Not so long ago, The Skulls would have starred Tom Cruise — but in which role? He could have been either lead; the one he didn’t choose could have landed in the lap of James Spader or Rob Lowe. One can easily imagine Cruise as Luke McNamara, the beefy, rough-and-tumble…
Merchant/Ivory Productions has long been America’s quintessential purveyor of classy “literary” films. At its best the team of director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant has given us A Room With a View (1986) and The Remains of the Day (1993); at its worst Slaves of New York (1989) and…
Los Angeles dramatist David Rambo (his real name) describes his discovery of a televangelist’s audio technician as the missing link in his three-character play this way: “The heavens opened — so to speak. I realized I had a trinity: the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost!” But in his play…
“Making time” is exactly the challenge you’ll face if you decide to take in “Making Time: Considering Time as a Material in Contemporary Video & Film,” the inaugural exhibition at the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art (PBICA) in Lake Worth. The show consists of nearly three dozen videos and…
The futuristic metaphysical movie The Matrix proffered the notion that more than one reality exists: There’s the one you think is reality and another one that exists beyond the average human’s realm of conscious experience. Hollywood blows plenty of imaginary smoke, to be sure, but in this case the plot…
The interactive comedy Shear Madness has been around for 20 years, but the touring production’s penchant for local references and updated jokes keeps it fresh. Enlisting local barristers to “defend” suspects against accusations of murder at the center of the whodunit also makes for a new performance each time out…
O! Sweet vulture of love! Picking through the bones and sinew of doe-eyed fools the world around! How exquisite is thy rending, how blissful the release! Spirits in crimson rivulets swirled, souls as carrion shredded! Two vibrant hearts made still as one, to sate thy gnashing beak! Blessed bloody bird,…
The gun is a coward’s weapon, always has been, always will be. Likening it to the sword is like equating rape to romance. However, for reasons that can be attributed only to collective insanity, Hollywood absolutely loves to romanticize the gun, serving as an adjunct advertising agency for the firearms…
One day 55 years ago in Pittsburgh, a precocious four-year-old named Joel Platt ignored everything his mother had taught him about playing with fire. He dropped a lit match into the gas tank of a car at his uncle’s car dealership, and the resulting explosion landed him in bed for…
Kris Kemp, a Web page designer, sometime carpenter, and film buff who named the annual Flo Film Festival after his now defunct poetry-and-music ‘zine, Flo, doesn’t think the event’s slacker, slumber party style will be lost by moving it to a real theater. Last year independent film fans gathered at…
If you think the prevailing attitude toward sex in the United States is often somewhat backward, consider that of late-1960s Ireland, as depicted in Agnes Browne, the new movie directed by Anjelica Huston. When asked by her best friend Marion (Marion O’Dwyer) if she misses “it,” the recently widowed Agnes…
It’s OK. You can say it. Just five little words. Don’t be shy. “I… am… a… wrestling fan.” You certainly wouldn’t be alone if you said it. Recent surveys show that as many as one in four Americans watches professional wrestling, and the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) routinely has the…
Check your sense of seriousness at the door — and your sense of moral outrage, too, for that matter — before entering “Lowbrow Art: Up From the Underground,” the gleefully subversive show now at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood. Although there’s probably not something to offend everyone, there’s…
Madonna, heaven help us, has yet to don patchwork jeans and a tiara and croon Cat’s in the Cradle to a synthesized beat. But the day may still come when Harry Chapin’s folksy ballads, like Don McLean’s “American Pie,” become fodder for the pop diva’s gristmill. Until then, you can…
A young man can learn plenty about himself and the world by taking the type of coming-of-age odyssey John Kretschmer undertook at age 25. Oddly enough, one of his lessons was that second-tier celebrities can be unkind. It was 1984, and the sailor had just logged 16,000 miles from New…
Most kids these days don’t even know who Janis Joplin was or Alice Cooper is. So what’s the marketing strategy behind a line of aged rock-star action figures? Well, according to the folks at Todd McFarlane Productions, the things aren’t dolls, and they aren’t aimed at kids. McFarlane, the creator…
Three decades after Rosemary’s Baby, two decades after The Tenant, and after a series of five non-horror films, Roman Polanski returns to the supernatural thriller with The Ninth Gate. What could be more promising? Regardless of what one thinks about Polanski’s personal life or legal status, the man is clearly…
It’s not a startling breach of conventional wisdom to apply the term masterpiece to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 Rear Window, which is being reissued this week in a nice restored print that, if memory serves, is better (though not that much better) than we’ve seen before. But critical reputations can be…
Critics die. Audiences are reincarnated. The only true test of a work of art’s value is its timelessness, and perhaps its timeliness. Timelessness is the ability of drama to say something about the human condition in a way that penetrates generation after generation of audiences. Timeliness is the director’s (in…
For years it has been a South Florida cultural landmark. First it was a movie house called the Lake Theater. Then it was the Lannan Museum, home to the collection of J. Patrick Lannan, a financier with deep pockets and a penchant for modern and contemporary American and European art…
William Youngerman has loved money since he was a little kid. He’s no greedier than the next person, he just has a thing for coins and bills — particularly rare, old currency. Now age 51, Youngerman started collecting coins when he was 9. By age 12 he was helping to…
The first thought you’ll have while watching The Next Best Thing is “Was Madonna always this bad an actress?” It’s a question that will soon fade from consciousness, to be replaced by “Was Rupert Everett always this bad an actor?” and “Was John Schlesinger always this bad a director?” Since…
