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…
A few months back, the folks at Festival Tribe Events had a vision. They wanted a mini-Woodstock monthly event where hippie kids could get together and listen to their local Grateful Dead cover band as well as the tribal percussion, jam-based noodling, and other musical bits and pieces so near…
At the height of a subtropical summer, what could be more natural than walking around in the asphalt-melting heat while chewing on barbecued meat and shaking your hips to the sound of a junkanoo band? This Saturday, the best place to do just that is Pompano Beach’s Eighth Annual Rainbow…
The Mad Cat experience Here in My Car may not be for everyone, but it may be for you. The best way to tell is not whether you’ve acquired a studied cool or nerdy hipness, it’s really more a matter of semantics. To find out if you qualify to get…
Once again the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA)right way to do an off-season show: put it together with care and insight, rather than throw something together just to take up space. “Selections from the Permanent Collection” not only gives us a good, well-conceived sampling of MoCA’s stockpile of more than…
“I want you to suck my big dick. I want you to lick my balls.” Thus begins Larry Clark’s Bully, a return to Kids territory, following a forgettable detour into adulthood titled Another Day in Paradise that apparently didn’t kick up enough of a fuss for the guy. So he…
A third Jurassic Park movie was of course inevitable, given that the second shattered box office records. (It also shattered the conventional notion that any movie starring Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, and a bunch of dinosaurs had to be at least somewhat interesting.) But when you have one of the…
Ludwig van Beethoven will forever be remembered as a failure in his contributions to beach culture. Most historians agree he was a poor surfer at best, and any who adheres to the controversial “Beethoven as Beach Volleyball Champ” theory are usually blackballed from intellectual gatherings. But despite these obvious shortcomings,…
When Amanda Dunbar was a tyke, she had the same artistic talent as most other kids; a stick figure here and a doodle there. But at 13 years old, she and a few friends decided to take an after-school art class. The teacher, Curtis Ferguson, handed out paint, brushes, and…
Back in her early teens, Reese Witherspoon proved herself a terrific actress in her big-screen debut, Man in the Moon (1991). Since then, she’s done first-rate work in critical hits such as Pleasantville, cult faves including Freeway and Election, and underrated gems like Best Laid Plans. So how is it…
In the movies, dead husbands and dearly departed boyfriends have an irksome habit of revisiting the women who once loved them — usually at inconvenient moments. Consider Demi Moore in Ghost. Poor thing had to put up with the dramatically challenged shade of Patrick Swayze, who droned on and on…
Most plays begin when the actors first appear, but Hollywood Playhouse’s Game Show: The Comedy You Play starts the moment you walk into the 200-seat theater. David K. Sherman has done an excellent job of setting the stage for this entertaining blend of interactivity and comedy. The brightly colored podiums…
Originally, this was to be a story about how Stan Lee, the industry icon who ran Marvel Comics for decades and co-created Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, wound up remaking archrival DC Comics’ most venerable heroes in his own image. The 12-part miniseries, Just Imagine Stan Lee Creating, was set…
With legal protections for gays and lesbians in Broward and Miami-Dade counties under attack by concerted referendum efforts, 20-year-old Christine Lane, an Ontario native now studying economics at the University of Miami, has decided to protect the whole state in one fell swoop. A fundraiser this weekend, at $10 per…
“There’s a couple films in the show — like “For the Birds”; “Ghost of Stephen Foster”; and “Rejected,” which was nominated for an Academy Award — that generally might not be in Sick and Twisted because they’re not very edgy. But they’re very high-quality productions. So it sort of rounds…
Even more than the recent Depression-era comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the turn-of-the-century drama Songcatcher is an absolute treasure trove of old-timey, traditional folk music. Set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Appalachia in the year 1907, the film follows city-bred musicologist Dr. Lily Penleric (Janet McTeer) as she…
Kiss of the Dragon — the latest vehicle for martial arts star Jet Li, a mainland Chinese talent who became a superstar in Hong Kong and has since succumbed to the blandishments of Hollywood — has a little of the best (and a lot of the worst) of Hong Kong…
The plot of David Hare’s The Blue Room might be described as “six degrees of penetration.” In the play’s opening scene, an off-duty cab driver gets it on with a prostitute. Next the cab driver seduces a French au pair, then the au pair has a sexual encounter with a…
By his own definition, Bruce Campbell is a “midgrade, kind of hammy actor”–a B-movie star, in other words, a man whose career unfolds, like a Swedish porn loop, on Cinemax in the wee small hours of the morning. When I mentioned to a handful of people I was writing about…
A couple in their sixties waltz down the 2000 block of Hollywood Boulevard. The man spins his wife spontaneously through the crosswalk. A passerby joins in and tries his tenor on the audience. A few blocks away, artists set up paintings on the sidewalk and thirtysomethings groove to the innovative…
For almost two decades, Stanley Kubrick wanted to make a film based on Brian Aldiss’s 1969 short story “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long,” about a robot child named David who wants only to be “real” so Mummy and Daddy will love him. The late director of 2001: A Space Odyssey…
