When hit men wore hats and Cadillacs had running boards, the average Mafia don could knock off the Tattaglia brothers in midafternoon and sit down to a nice plate of chicken cacciatore that evening, content that he’d seen to the family business and blazed a path for his first-born son’s…
The independent production-distribution company the Shooting Gallery probably got a lot more attention when Monica Lewinsky showed up in Washington wearing a cap with its logo than it is likely to get from the release of The 24 Hour Woman, a modest, deserving film from writer-director Nancy Savoca. Savoca made…
At the center of Taking Sides is a rube, a crass insurance salesman to be exact. A guy who doesn’t know Toscanini from teriyaki. A man who sleeps through Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, “Because Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony bores me shitless,” he explains to his secretary. Bored or just a bore, this…
A sense of deja vu hangs like a pall over “Eclectic Collectives,” and with good reason. This first group exhibition by the New River Arts & Crafts Association, now at ArtServe in Fort Lauderdale, is dominated by the kind of bland, innocuous art so often shown and sold at those…
The 16th Miami Film Festival continues this week with even more international fare. On the must-see list are Thursday’s presentation of a sublime offering from French newcomer Erick Zonca that created quite a stir at Cannes, The Dreamlife of Angels. Friday Buena Vista Social Club showcases famed German director Wim…
When Evelyn Yalch’s daughter moved away from home, she left a broken doll at the bottom of a cedar chest. Instead of tossing the tattered toy, Yalch took it in for repairs, not realizing that she was about to relive her youth. When she arrived at the shop, located in…
The first post time is still half an hour away, but the thoroughbred racing action has already begun, via video, in the Inside Track Room. The glass-enclosed area, which resembles nothing more than a smokers’ lounge at the airport — sans smoke — is beneath the grandstand at Gulfstream Park…
Thursday February 25 Truth is indeed often stranger than fiction — and sells just as well. John Berendt proved that point with Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, his megaselling novel based on a murder case in Savannah, Georgia. In that same vein, The New Yorker magazine writer…
A movie, a novel, a Broadway musical, and a stage play. The only popular dramatic form Kiss of the Spider Woman hasn’t conquered is the TV sitcom. Given its high-concept idea — a fussy homosexual and an idealistic politico sharing a small space and becoming the best of friends –…
Works by two artists with very different styles and very similar concerns are currently on display in a joint exhibition at the Schmidt Center Gallery — if you can find the place. I spent close to an hour wandering around the confusing, poorly marked Boca Raton campus of Florida Atlantic…
The Great Smoky Mountains National Park straddles the Tennessee-North Carolina border along a rugged stretch of mountains. From one peak to the next, elevation changes drastically, and the area is notorious for extreme weather changes, too. But when Charles Anchors, Jr. and a buddy set out on a backcountry trip…
The morning sun glints off the cockpit canopy of the propeller-driven fighter plane during a routine training mission. The hypnotic drone of the plane’s rotary engine sounds reassuring to the inexperienced student pilot, but the feeling doesn’t last long. Suddenly an enemy aircraft appears, diving out of a thick cloud…
Thursday February 18 Everyone’s heard of the guy, but how many folks, outside of the art world, really know anything about him? Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) is now famous for his depictions of the nightlife of the Montmartre section of Paris in his paintings and drawings. But he began his…
For film buffs, these are almost two weeks of sheer pleasure: the 16th annual Miami Film Festival, featuring 31 pictures from 15 countries. Naturally, Spanish-language features abound, from opening-night dance-fest Tango, courtesy of Argentine director Carlos Saura, to the kinky Spanish thriller Between Your Legs. There are also intimate looks…
After the priest has cut out the tongue of the Marquis de Sade, he presents the meaty organ to the asylum’s caretaker encased in a black box. Handing it over he comments, “It was so long and serpentlike that I had to wrap it around a dowel.” Well, I bet…
The first rule of writing a successful romance novel is to make your characters beautiful. The estimated 45 million romance readers in North America demand it. Romance fans also want lush, descriptive writing and some substance to balance the lovey-dovey stuff, according to a couple local romance authors. And with…
Thursday February 11 In 1993 Dr. Kary B. Mullis won the Noble Prize in Chemistry for the invention of the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), the method used to identify specific DNA molecules. His work has revolutionized the field of forensic science, which now relies on DNA identification to pinpoint suspects…
Some people think hopping on I-95 and driving for an hour or more to get to work is a bit much. But that’s nothing compared to Judith Marzan’s time-traveling commute: She journeys back more than four centuries to play her role as a cloth-spinning Renaissance dame. Marzan and her husband,…
For better or worse, the father figure in Larry Clark’s ironically titled Another Day in Paradise turns out to be Mel, a foul-mouthed, 40-year-old junkie wearing a devil’s-red tennis shirt. His notion of good counsel is showing his surrogate son how to disable the burglar alarm at a medical clinic…
Short of nuclear holocaust, a major sale at Kmart, or a confirmed Clint Eastwood sighting back in rural Iowa, there’s probably no way to keep the movie version of Message in a Bottle from overwhelming the tender emotions of the hearts-and-flowers crowd. After all, this relentless assault on the tear…
This is the season during which British playwright David Hare is printing his own currency on Broadway. In April the much ballyhooed The Blue Room, starring a naked Nicole Kidman, will be joined by a New York production of Amy’s View, featuring theater luminary Judi Dench. Soon after that Hare…
The mural began with a sketch or two — twenty-four, actually. And they weren’t even the artist’s sketches. They came from his subjects. Tin Ly is the artist, and the homeless are his subjects. They’re also the reason that the latest Broward County Public Art and Design Program project, which…
