Cuban-born artist Ernesto Rodriguez’s piece Lunch Break is a shimmering, bucolic, Renoiresque picnic scene, sans diners, in which a blanket and basket sit beneath the shade of a large tree. Renoir and other impressionists gave their landscapes a gauzy effect by incorporating broadly painted, broken brush strokes, capturing the essence…
Sure, you could drop $30 per night on an acting class, during which you’d get maybe 15 or 20 minutes of individual instruction and spend the rest of the time watching other people try. “Is that any way to learn how to act?” Billy Yeager asks, somewhat indignantly. Of course…
It’s the year 3028, and man… is an endangered species! (Haven’t we heard that somewhere before, like last month?) But this time around, the threat is a little more intimidating than those effeminate, Xenu-worshiping Conehead psychologists in platform boots. The villains in Twentieth Century Fox’s new animated spectacular Titan A.E…
Sixty years after Walt Disney’s original plans to expand on the 1940 Fantasia, Walt Disney Pictures has finally gotten around to making new musical segments for a reprise of the film’s classical-music-cum-animation concept. Fantasia/2000 has seven new sequences, with that old favorite, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” thrown in for old times’…
We take a seat in front of the screen, stage, or box to disengage. Sometimes it has to do with art — a riveting portrayal of the human drama — sometimes not. TV and film provide many ways to disengage, through electronic hypnosis, surround-sound inoculation, big-screen digital imagery, and the…
His name appears in almost every book written about Groucho Marx, so much so, he has been given the appropriate appellation by members of the Marx family: Wesso. But Paul Wesolowski is of no relation to the famous clan. He’s a man in his 40s who lives outside Philadelphia and,…
Step into the new South Florida Science Museum exhibition, “Frogs! (The Un-Toad Story),” and it’s obvious why organizers included the exclamation point in the title. They’re excited about the slew of ribbiters now on view in customized amphibian habitats. They should be — and so should viewers. These are excitin’…
Blink — or, more likely, doze — and you will miss it, this tiny, beautiful oasis in the middle of an otherwise barren wasteland. For a moment — a precious, frustrating moment to be treasured in a movie that flaunts its disposability — Nicolas Cage reminds us how good an…
If all the world’s a stage, then surely a courtroom is the place to see some of the best drama. Just think of Johnnie Cochran, striding across a courtroom and slamming down his briefcase, or O.J. Simpson, struggling to squeeze his huge hand into the glove that didn’t fit. A…
It was the Haitian art featured in “Haitian Celebration: South Florida Collects Haitian Art” that lured me to the Coral Springs Museum of Art, way out in the suburban sprawl of northwest Broward. And a fine show it is: 88 pieces in various media by 62 artists, the works drawn…
For a moment or two, David Lowery — front man for the band Cracker, and before that, beloved college-radio revolutionary sweethearts Camper Van Beethoven — found himself enjoying the book. He laughed in the right places, winced in the appropriate spots and thought, for a moment, the book wasn’t half…
“I was at a party in Syracuse, New York, in ’63 or ’64, and a dog was drinking out of the toilet bowl, there was folk music in the living room, someone was having a fight in the stairwell and trying to push a refrigerator down on someone else, and…
Walk into the Borders bookstore in Fort Lauderdale on the right Monday evening, and you’re likely to run into an odd assortment of characters holding court. Catch a snippet of conversation, and you might hear them discussing the best way to build an archery quiver or the proper design for…
Apart from mass cultural annihilation, beatniks, Hee Haw, and some dumb-ass sports, most pop-culture trends are not homegrown but imported to America after prolonged cultivation overseas. Take that novelty food tofu, for instance, dubbed le curd du soy by uncredited Belgian sailors exploring China centuries before 1958, when the little…
It is difficult to reconcile American perceptions of Iran, a rigidly authoritarian Islamic fundamentalist society, with the captivating and compassionate films that emanate from the country. Most of these pictures, including the 1995 Cannes Film Festival Camera d’Or winner The White Balloon and the 1998 best foreign-language film Oscar nominee…
Remember Love, American Style? It was a lighthearted attempt at feminism and gender bending, which somehow always ended up in bawdy, wide-angle shots of breasts and behinds and concluded in catty dialogues that took place in a huge brass four-poster bed. As a youngster I tuned in for the opening…
Michael Jordan’s smooth, bald dome fills the movie screen as rivulets of sweat trickle down the sides of the basketball superstar’s head and face. And thanks to the wonder of large-format film, the Blockbuster IMAX Theater at the Museum of Discovery and Science brings us the image five stories tall,…
Over the River and Through the Woods (written by Joe DiPietro and directed by Kenneth Kay) is one of those plays that you walk out of saying, “Gee, my mother would have loved that,” and lo and behold, you look around and there is your mother — and all of…
The eerie glow that emanates from so many of the canvases in “Kate Kretz: Fate of a Technicolor Romantic” is the result, according to an artist’s statement, of being raised “on a regimen of Catholicism and Technicolor movies.” It’s an odd but apt convergence of influences, with the conflicting impulses…
Michael Moore often worries about being seen–and worse, dismissed–as the plump, ball-cap-wearing windbag who barges into company headquarters, demands to see the chairman of the board, then gets kicked out or even arrested. He frets about being reduced to a stuntman of shtick, Captain Ambush, the guy called upon whenever…
Trying to make his way in the world as a young man during the Great Depression, Arthur O. Stone was enamoured of the sleek, flashy cars driven by the well-to-do. He especially liked the ostentatious autos being produced by the Packard Motor Company; the magnificent automobiles had the class and…
Early on in Mission: Impossible 2 (or M:i-2, as the confident Paramount now calls it), hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) complains to his boss about his new assignment: “It’s going to be difficult.” “It’s not mission difficult, Mr. Hunt,” the boss icily replies, “it’s mission impossible. ‘Difficult’ should be a…
