A comedian often has a tragic tale or two in his past. When life piles on the pathos, you either have to laugh or go mad. Some would say George Carlin has done both. If tragedy really does beget comedy, then Carlin is a natural. Born in 1937 to a…
It’s where Walter Huston found paradise at the end of Treasure of Sierra Madre, where the murdering lovers Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw rode into the sunset at the end of The Getaway, and where Thelma and Louise were headed when they ended up at the Grand Canyon. There are…
Finding Forrester is the latest film from director Gus Van Sant, one of the true American originals to emerge in the ’80s and ’90s. When Van Sant is at his best, he gives us stories and images we’ve never seen before. Finding Forrester, however, is not Gus Van Sant at…
When American poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “The personal is political,” she reminded us that political acts cannot be separated from the circumstances of individual lives. Too often drama that attempts to convey an ideological message does so by striving to be “universal” at the expense of the characters’ discrete choices…
Has any 20th-century artist exerted a more ruthless, relentless hold on the public imagination than Salvador Dalí? I doubt it. Even Picasso occasionally stepped out of the limelight. Not so Dalí, the perennial showman, the unapologetic huckster. Dalí always seemed to be on. Dalí at his most flamboyant is the…
Contained within a care package sent by C.D. Payne is a self-penned press release introducing the author as “the Rodney Dangerfield of comic novelists,” complete with a picture of the bug-eyed comedian and his shopworn catchphrase “I can’t get no respect.” As it turns out, this is the letter Payne…
On a small, dimly lit stage, beneath an array of soft purplish lights, stands a black man in his twenties, draped in an oversize brown suit. He wears prescription specs, through which he stares at his feet, as if counting the scuff marks on his designer loafers. The lanky, six-foot-three-inch…
This cinematic bonbon has all the ingredients required to spin an audience into the throes of fuzzy warmheartedness — the hope, the compassion, the joie de vivre — blended with the skill of a consummate confectioner. Much like a box of sweets with a convenient guide inside the lid, Lasse…
The moods of Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me are so artfully mingled that it’s difficult to get a fix on this highly personal independent feature. Set in a quiet little town in upstate New York’s lovely Catskill Mountains, it is at once a drama about the unresolved traumas…
The word juggernaut means “an overpowering force,” and appropriately the artistic director of Juggerknot Theatre Company, Tanya Bravo, is tapping into the powerful force of theater by pushing limits — both artistic and geographic. On the 67th block of Biscayne Boulevard in Miami, there’s more than one craft being fine-tuned:…
Fair warning: Enough time has passed that it’s OK to discuss the ending of writer-director M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable. Those who have not yet seen the film and intend to might want to keep on moving. Or perhaps not: To reveal the ending, all 180 or so seconds of it,…
Instead of battling department-store crowds or waiting for dot.com deliveries that may never arrive, why not browse through collectibles, furniture, jewelry, and artwork on the streets of Himmarshee Village to do your shopping this holiday season? The downtown Fort Lauderdale district is now home to the Riverwalk Antiques and Collectibles…
It’s time to see the lights. And what better place than Boca Raton, where over-the-top is a year-round way of life? So if you feel like checking out the best in bright, blinking bulbs, we offer four recommendations: This is the time of the year when people start referring to…
Assessing the merits of Quills, the lusty new feature by director Philip Kaufman (Henry and June), it’s tempting to seek correlative characters from popular movies in order to illustrate just how radical this business is not. In Kaufman’s film — affectionately built upon a screenplay by Doug Wright, who adapts…
What Women Want could be the first movie to win a Clio Award for Advertisement of the Year. No fewer than two dozen products receive prominent placement in the film, from Federal Express to Foster’s Lager to Cutty Sark to L’eggs pantyhose to US Airways. After a while you begin…
In a starkly furnished Paris apartment, spectator Marc (Judd Hirsch) circles a white canvas with the wary step of a big-game hunter while Serge (Cotter Smith) looks on expectantly; we can’t help but wonder if it is the art or his best friend that Marc is about ready to attack…
The five artists represented in “Faculty 2000: A Retrospective,” now at the Fine Arts Gallery on Broward Community College’s Davie campus, are all full-time faculty members at BCC. As the subtitle indicates, this show has sent them rummaging through their pasts; as with most such expeditions, the results are highly…
Christmastime is here, but for the first time, Charlie Brown’s father will not be around to watch his depressed, round-headed child celebrate the holiday. He will not be in front of the television next week to watch his little boy seek psychiatric help from a nickel-grubbing girl who diagnoses her…
Circling gracefully overhead, a large anhinga soars on its outstretched wings, looking for a place to alight just west of I-95 in Dania Beach. As the majestic water bird surveys the scene, so does Glenda Kelley, noting that not long ago, the dark-feathered fowl would have been looking elsewhere for…
About halfway through the megabudget mountain climbing adventure Vertical Limit, even the most rugged, thrill-hungry fans of disaster movies may find themselves going numb. Not from the howling weather on the icy face of K2, in the Himalayas, where the action supposedly takes place. Not from oxygen deprivation. Not even…
Day 1: It was just part of the job, just another movie on another afternoon. This one promised to be no more special than any other, save the casting of Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe. Proof of Life was the movie during which they fell in love, or whatever it…
