can be done now is mourn that lost era with the old fogies at Orbit tonight. The Spirit of ’67 features a few original members of three bands that long…
Being so close to the Caribbean Sea has made Florida unlike any other state in the Union in almost every facet of life, from the music to the language to the food. The fact that someone in Broward and Palm Beach counties hasn’t held a big festival dedicated to everything…
Cuddly outsider #63178D, please step forward. Well, my goodness, you are so alternative, so fringe, so punk! So artsy and alienated! So utterly aimless and oozing with angst! That’s one reaction a viewer might have to Thora Birch’s power-moping in Ghost World, the new collaboration between director Terry Zwigoff (Crumb,…
Anyone with any experience in sharing toys, attention, and uncomfortably long car rides on the way to dreaded family vacations will recognize some familiar personality types and situations in Tortilla Soup. Directed by the Spanish-born María Ripoll, who is best known in this country for her English-language film Twice upon…
The topic is not a common subject for the stage, screen, or most any other entertainment medium. But the Cuillo Centre for the Arts’ current production, Menopause: The Musical, is a cabaret-style revue about what feminist Gail Sheehy termed “the Silent Passage” and to which aunts, mothers, and grandmothers for…
If you think cultural diversity in South Florida consists of sipping a café con leche and listening to a Gloria Estefan tune, think again. The Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens’ annual Bon Festival in Delray Beach is a traditional celebration that draws thousands of people every year. Bon signifies a…
In 1983 seven Hispanic members of the Hollywood community did something radical. They decided to throw a party. Why was that so radical? Because of what it’s become. Eighteen years later people come from all over South Florida to attend their fiesta, the Hollywood Beach Latin Festival — the largest…
The title Apocalypse Now Redux is fairly amusing. Think about it: Prophetic Disclosure Presently Shows Up Again Newfangled. Of course, in the ten years since the release of Hearts of Darkness, the documentary on the making of Apocalypse Now, we’ve been taught to revere the legend of Francis Ford Coppola…
