hy is it that every time they make a movie about a nerd, the character in question is always white? Someone must have cried discrimination, for Jump Tomorrow gives us a black nerd and puts him front and center. In the time-honored movie tradition, of course, he’s actually a good-looking…
As an east-of-I-95 kind of South Floridian, I’ve always felt the impulse to pack a travel kit stocked with essentials when I head into the far-west suburban sprawl of, say, Coral Springs. One thing that regularly prompts me to keep my canteen and compass handy is the Coral Springs Museum…
Ten years ago, Robert Harris picked up the phone to find on the other end a relative stranger bearing extraordinary news. This man was at a film exchange in Toronto, where movies are housed and rented out to exhibitors, and he was holding in his hands canisters of film containing…
The history of Haiti is one of mercurial changes and staggering violence. It was the richest colony in the New World in the 18th Century, built upon the backs of slaves who were flogged and even buried alive for minor offenses. It was ruled by one tyrant after another throughout…
Mary Chapin Carpenter has made a career of thumbing her nose at Nashville, despite her success in the country-music charts. Instead of taking the typical Tennessean route to the top, she graduated from college, headed off to the folkie scene of Washington, D.C., played in small joints for a few…
Actor-director “Beat” Takeshi Kitano has built an international reputation over the past decade, primarily through a series of ultra-hard-boiled crime films in which he plays either a cop or a felon. With the exception of Gonin (1995; released in the U.S. in 1998), which was directed by Takeshi Ishii, all…
During this cinematic Summer of Dumb, it would be all too easy to celebrate half-assed cleverness as a virtue, especially when proffered by Bobby and Peter Farrelly, who elevated the gross-out to an art form in Kingpin and There’s Something About Mary. Osmosis Jones is a film about the animated…
It’s not every day that a play about death resuscitates the English language. The word wit as a noun has all but vanished from the English language only to be replaced by the shallower derivative, the adjective witty — a witty joke, a witty game show host, a witty comment…
There is only one reason Jon Favreau’s new film is called Made. Not too long ago, his old friend and co-star Vince Vaughn called him up and told him, in no uncertain terms, “You gotta write something that can get made.” It was less a demand than it was a…
Early August is the pinnacle of the summer doldrums. Even the last of the snowbirds have abandoned us for their houses in the Hamptons or on Martha’s Vineyard, and the locals are sitting in their homes with the air conditioning on full blast. In an area that makes a sizable…
Times have certainly changed. Twenty years ago a musical about an East German transsexual rock singer would have premiered in one of New York’s off off-Broadway theaters or cabarets, run for a couple of weeks, and remained the pleasant memory of a select few. But when John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig…
The most telling scene in Rush Hour 2 comes during the closing-credits montage of outtakes that have become the most enjoyable part of Jackie Chan’s Hollywood outings. Chris Tucker, the poor man’s Eddie Murphy, and Chan have just pushed one of the film’s myriad baddies out of a window; the…
From Bosnia to Bessie Smith, Florida Stage’s 2000-2001 season consistently has shown how music helps shape historical moments and our lives. The theater’s final production of the summer, At Wit’s End, is no exception. This musical comedy uses live piano accompaniment throughout to re-create one of the most culturally vital…
Both executive director George S. Bolge and curator of exhibitions Courtney P. Curtiss of the Boca Raton Museum of Art have made something of a fuss over the “50th Annual All Florida Invitational,” which marks a half-century of such group shows. And yet the exhibition itself doesn’t feel like much…
“We call it hillbilly disco,” says Recipe percussionist Tom Whelan in an effort to describe his group’s distinctive brand of Appalachian funk. This weird fusion of sounds started off, as all good mountain music should, in West Virginia. Party People in a Can was the original band name for three…
The audience at the 26th Street Theatre’s production of William Finn’s musical Falsettoland can be as idiosyncratic as the play itself. In South Florida (and especially in Broward and Palm Beach counties), where theater audiences usually consist of retirees age 65 and older, a recent Sunday’s full house consisted of…
Matt Stone has little time to talk. It’s Tuesday, July 17, 1 p.m. in Los Angeles, yet Stone and Trey Parker have yet to finish a television show that will debut some 30 hours from now–an episode of South Park titled “Terrance and Garfunkel,” in which the farting, fighting Canadian…
With all the hype that surrounds film festivals in South Florida, the little guys sometimes get lost in the shuffle. Sure, the Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach international film festivals receive plenty of well-deserved attention; the geography-specific fests (Italian, Central American, Cuban, and more) also get their fair share of…
German filmmaker Tom Tykwer has a gift for fusing psychological complexity and crackling plot without forsaking the excitements of either. The success of Run Lola Run didn’t exactly turn Tykwer into a household name, but it earned him his props as a young lion of the art houses. Moviegoers hungry…
When last we spotted indie icons Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau on-screen together, they were knocking back fruit-flavored martinis and chasing L.A. skirt in the inventive Gen X hit Swingers. The goofy charm of that phenomenon now gives way, I’m sad to report, to a labored fringes-of-the-Mob comedy titled Made,…
The Go-Go’s are indisputably the greatest girl band of the 1980s, but they fizzled out halfway through the decade. Their third record, Talk Show, failed even to go gold, a stunning defeat following the rampant success of Beauty and the Beat and the still-reasonable sales of their sophomore effort, Vacation…
Robert Scott Crane insists he had no idea that people would be so fascinated with his famous father’s penis (or is that his father’s famous penis?). “We knew it would be big,” Scotty Crane says, “but we didn’t know how big.” He’s talking not about the member in question–of its…
